Newgrounds was incredible! At the time, games (of any quality) for free was a biiiiig deal. It was even more amazing that you didn't need to wait hours to download and install them.
I agree w/ your take on blogging... kind of a bland "one-stop-shop" for everything a person thinks of rather than an experience tailored to a specific interest. I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly... even within a single domain I would have multiple websites all linking to each other, each with a different design, and subtly different content, but now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol. Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites...
Based
I'm working on a revamp of my personal site. I do a lot of creative coding, most of them are throwaway experiments, so I thought I'd showcase more of them there. Besides that though, I have some "rare pepes" that I've been meaning to put somewhere. What I like about these is that they're highly polished, animated gifs that imitate the sort of "holographic" effect you'd find in rare collector's cards, but at the same time you can't track down who originally made them, they aren't part of some professional's online portfolio. In that sense they feel like a special piece of internet folk art, made by some complete rando.
Nowadays we have Pinterest and the like, but I really like the idea of creating my own little online space for images I like.
Reminds me of https://poke-holo.simey.me/ note: hover over the cards to activate.
One of my fondest memories of the early Web was getting awards on Newgrounds for my animations(I had one for 250k views. Pretty sure I got into the top ten at one point) , and logging in to read and respond to comments, and to see that view counter tick up and up!
> now I have a bland blog that I don't update regularly lol.
I’m guilty of this but at least it’s a different kind of boring (plain text files).
> Maybe building a retro site is what I really need to do.
YES.
> I used to make Dragonball Z fan sites mostly
That's exactly how I got into programming :)