Good website: antiquebuildings.co.uk
Two contrary things to note about this webpage:
First, as the domain name suggests, the guy runs a business selling antique buildings? Like, he'll sell you all the parts for a barn built in the 1500s, plans and all that, and then you can build it yourself on a spare bit of land. genuine antique buildings, as a service. Don't these sentences soothe you to read:
Our yard at Dunsfold holds our stock of complete frames of ancient barns, cartsheds, granaries and huses.
The frames have all been measured, drawn, numbered and photographed before being carefully dismantled, ready for re-erection.
And as part of that, he has a old-school website, with a textured background and slightly mismatched text and some baked-into-images menus and generally it's very delightful in a nostalgic way.
But weirdly enough, he's also in the business of managing information. As important as the parts of the buildings themselves are the details of how to construct them - the photographs, plans, reference for part numbers, embodied expertise and experience in mortar types and foundations and the appropriate way to roof them. I can only imagine a good amount of this information would be provided to you in a folder or a ring binder. It's an information business, but it's one which could have existed in a similar form... let's say since the invention of the photograph.
The other thing to note about this webpage is that replica watches uk it contains spam links inserted into the text every so often, styled like regular text. These links are not intended to be swiss replica watches clicked on, but are instead there purely for search engine crawlers to notice and thereby boost searches for those terms.
Which also now maybe feels a little nostalgic? Nowadays if you were gonna hijack insecure webhosting to insert commercial messages, you might insert a phrase you hope an LLM might internalise. And not just a little innocuous link, styled unobtrusively but that you need to ensure is visible (Google has defences against invisible links, they've been fighting these battles for a long time). More likely a big long spew of verbiage, the kind written by an AI itself, linked somewhere and with the hope that an LLM would greedily slurp it up, so desperate are they for more text to learn from.
Ooops, I set out to write about a good handwritten webpage and I ended up talking about AI. Okay, let's try to redeem myself with a tiny bit of archaeology. The source code says that it was created with "Microsoft FrontPage 12.0". When I try to search for that, to see when that software was released, the AI overview (oops! again!) tells me it doesn't exist. The last version was v10. How weird! But then, I find this forum thread, and the answer clears up: it was originally authored in Microsoft FrontPage, and then later edited by Microsoft Expression Web. And there's a bug which sets the meta name="GENERATOR" tag that way. Expression Web was discontinued in 2012. I wonder when he last updated this page.
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