"© J H Irvine 2002"
Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again.
Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech, no trying to hard sell anything.
God, I miss this era.
"© J H Irvine 2002"
Yes. This is a taste of what the web was like before it became shit. And it's the way it should be again.
Weird, quirky, fun, no ad-tech, no trying to hard sell anything.
God, I miss this era.
If that's too scary for you, you could always look at "Pylon of the Month" https://www.pylonofthemonth.org/
The website was set up by an Englishman, of course, because that's what us British do best: quirky and underwhelming.
I heard a fund manager in the energy sector the other day who said that PotM was the thing that fascinated listeners most.
Spoiler alert: January's pylon is from Cadiz in Spain, has its own Wikipedia page, but the pair featured aren't as tall as the Thames crossing pylons.
And also this gem:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundabout_Appreciation_Societ...
which got its meme explosion from a calendar of 12 roundabouts, here is the latest 2024 edition:
https://dullkev.com/product/roundabouts-of-the-world-2024-ca...
On the topic of Appreciation Societies, I'd like to add the World Bollard Association which has brought me much joy.
https://twitter.com/WorldBollard
As an aside, what's today's preferred alternative Twitter/X frontend, now that nitter.net seems to have shut down?
In London, some bollards have been made out of recycled cannons.
You generally find this where ever cannons have been. I've seen in NZ, UK, France, Malta, etc
I use twiiit.com (and have a rule in kagi to replace twitter.com with twiiit.com in search results)
It uses a random nitter instance each time.
Thank you to all upvoters, the parent comment has brought me to 1000 Karma, some 12 1/2 years later :)
Ah yes, the Arc de Triomphe, notable for its location in one of the great roundabouts of the world.
Speaking as someone with a predilection for photographing fire hydrants and manhole covers, this seems like an entirely reasonable perspective.
Have you seen the "fire hydrants that look like planets" blog or whatever it was - it was a few years ago...
https://www.reddit.com/r/firehydrantplanets/ <-- Warning, contains Bollards as well.
https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-1-d&q=firehyd...
Lots of really cool planet-hydrants posts
Ah yes, the Arc de Triomphe, celebrating victory in 1806, which turned to tragic defeat by 1812, and invasion by 1814, with 500k French dead, and the Russian Tsar marching into Paris - presumably inspecting the shiny new Arch of Victory LOL. The French invasion of Russia turned into the Russian (allied) invasion of France.
The aforesaid roundabout (12 avenues meeting in a neat circle, containing some vague gallic-shrug number of unmarked lanes) will always be the Place D'Etoile for me, never the Place Charles de Gaulle - but that's another long story of French arrogance and hubris. I do believe the Nazis also paraded around the French Arc de Triomphe.
quirky and underwhelming
Describes Stonehenge perfectly. Which I suppose could be some sort of ancient pylons?
You might be interested in "Crap Days Out", a book published about 1 decade ago. In it you can find out such treats as the Dinosaur Museum, which has no dinosaurs, the Pencil Museum, which boasts the world's largest pencil, and Teapot Island, home to more than 8,000 teapots. Of course Stonehenge appears in it.
Here's a review in the Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2011/aug/21/crap-days-out...
"And that's Stonehenge!" I announced. "Is it?" replied Maria. "It's a bit small and rubbish, isn't it?" "Yes," I said proudly. "It is."
If you're referring to the Pencil Museum in Keswick, I found that fascinating. But that's probably just me tbh ...
The website was set up by an Englishman, of course, because that's what us British do best: quirky and underwhelming.
In a sense I'm disappointed, because it's not as underwhelming as I had hoped. There goes my expectation of getting a new favourite of these things every month: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/6f/Pylon_01...
You promised me underwhelming and I almost had a heart attack with January's pylon
Thankfully the 2023 ones were just mundane enough to bring me back
Spoiler alert: January's pylon is from Cadiz in Spain
Thank you for bringing me back. I wish I'd be there now for the Carnival.
Those towers are a nice landmark. The photo is great, but it lacks perspective of how they connect Cádiz and Puerto Real over the bay. A video:
https://www.endesa.com/es/proyectos/todos-los-proyectos/sect...
