blast from the past

www.spiv.com postcard rack

Send a postcard to a friend

I had no idea this stuff was in the Wayback Machine’s repository . . . .

I’m glad to see this: it was a fun time, back in 1996 (!?) when these kids (I use that word advisedly: they were all younger than me and tons smarter) were creating innovative web content before the interweb was ready for it . . . . . .

They’ve all gone on to do great things elsewhere.

This postcard generator was the first interactive thing I ever did and it was the first one I ever saw: now, of course, they’re as common as dirt (and lots better). But for the time it was pretty cool: it created a GIF file with the background image and text the user selected and mailing the recipient a URL where they could go get it. It used perl and Tom Boutell’s GD library (via a perl interface to GD). This, of course, was before Open Source was the buzzword it later became.