Ancient Web: Tilde.Club Gallery Collected a Thousand Homepages at 800 by 600

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

A personal homepage is easier to appreciate when you can see the collection as a neighborhood. Someone on Tilde.Club decided to make that neighborhood browseable as a gallery of screenshots.

Visit the Tilde.Club Gallery.

Its maker, tweska, describes the project as a collection of more than one thousand screenshots of Tilde.Club members' pages. A narrow menu runs from A to Z, with one additional section for names beginning with other characters. Instead of searching by tags or following popularity rankings, you browse the usernames alphabetically.

This is a later preservation project associated with the 2014 revival of shared Unix homepages. It preserves a particular kind of digital work: the small, idiosyncratic personal site published in someone's tilde directory.

The screenshot has rules

The FAQ on the gallery's front page explains its selection process. The program deliberately ignores accounts whose owners never changed the default homepage. The author estimates that roughly half the pages fall into that category. It also omits some pages when screenshot capture fails.

Each screenshot uses an 800-by-600 browser window. If an elaborate layout spills outside that frame, the site politely points out that the homepage was not designed for the chosen size. It is a wonderfully old-web constraint attached to a modern automation.

The gallery watches modification times rather than continuously scanning every dependency. If someone edits a stylesheet or an image but not the main index.html file, the screenshot may stay unchanged. The FAQ recommends using touch index.html to update the timestamp.

A link labeled See the code invites visitors to inspect the program, while an IRC contact offers a less formal way to report mistakes. In that respect, the site is as much a collaborative community utility as a passive archive.

There is no evidence that the screenshots preserve every version of every listed page, or that a missing image means its author was inactive. What survives is a visual index of a community's experiments.

The gallery complements Tilde Town and Squiggle City, covered elsewhere in this collection, without being the same project. It documents how one shared-web neighborhood looked through another resident's eyes.

Browse the gallery and its preservation rules.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.