Turns out there's a Dutch equivalent also: https://www.hoogspanningsnet.com/
because that's what us British do best: quirky and underwhelming
Yup. We're a bit crap and we know it. And that's just fine.
https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/page281.html
How come a piece of tree (or whatever it is) is supposed to be an entrace of hell? Hmmm okay. Perhaps I don't get this Brits joke.
The flowers on the right hand side look like daisies and probably like 1-2cm across. The whole thing is probably about 20cm across. Its probably a mole-hill? It looks vaguely like it could be earth displaced from a tunneling devil if you squint a bit and go with the 2002 vibe.
Moles, though. You can't trust 'em.
Yes indeed, the preferred way to deal with them is to stamp on the hills and persuade them to move next door.
It's the Wessex Variant of the Mornington Crescent rules that mean... oh wait, wrong thread...
No! It's the Malebolge variant!
(sigh)
Can you even use Malebolge on a Tuesday? That's definitely not canon.
Why are you so certain that you can recognise an entrance to hell when you see one :) ?
Must be the Devil, trying to sow seeds of doubt among us.
It's incredibly convenient for us who commute home from Oracle's office in the area.
I wish I could up vote this comment twice. Larry would be proud.
Although it is an extremely exhausting process, his ability to swim through soil means that the devil will, on occasion, create temporary entrances. These will eventually be filled in by the local County Council but they can be a source of harmful mantle-gas. This example was named Oilyn by the investigating police officers after the former Prime Minister.
Well it’s only a temporary entrance, and is clearly labelled as such. For more information please reread.
Random/not so random things and making up stories about them with a theme. It's creative.
What a gem! And a few more from the HTML source:
<META NAME="Keywords" CONTENT="entrances2hell, entrancestohell, entrances to hell, Hell, Canterbury, Kent,">
</styleWhen did we stop explicitly welcoming people to websites (literally: “welcome to my website!”) . The same era that “going on the internet” was an actual activity. I miss that. It’s like we all stopped being excited by the web.
Content should speak for it self. Welcoming people to a website is same as starting a IM conversation with: "hi!".
Valid point, but there was something charming and innocent about "the welcome to my website" that I miss.
Everyone's a "brand" these days. I get the same kind of feeling when I see a bio written in the third person but which was clearly written by the person themselves.
The same era that “going on the internet” was an actual activity. I miss that. I
Now you can never leave.
I noticed this too. Would be a safe bet it was hand crafted in notepad with no syntax highlighting.
Might just feed it to the W3C validator for kicks.
Update: The validator reported 42 errors before giving up:
Fatal Error: Cannot recover after last error. Any further errors will be ignored.
From line 56, column 1; to line 56, column 23
Verdana">↩<a href="page279.html">This whand crafted in notepad with no syntax highlighting
Those were the days!
Save, open FTP/SCP client, copy to webserver, maybe poke/restart a service via SSH, back to browser, refresh... dammit, error, rinse repeat.
We're certainly spoiled having formatting, linting, tests and coverage all run on save these days :-)
The validator reported 42 errors before giving up
Giving up? 42! How can you not see this as the sinister interference of Beelzebub!
42 hex in decimal is 66!
How old is this site? I'm sure even in 2002 JPEG was a better option than GIF
I'm sure it's older than that, seeing it again has triggered a memory from I'm sure the late 90s.
According to the blog of the man who runs it, it was from 2002-2005: https://misterirvine.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/explain-entran...
Also from his blog:
« I am a husband and father. The reason I was born was to become my daughter’s father. I was wise enough to notice and appreciate at the time, the slow ecstatic joy my child’s early years were giving me. So too have her later years. I will die happy. »
Beautiful.
"The poor design is also a way of making the fictional compiler (Rae Gates) seem to be lonely, naive, obsessed, deluded and out-of-touch. I, the real compiler, am only one of these."
Genius.
see first entry here : https://web.archive.org/web/20021001000000*/https://www.entr...
This reminded me of the Hidden London tours, which allow guided access to staff-only disused and abandoned parts of the London Underground. There's a real excitement in taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors you walk past every day.
