My Setup
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Most of Mind Gone By was coded by hand on this Gateway GP7-500 computer. I bought it because it's extremely similar to the one that my family had when I was a child. I was originally planning on using it to play old games, but when I had the idea to make a personal page, I figured I would be as authentic as possible with it. The computer runs Windows 98 Second Edition, has a Pentium-III 500 MHz processor, 512 MB of RAM, and an 8GB hard drive. The monitor, keyboard, and mouse all came with models like this. The speakers are the same exact speakers from my childhood computer, and still work like a charm.
I picked up the basics of HTML using W3Schools' HTML tutorial. Once I practiced the basics for about a week, I began to lay out my site. I considered using Adobe DreamWeaver 3 to build it, but I settled on Notepad to get a similar feel to someone making a personal page in the early to mid 1990s. I test each page in Internet Explorer 5 to make sure the code I use formats properly and is time-accurate as possible. Two additional resources I use for code are IDG Books' Creating Web Pages Simplified from 1996, and Webmaster in a Nutshell (2nd Edition) from 1999. Creating Web Pages Simplified has a lot of really fun illustrations in it, and if you want a great resource for making a retro-style page, I highly recommend it.
For my site's GIFs, I used Internet Archive's Gifcities page to search for what I wanted. Gifcities archives thousands of GIFs from 1990s-2000s GeoCities pages that they managed to save. I highly recommend browsing on there if you want to get a pure snapshot of how fun the internet used to be. Save some and put them on your page, too! We need this look to come back.
Once I complete a page, I copy the files onto a USB drive, transfer them to my modern PC, and check the code for errors using Phoenix Code. Once everything is checked, I upload the page to NeoCities. It's a lot of hoops to jump through, but I love the experience of building a throwback site on time-accurate hardware. As long as this computer keeps working, it'll be my main workstation for Mind Gone By.