29 January, 2011

Websites

I regularly refer to The Good Ol' Days of dial-up internet and the OIQFC chat room, but I haven't really mentioned the other websites. If you were born in the 90's, there's a good chance that you probably don't know what the hell I'm talking about.

Back in the day, when Geocities was the place to build a website, aside from Dream Weaver, there were Queen websites all over! And they had really cool shit like menus, flash animations, and embedded MIDIs that played automatically and on a loop and the site builder set it up so people visiting couldn't stop the song or lower the volume without unplugging their speakers!

Since Geocities no longer exists, a lot of sites have disappeared for what's probably forever. One of my favorites was called 'Freddie Mercury - Music? Not Only!' as it contained what was at the time really obscure information and pictures (that fucking MIDI of Nevermore still rings in my ears to this day). I did a Google search and managed to find You Take My Breath Away which, to my delight, hasn't changed all that much in 10+ years. I can't remember anything specific, but another defunct site that comes to my mind was called 'Queen Heaven.' Queen - The Complete Words is still up, which is awesome because sometimes I need to school people on lyrics and I trust that source not to make me more wrong than the people I'm saying are wrong.

Andy's Queen Page was the very first I ever visited. Seeing the Queen crest had me flipping out and I instantly became convinced that the internet was the best thing ever.

I think the site I miss the most is 'Jayme's Queeniac Zone.' And as I recall, Jayme was a really awesome person.

Anyway, this morning I thought that general fan sites were long gone and old hat. But I found some that are really awesome and active! Mercury - and - Queen! And two blogs, run by the same person, Fuck Yeah Queen and Fuck Yeah Freddie Mercury. I like that there are some really fucking amazing pictures, but I wish both blogs would be more visually accessible. Sometimes keeping it simple is perfectly fine. Highlighting text so I can read it is annoying.

But anyway... Yay for nostalgia and pimping out sites that helped get me where I am today!

1 comment:

  1. This post made me smile. I have similar fond memories of Geocities, annoying MIDI files and all! There's a project called "Oocities", intended to archive as much Geocities content as possible. You might find that some of the sites you remember still exist to some extent. The project is based here.

    The WaybackMachine is also quite useful. Some of the now dead content from Andy's Queen Page still exists there. That was the first Queen site I ever found too! Way back in the mid nineties... *creaks with age* ;)

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