Those sort of tours are often listed on https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/
Haha "things to do in London Today: https://i.imgur.com/Qpu7ZKd.png
very interesting, thanks - I've been looking for something like this
taking a peek behind one of these dusty, abandoned-looking doors
back in middle-school in USSR exploring with friends abandoned underground fortifications one of the doors that we broke through happened to let us into an actually used military hardware storage (unfortunately not munitions nor weapons) which had its official office and gates with guards/etc. from the other side of that hill.
More intentionally though we back then several times visited using ventilation pass the large underground military fuel depot each time carrying away buckets of fuel for various fun childhood fire activities.
I love this. Texts appear both coherent yet utterly random:
Satan's heat-image can sometimes be seen here and it has recently been proven that all of the earth's insects were born just inside the metal door.
This sounds like Stig facts
It reminds me strongly, in places, of Peter Greenaway's 'A Walk Through H':
https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-a-walk-through-h-t...
Many do, but some go beyond coherence and tell a story. E.g.,
https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/page285.html
says
The Cult of Reversible Death wrote of a moonlight-appointment with God (which the devil failed to attend due to prior commitments) claiming that it was to have taken place here at Puggnac. There is no evidence to prove their claim but the local steelworks still shows the event on their coat of arms. Puggnac has superbly delicate ductwork and a hydraulics system which was designed and built in Yorkshire.
Radom as hell, though, fitting the theme.
...coherent yet utterly random
Beautifully put!
Not Heaven and Hell, but...
Blisland, Cornwall, England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blisland
Helland, Cornwall, England
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helland
About 3.2 km (2 miles) apart as the crow flies:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/33809465#map=13/50.5278/-...
Or 5.3km driving:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/directions?engine=fossgis_osrm...
The main route into Cornwall is the A30, and you see the signs to them at successive junctions.
Who knew Bliss and Hell were so close together?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hell,_Norway
the image is quite funny. On the train station it says "Hell, Gods - Expedition". (but which in Norwegian actually means "goods handling")
I've been there.
The boot camp for the Norwegian Air Force used to be next to that place and had a gate there so many Norwegian air force soldiers including me guarded the gate at Hell ar some point.
Interestingly the "entrances" seem to go from /page272.html to /page381.html, and then loop back.
There also appears to be some kind of autocorrecting going on in the url path, where /page1381.html will redirect to /page381.html, though some will give you multiple choices like https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/page481.html. Seems like a strange routing system. Is this common?
Not strange, it's hypermedia at work. I wish more APIs (made for human consumption or otherwise) would be so considerate. See also: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Status/300
Looks like it's "mod_speling" from an old version of apache: https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_speling.html
An old site, but with a good deal of obscure British charm.
So random/wacky. A classic example of the lovely "weird internet". (That I hope is forever preserved)
Frontpage/Dreamweaver vibes
Slightly off topic but I recently discovered to my surprise London has a now disused railway for the dead https://www.london-walking-tours.co.uk/secret-london/london-...
So (a) it's not exactly a disused railway, because the trains of the dead used the same tracks as those of the living, which are still in use, although the dead did have their own dedicated stations and their spurs at either end, and (b) it's a shame it wasn't called the Necropolitan Line.
The maps are hidden gems. Don’t want to spoil it, but be sure to click the link on a few of them. It’s top notch British humor.
Rare, these days, to laugh out loud at a website. But one of those maps got me.
Can somebody please explain the joke/context? :)
https://misterirvine.wordpress.com/2011/07/15/explain-entran...
[Thanks goes to @autophagian who linked this in another comment]
Here is the "gates to hell" in Zürich, Switzerland:
https://d3qvqlc701gzhm.cloudfront.net/mirror/1c45663482a9521...
https://www.zuerich.com/de/besuchen/sehenswuerdigkeiten/hoel...
Some of the letters and answers are hilarious.
https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/pageletters.html
Also this:
Though these gates are not sinister enough, in my opinion, it would be a nice idea to make a game out of it with a plot around gate research. It could be fun...
Disclaimer: I am not nostalgic for the internet of the old days, especially the times when you had a few websites to access, mostly university sites, and you could memorize each and every IP address. I actually hate the fact that the major search engines (especially Bing and Google) try to deceive me with the URLs I don't need. During the times of Altavista and Yahoo, I had the regex pipeline to filter their searches; however, this tactic is now futile...
