Anyone ever used the anipike?

[Heero]

Just out of curiosity, did anyone else do the big Anipike Trivia Contest? I remember being really impressed with the prize package they put together for that thing and had a lot of fun trying to find answers to all their questions. (some of which were pretty impressively obscure)

[Ben]

Just out of curiosity, did anyone else do the big Anipike Trivia Contest? I remember being really impressed with the prize package they put together for that thing and had a lot of fun trying to find answers to all their questions. (some of which were pretty impressively obscure)

You know, I did, but I just can't remember that much about it. I think it was sponsored by Animenation, but I might even be wrong about that.

[ParaParaJMo]

At 10 or 11, I think I was one of the youngest participants in those quizzes.

[Drew_Sutton]

Also, I don't know that "blogs'" are anything new. I mentioned this in another thread, but therossman.com has been around for almost 20 years, and is probably the earliest anime "blog" type of site I can think of it, it just wasn't labeled as such and of course was written from scratch. I think that the basic content has staid the same, the delivery vehicle has just been altered a bit.

I think what I was getting at was the effort level involved in getting your space on the Net. 15, 20 years ago, if you wanted to have a page on the web to talk about your interest in anime, it would have involved coding it all yourself - which was cool because you could really get into your own designs and layouts (at least, I found it easier to do in HTML4 than my more recent attempts with HTML5/CSS). When I did my awful anime pages, I signed up for my free GeoCities domain and was immediately confronted with the basic HTML editor so before I could get a word out there about cartoons, I had to read up on how to do that. Then the first external WYSIWYG editors came about (Dreamweaver, MS Page Maker, etc) and you could do your design, it would do all the code on the back-end, and you took your HTML files and uploaded them to the server or copied your code into their editor.

Now I can go to WordPress or blogger, sign up, design it and get to typing all in an afternoon. I can do the same with tumblr and practically any other major platform. The barrier to entry to getting ideas out there is severely erroded and, if I can wax philosophically about the general state of the web, more democratic and allowing any and every fan or crackpot to get the word out about their Thing.

Really, is Tumblr that different from an old image gallery, or a WordPress blog that different from a character shrine/personal page? Or were the little blurbs on the anipike.com front page that different from a short tweet? The decline of IRC, mailing lists and Newsgroups/Usenet are the bigger shift in Internet culture, not just anime culture, I think

There is no difference in terms of content; I would argue that there are differences in terms of execution - which I highlighted above, being that you don't have to learn to code to get your message out. Another thing that's different though, if we were to say, build the "classic 90s anime site with modern design sensibilities", would be the diversity of services involved. Way back when, you wrote your home page, then your image gallery page, then the character shrine, then your links page to webrings and smutty fanfiction. All of those pages resided individually on your server and people surfed seamlessly through all of that content until they moved away from your page (most likely to those smutty fanfics). Everything was neat and together, unless your host got reformatted and you lost your pages. If I were to do that now, I would get WordPress for my all of the home and character shrines and a tumblr for the image galleries. And I am sure, pending the theme, I could get things to work relatively seamlessly between pages, capturing that feel of the old school site. But with diversity of service, one of the trade-offs for ease of set up, comes the possibility that services get denied. tumblr has outages, WP has issues, and as much as it pains me, Twitter still has outages; parts of Google go down periodically.

I wholeheartedly agree that while the tech has changed and the audiences' demands have changed a little, the desire for content has not. Mostly, it's just the delivery system.

[Ben]

Also, I don't know that "blogs'" are anything new. I mentioned this in another thread, but therossman.com has been around for almost 20 years, and is probably the earliest anime "blog" type of site I can think of it, it just wasn't labeled as such and of course was written from scratch. I think that the basic content has staid the same, the delivery vehicle has just been altered a bit.

