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Published 2025.07.19
This post is a retrospective on two projects I made way back in college in my introductory web development class. I've never been a very good client-side developer (even though I am now a professional web developer, I have always had more of an inclination towards backend work). The shoddy craftsmanship of the garish website to which you have presently navigated ought to be some indication of that.
Both of the following projects were really, actually submitted as weekly assignments for this class, and both are easy to post on my blog because they consist of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript only. Some of the later projects in this class had backend components written in nodeJS that I'd rather not actually host and maintain.
They make for nice viewing because they follow my general principles of web design (sadly, not yet adopted broadly across our society):
The modestly titled "Really Cool Website" was the first assignment in this class and covered really basic HTML and CSS. I knew this style of web development (the style to which I still adhere) was antiquated even then, so I opted to make this beautiful geocitiesesque concoction with a shoutout to my favorite vintage site: Armadillo Online. Even today, I have a deep nostalgia for this style of website from a time when a website was handcrafted with love and represented a unique space or at least some form of publication. I still agree with those table opinions.
I think (based on some indication within the site itself) that one aspect of this assignment involved subjecting a classmate or classmates unknown to our submissions for peer review: hence the parenthetical on the Table of Tables. I hope whichever of my contemporaries at Northern Michigan University was amused or at least not too annoyed with it.
Really Cool WebsiteWho doesn't love jQuery? In a world of complicated frontend frameworks, it's refreshing to do things "by hand" from time to time. Actually, I often hear my colleagues utter the name jQuery in the same disparaging breath as PHP, but I think that's unfair to our old reliable friend. It's possible that jQuery haters have secretly been paid off by Big React or shady groups like the League of Internet Service Providers for Larger Websites. I, for one, am a huge proponent of dumb sites (dare I even say, dumb apps since this features a modicum of intractability) like this one, and the reliable, lightweight technologies that power them.
As for the content of "Adventures in jQuery", it's a small text-adventure-inspired affair along the lines of Kings Quest or its Homestar Runner parody: Peasant's Quest. It features mind-boggling animated graphics in the form of giant pixely .gifs. It's fairly straightforward but does feature one hard-to-find ending which you can always figure out by peeking at the source code. After all these years, I still think this is a pretty swell homework submission that any professor would be happy to receive (assuming it met the requirements, that is). I don't recall it going over particularly well or poorly.
Adventures in jQueryI'm not sure where all the assets on the attached sites originated, and while I believe they were largely created by myself or included in the course materials, I'm not sure that I'm allowed to use them.
Specifically, the table stock photos in "Really Cool Website" are probably just scrounged up from Google Images. I claim no ownership of the images on either of these sites and hope in the spirit of goodwill between users of this World Wide Web of ours that I won't be targeted by aggressive litigation for some throwaway projects I made when I was a student.
If anyone does object to the use of the materials contained therein, shoot me an email and I'd be happy to replace them with hand-drawn sketches.