And by virtue of that site listing them, those entrances have become Hyperart Thomasson: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperart_Thomasson
That's hilarious, thanks for a much needed laugh in between my job hunting. the Tories here in the UK have made such a big mess it's going to be hard to find a job with my disability.
The site even comes with its own music charts: https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/pagechart.html
My favourite track is "Ssssuuuuft".
along these lines, see Portals of London https://portalsoflondon.com/
https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/page322.html
I know this location well. It leads to this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crystal_Palace_(High_Level)_ra...
which was one of the "abandoned places" I loved to explore in my youth. I always suspected there were infernal forces at play in that area.
Being a Mancunian of a certain vintage, these make me homesick.
I would like there to be one for the city of Turin.
How about a useful list, like, of entrances to the platform for the Hogwarts Express. They'd look very similar I imagine?
That web still exists. Even though it has been eclipsed by the siloized monstrous goos, those independent, quirky, greenfield sites are still very much alive.
Much like saying ancient Rome still exist, you just can see it through all the gentrification
Gentrification is a poor analogy since the web is not zero sum unlike physical space.
Attention is limited though and that has shifted away from websites like this so maybe it's gentrification of attention
Feels like saying "Casino's are the gentrification of wealth".
Not disagreeing with you. It's just the modern web is a trap. A game you will lose, as your attention is abused, misdirected and monetized.
Sadly, I think we're the only ones that pine for the old web.
It looks as if it's "not zero sum" because a random user can supposedly check out anything on equal footing, whether it's Facebook.com or some guy's hobby personal website. They're both there and available.
But in reality that's never the case. A person taken at random is never equally likely to visit this or that (except in the sense: I have 50%-50% chances of winning the lottery today: I either win, or I don't). The gentrified one's would have way more exposure, be promoted as way more essential (socially, and even professionally) to be on them, they will have all the trappings of fashion, like modern design, mobile client apps, and such.
Back in 1999 that wasn't yet the case. At least nowhere near to the degree it is today.
This is reflected in viewership numbers of course, where a gentrified behemoth might get 99% of the traffic, and the rest long tail 1%, despite consisting of billion times more websites.
OK but... a personal website gets substantially less traffic than Facebook but does it get more or less traffic than the website owner's profile page on Facebook? If that person keeps a blog on the personal site and occasionally posts on FB, the website wins. If that person posts all the time on Facebook and rarely blogs, the FB profile wins.
I do have a website since last century and I stopped posting on FB since a few years ago. My website gets negligible traffic except scan bots but still more than me on FB. If people google me they might find me on FB and realize that my page is dead. If they insist they'll find my site.
I love the comparison with gentrification. It’s not the same though. You can still see the old web untouched, it’s just almost impossible to find. But if you do find it, you don’t see the gentrification.
Maybe it’s more like Rome being surrounded by hundreds of miles of malls, and parking lots, and highways, and those highways (and Google Maps) only leading you to those parking lots and malls. You’d have to stumble upon a backroad that’s not on the map to find the old Rome.
Just like it was back then... There was a very steep path for the entrance to he^W the Internet, and then it was easy to find those places. Now you can access the Internet easily but it's harder to find those places.
EDIT: typo
Part of it is, SSL certs. Google downranks, heavily, websites without SSL.
Some of these sites will never see SSL, and so they are indeed as roads not on a map.
(It isn't relevant how easy or hard ssl and obtaining certs are. The reality is, these older, static html sires sometimes don't have ssl, and will never have ssl.)
You really really don’t want to have lived in Ancient Rome. Same applies for most nostalgia
Finding a path to that still-existing web is like trying to casually hike into the fairy realm or something. It's all around us and invisible, inaccessible.
I wonder if it would be possible to filter out the noise of the “modern web” by black listing big tech the same way we block ads. Might be an interesting project.
I would use a search engine that only indexed sites that have zero ads, tracking or referral links.
Not sure how useful it'd be, but I would use it!
It would probably be like Google circa 1999-2000
I would use that too, for sure! I kind of feel like experimenting with this now. I have no idea how doable it is to just "start scraping the web" though. uBlock Origin is open source, so I guess that could be used to help filter out sites that serve ads.
