Digital Blasphemy (1999-2006) by Ryan Bliss

If DB had a Golden Age (other than now) it would be between the years of 1999 and 2006 and this was the splash page I developed to greet all those millions of visitors.

Dynamic HTML was just starting to be the brand new thing in 1999 and I wanted animation on my homepage. Unfortunately most folks were still on dial-up connections so I only animated the magical fire, then positioned everything using HTML so it looked like he was holding it. For the final part of the illusion I rendered two versions of the guy, one with eyes open and one with eyes closed. The eyes would open when the user hovered the right ways to enter my site.

You'll notice my plea to AOL Users😄 America Online would cache my work and utterly destroy it with compression before serving it to their millions of users. They would then complain to me so I had to made a special page to instruct them on how to fix the situation.

I'm finally getting ready to post DB 2.0 so it's a good time for a fond look back.