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Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day

Today I stumbled across a link on a rather old SQL article that referred to the site swynk.com. I don't know how many folks remember Stephen Wynkoop's SQL resource website, but back when I was cutting my teeth on classic ASP swynk.com was one of my regular stops. In 1999 Stephen sold his site to Internet.com and moved on to other things; today Swynk.com redirects to Internet.com's Enterprise IT Planet website's Networking section.

Another regular stop of mine was ASPHole.com, which today no longer exists. (Although I could have sworn that a year or two ago the site made a comeback, but it looks like that comeback faltered.) I have no idea what happened to ASPHole, originally, or after their attempted comeback. Anyone know? And of course there was Charles Carroll's very popular ActiveServerPages.com (which was later renamed to LearnASP.com), which was shut down for sometime starting in 2002 (although it is back online today).

A large part of the reason I started 4Guys a little over seven years ago was because, at the time, there were not many classic ASP websites out there. Other than ActiveServerPages.com, the only other professional classic ASP websites (that I recall) were 15Seconds.com and (to a lesser extent) ASPHole.

Were there any websites back in your day that you used regularly, but disappeared for whatever reason over the years?

posted on Thursday, January 05, 2006 9:55 PM

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# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 5:10 AM Jeffrey Palermo

I used http://www.devguru.com/ all the time. I was all over the Javascript reference when AJAX came out (we called it Dhtml back then).

I also used dejanews.com to search newsgroups, but Google owns it now.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 6:10 AM Richard Dudley

4 Guys was my main source of info back then (and is still one of my favorites). I just cleaned out a lot of old articles from sites that no longer exist.

Dejanews.com was also my Usenet search site.

BTW - what happened to the other 3 guys?

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 6:29 AM Sonu Kapoor

Richard, here is an article stating what happend to the other 3 guys:

http://web.umr.edu/~w3/alumnus/fall02/mitchell.html

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 8:31 AM Scott Mitchell

Urg, that yellow shirt!! I'm not a big fan of the photo in that UMR.edu article! :-)

More 4Guys history available here:
http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/080701-1.shtml

# Websites Back In The Day 1/6/2006 9:51 AM you've been HAACKED

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 2:16 PM Steve

Want to see if it's like you remember?

Use the WayBackMachine" at http://www.archive.org/

for example...
http://web.archive.org/web/19990129082301/http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/

Makes you stop and think before you put some information on the web because you cannot take it back.

Steve

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/6/2006 2:19 PM Scott Mitchell

Hehe, good point, Steve. Whenever someone says that they were a fan of 4Guys from the getgo, I ask them if they remember the green/black color scheme. If so, then they are truly 3l33t.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/7/2006 1:51 AM Matthew Baxter-Reynolds

Back in the day, I used to do ASPWatch.com. Anyone remember that?

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/7/2006 11:32 AM Mark Aurit

Niblack.com was pretty popular for a little while (I just looked at the old bookmark I have for it, and its dated 8/31/1999).

But what I really remember was the asptoday.com fiasco. Incredible.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/7/2006 12:06 PM Scott Mitchell

Matthew, yes, I remember ASPWatch, and Mark, I recall Niblack.com, too! And ASPToday.com, who could forget that? The first (and only?) non-free ASP/ASP.NET community site! Of course then Wrox blew up, and now it's run by APress, which bought a lot of Wrox's titles/IP after their demise.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/8/2006 10:11 AM Richard Dudley

I remember that black and green color scheme. The buttons were kind of cool. I also remember when you changed a few of the sections around, and had to kludge together new buttons from old ones. If you looked closely, you could see the typeface didn't quite match. It was that way until you launched the "new look".

I started doing ASP development in the fall of '99, and you had some great content built up by then. Alta Vista led me to you, and you've been bookmarked ever since.

Couple other sites I used were ASPFAQ (www.aspfaq.com), asp101.com, askasp.com, haneng.com, and Tip World (later Topica) had some excellent code snippets each week.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/11/2006 6:56 AM Curtis

Yeah, it's interesting to see who is still at it and who isn't. Seems like most of the bigger sites got bought up. I used a combo of DejaNews, ASPWatch, 4Guys, LearnASP and a bit of NiBlack. There was also this ADO site I used a lot, might have been Bill Vaughn's.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/19/2006 3:00 AM Mischa Kroon

Actually learnasp.com never went offline...

Charles only closed down the mailinglists.

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 1/19/2006 8:29 AM Scott Mitchell

Mischa, while LearnASP.com is now up, there was a period of a couple of weeks where the site's content was replaced by the picture of the cover of Ayn Rand's book, Atlas Shrugged.

# The Latest Thing from Microsoft - Video Training 2/28/2006 10:24 PM Scott on Writing

# re: Reminiscing About Websites Back in the Day 3/2/2006 11:20 PM Charles Carroll

LearnAsp.com was replaced with an Ayn Ryand quote for less than 48 hours when I was in Tokyo and Scott Guthrie called me in Tokyo to request I put it back online.

It was not a couple of weeks, it was 1-2 days, and yes it did happen.

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