The flight sim site that taught me HTML

In 2005 I made a website for a virtual squadron that flew together on Tuesday evenings. It had a frameset, an animated banner I made one pixel at a time, a hit counter that I reset whenever it embarrassed me, and a guestbook signed almost entirely by me under different names.

How it got made

Badly, and entirely by accident. I had no idea what HTML was. I opened a WYSIWYG editor on a school computer, dragged things around until it looked like the other squadron sites, and then hit the button that said upload.

The learning started when it broke. Something would look wrong in the browser and not in the editor, and the only way through was the menu item called “Edit HTML source”, which I clicked expecting nonsense and found something I could almost read. <font color="green">. Well, obviously.

That is still the best on-ramp I know of: a thing you care about, visibly wrong, with a button that shows you the underneath.

Why it explains this site

Fighter jet cockpit displays have been an interest ever since, and I have never really shaken the aesthetic. Green symbology on black, everything boxed and labelled in small capitals, no decoration that is not carrying information.

It turns out to be a perfectly reasonable way to list blog posts. An MFD is a dense, information-first interface designed to be read quickly under load. A blog index has the same job and much lower stakes.

What happened to it

It ran until 2008 and then the host folded. There is no copy. The Wayback Machine has the front page from 2006, banner included, and I look at it more often than I would admit in person.