Remembrance of zeldman.coms past

As we finesse a few details of this site’s current redesign, it’s worth looking back to where we began, going back all the way to our launch in the spring of 1995. Visual punk rock: 1995 ƒƒ Frozen in still screen capture form below are two pages from my GIFPLEX (1995), which is still viewable on the current site. It used tables for layout and employed left and right ASCII arrows to guide the visitor through a series of animated GIFs. I made the GIFs by sampling homemade Beta and VHS tapes from my collection, using Gifbuilder, a System 7-friendly shareware video-to-gif tool. Psychotronic film fans and MST3K devotees may recognize a few frames from “Horror of Party Beach.” And here (viewable via the Web Archive) is what the home page looked like at the end of that first year: Note that earlier versions—and there were many; I changed the design every few days—are not available via the Wayback Machine, as it was not yet invented when I launched this site. All of those early pages, which…