Welcome to Nockiros Homepage!

Visual and technical details

By now you will probably have recognized a certain kind of style that has been used on this website.
On this page, a few notes and credits shall be given to the sources of this style.

Art and graphics

All the design on this homepage is made to look like a website of the 90s/2000s.
That means: ClipArt^[1], Microsoft FrontPage 98 (with which I've built my first websites with) and as much neon as can be fit!

Despite being a 00s-style page, the CSS/HTML is pure, modern and self-written CSS3 and HTML5 (with no usage of website templates or anything like that), though.

You might also find small rectangular buttons/gifs here and there; I have no idea what they're called, but they were a common way to link to a website or advertise products in those times.
A nice little archive for examples (and also the source for the buttons) can be found on https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons.
Note: The contact buttons are taken from here, except for Signal, IRC, XMPP and Skype which I've made myself using this handy tool.

Sidebar/Menu

The menu images were tediously dug up out of the Microsoft Office 2003 ClipArt collection.
If you happen to have the Microsoft Clip Organizer of that era installed, you can find most of the images under Technology/Computing.
They are stored in an ancient file format called WMF (Windows Metafile), but can still be opened with Microsoft Paint or GIMP.

Neon background/style

The neon banners and title background used were built-in with Microsofts FrontPage 98 ^[2] under the theme Neon in v1.02 - the same background in version 2 didn't have the cool glasses anymore but were instead more like a blue mosaic.
A (maybe) interesting fact: In FrontPage, the images and texts were merged into one image and only then delivered to the web browser.
Nowadays, we can just use CSS and dynamically change the text (which I've done on this website).

The page background is also derived from a background delivered with FrontPage 98, but with a blink effect added via CSS.
You can however also see a caveat of modern times: Due to the differences in support for modern webdesign (in this case: CSS), the background from this site doesn't look the same in all browsers.
The cause of that is that the CSS used is relatively modern, but doesn't work the same in all browsers. In the original file, the glasses don't blink and also are much too dark, too (interestingly enough only since v1.02 of the theme).

If you've encountered a frontpage website previously, you might have noticed a change in how to navigate this site.
The original frontpage neon website theme used the top bar as main navigation bar and the right-hand side for navigation at submenu level – which you could also move back then as I did now (to the left-hand side). :-)

Hit counter

As an homage to the good ol' days™, this website has an embedded hit counter.
It works with a simple text file that contains as many bytes (a space, to be exact) as this site had visitors.
This way, the hit counter works without a database (and without selling data to service providers), but nevertheless fast enough for it to work.

The numbers are - also as an homage - all tiny pictures in a sprite, made with GIMP and the font DejaVu Sans Mono in a not-as-neon green I thought matches the page without having too much of an impact.

Screensaver

Maybe you haven't noticed (or disabled Javascript ooor you are in Safari on Low Power Mode), but this website was designed with a state-of-the-art screensaver!
The screensaver (3D Pipes) could be used in earlier Windows versions, the video embedded on this page was taken from YouTube and cut down so that it doesn't have a noticeable impact on your internet connection.

Footnotes

• ^[1] If you want to see a nice video about the history of ClipArt and why it became popular, check this video out!
• ^[2] There is a really interesting article about FrontPage (FrontPage: The Good, The Bad And The Ugly), how it worked and how it compared to other tools.
  Especially, how complicated it would be to use it to design websites in this day and age.