page coded and written by Jakkalope
page layout based on the Windows 95 GUI
genuine 90's gifs sourced from gifcities
with no necessary credit, but incredible love and respect for archive team

A Note From The Webmaster

It used to be that anyone could learn to code a website in a single afternoon. People with no sense of color theory, design sense, or general common sense made pages with flashing gif backgrounds with titles like "MY COOL SITE" and "BETHANY'S PLACE".
A thousand "under construction" gifs; an email address where you could send in your stories, shared as a directory list of .txt files and jpegs. Marquee blinking text. "DO NOT CLICK HERE" pages that opened a thousand alert boxes. Unformatted tables. No interactivity. No logins. No user data. No ads that followed you across the internet. No social media integration. Autoplaying midis and clipart gifs instead of embedded video. Fandom shrines for your favorite Final Fantasy character, web rings, hobby sites dedicated to spelunking in national parks in Ohio, photos of your dog, pages dedicated to the concept of dogs-- all bashed together with basic HTML and web-safe colors.

As websites began to look better and do more, these kinds of personal sites have all but vanished as the ability to make even a non-professional site has completely left behind all but the most dedicated hobbyists, in favor of templates, services, and platforms-- and while there's certainly benefits to it, the complete abandonment of the do-it-yourself internet is a loss I feel acutely.

Though this pet may seem tongue in cheek, he is a genuine and wistful tribute to a time on the internet that I miss very badly. As we move forward into a future defined by a few megaplatforms with Web 2.0, and tech-bros try to get us to turn our internal organs into a stock market with "3.0", always remember the awful, janky wild west, and do it without irony.

Here's to a generation of kids who learned how to code on pet sites.