Evolution of the Web: Sites I miss

My boyfriend recently started his own art blog, Dungeon of Sketch, and it got me thinking about some of the old sites I used to visit around the Web. So today I'm taking the liberty of blogging about something other than nails. I've been on the Web almost since it was new - since Spring of 1995. Hard to believe it's been 18 years already. I've seen a lot of sites come and go and yes, I still miss a lot of them. Ironically, one of the things that has changed is me- with the advent of Web 2.0, it changed the nature of the Web quite a bit which meant a lot of my favorite sites vanished. I say that I changed, because back then I hated blogs and declared many times I would never have one.  Boy was I ever wrong.

Anyway, I just thought I'd share with you some of the sites I miss.. one of the things I loved to do was adopt cyber pets, and you can still find all of mine (minus a few dozen that are still hibernating on my hard drive waiting to be published...) on my Web site. I don't know if anyone even does the cyber pets anymore.. but they were fun while they lasted!

Starluck's SweetWater Valley
is one of the sites still around, although many many years ago she changed the site to a donation site. She still has some of her graphics available as linkware. I want to add, if you've been around Neopets long enough, you'll probably recognize a lot of the Neopet user store backgrounds as they came from Starluck's.

(originally posted here: http://metalminky.com/water2.html )

Skyhaven Adoptions

is one of the newer sites which fortunately means it is still around although it hasn't been updated in many years. My Jewelwing, shown below, is a special creature. There are standard basic creatures you can still adopt on the site as linkware. Other adoptions, such as my Jewelwing, you had to search through the site for and then send an email over to Bright Dreamer. Some time later, she would send over the different stages of growth until finally you got your adult form.

(originally posted here: http://metalminky.com/moon5.html)

the EverRealm

was one of my favorites; it is still online but adoptions have been down for many years. The EverRealm was awesome because Myrror let users somewhat pick different creatures they wanted drawn, and some creatures were only available as part of a frequent adoption program. You could also take two of your creatures and request that Myrror breed them to make a new creature. My Hunter Cat, shown below, is the result of one such breeding.

  (originally posted here: http://metalminky.com/air14.html)

 The Silver Unicorn

 is another site that is still up and this looks to be the only one which is still fairly active. Most of the site activity now occurs under Secundi but there are still click and take adoptions, hunt adoptions and Silvanon even made a pretty neat generator for creating custom unicorns. I made the unicorn just now using the program to demonstrate this :)

 

(created March 23, 2013 using Silvanon's Make A Paint program)

Other noteworthy sites - no longer online

 Chibi Ningyo's

Lady in Black's Mystical Castle (which was seriously one of my most favorite sites ever. I can remember back in the days of dial up I would spend hours and hours on her site.) 

the Enchanted Hollow 

cypris.org

I have literally like 100 Web pages on my site filled with my adopted pets, so of course I can't show them all here but I just wanted to take a minute to show case a few of the sites that are still up and mention the others I still really miss as well.  

Lastly I have to mention Faeries Are Among Us, created by Wandering Faerie. This site was absolutely awesome, among my top favorite sites ever. The graphics blew me away. It was the first time I ever really saw animated GIFs  and there was just so much creativity on that one little site.. literally hours of fun. I think it miss it more than any other site. It inspired me to learn graphic design and Web design. 

I seriously miss those days.. back before Web 2.0, everyone had to be more creative with things because sites were just more static. It was more interesting. People came up with their own stories, own worlds, and their own games to keep users interacting. These days it's all about Facebook, email, shopping, etc. A lot of the original fun of the Web is lost, I think. Well, I've seen sites like MySpace come and go, so I know Facebook won't last forever either. I hope someday there will be a revival of the kind of creativity once found around the Web. Until then, I have my memories of some of my favorite old sites :)