lance.net

after watching lance.com for over ten years in hopes that one day someone would forget to renew it, i finally gave in and bought lance.net. close enough!

for a long time there was nothing here, and i was simply using the tld for email/workspace. but as time went on i felt like it needed something, and since i do enjoy the bare-bones HTML styles of the past i whipped this up. while i'd love to say that i hand-coded this entire thing, that's not completely true. this entire site is a claude code project. using claude code, i created an entire text-only editor that supports direct html creation (for what you're reading here / each page here i am writing the html by hand), file upload/management, new page creation, and a few settings to make minor ui tweaks.

if you want to check out the page creator for yourself, you can create your own site (100% free) - head on over to my page builder to get started. i'm a generous guy, so you get 20mb of storage. just pretend it's 1998, and 20mb is an unheard of amount again!

i'm also a fan of internet nostalgia, and enjoy pining for the simpler times when the internet was something you weren't carrying in your pocket. when we couldn't have imagined the depths in which the internet has sunk its talons into every aspect of our existence, and instead saw it simply as a novel way to connect with people and share ideas. before we were the product.

the internet used to be something you had to want. you dedicated time to it. you sat down in front of your computer (which by default was off), waited for the boot-up beeps and boops, had to listen as your modem dialed out (i'll never forget 781.336.4447 - galaxy internet services!) and then screamed in agony for what felt like forever. after that ritual was complete, you had to wait patiently as the broswer painstakingly rendered a page, or you downloaded a local copy of all of your emails. hell, for most of us the computer was such a mysterious, powerful entity that we gave it it's own room, or at least a significant portion of a communal room. i'll write more about this on the nostalgia page.

i've enjoy finding pages that call back to these older, simpler times. whether by design or simply lack of updates, these sites just have such a visceral, meaningful feeling. i've linked a few of them on the nostalgia page. i have wiby.org to thank for most of them, check out wiby if you want to be transported back in time - i prefer the "surprise me" link.