I think what I was getting at was the effort level involved in getting your space on the Net. 15, 20 years ago, if you wanted to have a page on the web to talk about your interest in anime, it would have involved coding it all yourself - which was cool because you could really get into your own designs and layouts (at least, I found it easier to do in HTML4 than my more recent attempts with HTML5/CSS). When I did my awful anime pages, I signed up for my free GeoCities domain and was immediately confronted with the basic HTML editor so before I could get a word out there about cartoons, I had to read up on how to do that. Then the first external WYSIWYG editors came about (Dreamweaver, MS Page Maker, etc) and you could do your design, it would do all the code on the back-end, and you took your HTML files and uploaded them to the server or copied your code into their editor.

Now I can go to WordPress or blogger, sign up, design it and get to typing all in an afternoon. I can do the same with tumblr and practically any other major platform. The barrier to entry to getting ideas out there is severely erroded and, if I can wax philosophically about the general state of the web, more democratic and allowing any and every fan or crackpot to get the word out about their Thing.

Really, is Tumblr that different from an old image gallery, or a WordPress blog that different from a character shrine/personal page? Or were the little blurbs on the anipike.com front page that different from a short tweet? The decline of IRC, mailing lists and Newsgroups/Usenet are the bigger shift in Internet culture, not just anime culture, I think

There is no difference in terms of content; I would argue that there are differences in terms of execution - which I highlighted above, being that you don't have to learn to code to get your message out. Another thing that's different though, if we were to say, build the "classic 90s anime site with modern design sensibilities", would be the diversity of services involved. Way back when, you wrote your home page, then your image gallery page, then the character shrine, then your links page to webrings and smutty fanfiction. All of those pages resided individually on your server and people surfed seamlessly through all of that content until they moved away from your page (most likely to those smutty fanfics). Everything was neat and together, unless your host got reformatted and you lost your pages. If I were to do that now, I would get WordPress for my all of the home and character shrines and a tumblr for the image galleries. And I am sure, pending the theme, I could get things to work relatively seamlessly between pages, capturing that feel of the old school site. But with diversity of service, one of the trade-offs for ease of set up, comes the possibility that services get denied. tumblr has outages, WP has issues, and as much as it pains me, Twitter still has outages; parts of Google go down periodically.

I wholeheartedly agree that while the tech has changed and the audiences' demands have changed a little, the desire for content has not. Mostly, it's just the delivery system.

Well put Drew, and I agree with all of that. That high barrier of entry is one reason why I never got into making my own page, from what I remember in those days most people who had sites (outside of barebones GeoCities ones) tended to have gone to high schools with web design classes or took them in college. I had no such luck, and I always remember people saying "Oh, it's easy, just read HTML Goodies" which seemed like Greek to me, so I just stuck to posting on other people's boards or hanging out on IRC.

[greg]

It was really like the wild west, you had Web Crawler, Excite, Alta Vista, Yahoo, and Lycos all jockeying for position.

Don't forget Infoseek! It actually still exists in Japan today, actually.

Really, is Tumblr that different from an old image gallery, or a WordPress blog that different from a character shrine/personal page?

Well, considering that the old way of doing things would typically feature a table of contents and thus made it easier to find stuff rather than searching month by month or by keywords, I still prefer the old way of doing things. One thing I like about the new way of doing things is how the newest things are what you see first, at least.

[cosmosamurai]

I just noticed that the Anipike site is down, and it wouldn't surprise me if this is another "living fossil" nearing (or at) it's end on the net. The "Anipike Classic" preservation of the original Anipike is useful for nostalgia and it's links to many ancient anime pages (many dead, but preserved on archive.org) and it will be sad to see another part of online anime history end.

[ParaParaJMo]

No, how can it be down? A part of not just online anime history, but anime history in general, is now gone

[X-KID Z]

Oh wow, animpike. I was never an active particpant to the site, but I definitely came across it looking for anime online, and used the directory. Too bad the site is down, I'm hazy on what it looked like. Would've been neat to get a little blast from the past. Ah...the AOL online days...

[yusaku]

Anipike was my goto spot for a while. I would go through broken link after broken link of anime shrines, fan sub sites, and Kiss doll sites. I got to find all kinds of fun and wierdness through anipike. I got other connections through comic book stores, anime clubs, and other local otaku and I stop going to anipike. Anipike was a great starting point for all things anime in the late 90's.