Silly, silly things

I've been thinking about amping up the silly here, which is fairly difficult for a site with no real purpose with a design straight out of 2002 using a toolset that is also peak 2002. That's the tail end of the Web 1.0 era, so it wasn't uncommon for a site to sell ads directly, rather than rely on the insanely complex system that exists today that has somehow destroyed all value for both advertisers and sites running the ads.

And that's the feel I want to throw at this. The ads won't actually be real. Even the branded link buttons at the bottom are unofficial and will probably bring an official "Could you please not do that?" at some point in the future.

At one point, I was dead set on making the mobile version of the site be the same as the desktop version of the site, but with locally-served banner ads for real laptops thrown into the mix. I never could figure out a good way to make that happen, though I think I have an idea now. There's something called Edge-Side Includes, which are effectively SSI for CDN proxies so that """PERSONALISATION""" can be tossed at a site that is cached to heck and back through a CDN. It would actually be easy to use actual ESI and an actual caching proxy, like Squid, to make this happen.

Of course, to make that happen, I need to make some peak 2002 banner ads which is where I'm heading next. Apparently it's easy to make animated gifs in Photoshop, but I really need something to help on the animation itself. Making things blink isn't all that difficult. Doing something more complicated like the enlarge your guinea pig thing... well... that's work. Who knows where this will lead.