Wasn't there a site that showed search results but skipped the top N results, so you ended up seeing a lot more interesting smaller sites? Can't remember details and a quick search (hah) didn't find it. Pretty sure it was linked on HN a year or two ago...
Edit - I think this was it, but looks like it needs an account: https://millionshort.com/
A lot of smaller sites just aren't indexed any more, it's a common complaint you read here...
"Smaller site, we don't use adwords, we're getting crawled 500x/day which is 40% of our bandwidth, still not indexed after 6 months"
Kagi (the search engine) has Small Web※, which (I assume) shows only results from the long tail and excludes popular sites (they use TinyGem search index for this).
※https://blog.kagi.com/small-web
Oh this looks really nice. Thanks for sharing!
If a search engine were to penalize ads, I bet a lot of those old sites would surface. The old web was an "amateur" web, people created sites to share content they were excited about, not to monetize it (or to allow a platform to monetize it). If search engines also make most of their money from advertising, they have a big conflict of interest. We need an open source search engine owned by a non-profit organization following the model of Signal.
Maybe using an ad blocker to build a list of "websites that serve ads" (in addition to domains those ads are served from), and using that list to filter out results from an existing search engine API (like Duck Duck Go) would get you part of the way. But you'd probably need to search really far before you start finding sites that don't serve ads.
I find this CSE quite usefull for finding old websites https://www.oldestsearch.com/
I mean put adblocks into crazy mode, blacklist anything related to Google and Meta-crap by default, turn off JS and probably CSS too and you are almost there, maybe apart from blinking text and weirdly stretched bitmap backgrounds
All you need is a reliable way to detect cookie popups.
It still exists you’re just missing it
Right... But how does one find it.
Does one have to tilt their trolley at every pillar on every train platform. Or find a friendly worm type thing to show them hidden entrances?
It's work and we need to re-establish a true net of websites, webrings and all the other forgotten stuff that was made obsolete by search engines. Here's my contribution:
https://mglz.de/links.html
I'm not sure, I think it's better to keep it private and dispense it through closed communities. These things don't work unless there is a lot of personal interest between each website creator, so just dumping them into a big list isn't great. I think the best modern approaches I've seen have forums/Discord servers organised around a topic, such as making demos or sizecoding, and then people sharing their sites and projects within those spaces.
Discord is a walled garden and is not searchable, so knowledge posted there is lost very quickly and is super hard to discover. Static HTML has its limits, but has much better longevity.
The latter
No ad-tech, and 2002? What web were you on? 2002 had popups, pop-unders, frantically blinking banners, pages opening many other pages when you click on them, search results poisoned with transparent or small text, and barely any tech in the user's hand to fight these.
The web is, I think, friendlier now than it was in 2000-2005. And much, much more useful in general.
I'd replace "is" with "looks".
What makes you say that?
All the spying going on in the background every time you load a web site.
Right, now that really is something that is much more aggressive on today's internet.
Apparently not even the coffee mug now, which is bitterly disappointing.
True, although the official safety posters[0] still seem to be available: https://www.cafepress.com/e2hp.34051572
[0] https://www.entrances2hell.co.uk/pagesafety.html
instantly ordered one for my office. Incredible.
"Don't shout at the devil (not even with good news)."
This is just amazing, thank you (and OP) for the link!
Ahhh now I want one.
I put together a list of sites/catalogues you might find interesting: https://untested.sonnet.io/Places+to+Find+Indie+Web+Content
I've a site like that too, we would appreciate a link:
http://wmw.thran.uk
And my Axe!
https://mglz.de/links.html
are we sharing pages of random links here?
https://industrialnation.co.uk/
Part of the problem is information discovery is dominated by big tech, between Google and social platforms.
Mojeek is an alt search engine with an independent index that returns this site so obv indexed.
https://www.mojeek.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell
I see another one there for Dutch locations
http://pkazil.free.fr/e2hnl.html
disclaimer, I used to work at Mojeek.
I'm not sure what point you're trying to make with the search results as compared to Google? https://www.google.com/search?q=uk+entrances+to+hell
90+% of people would use Google to find stuff via search, it's useful to have other means. As you can see by their results they tend to favour 'fresh' (nee recycled content) pages rather than older and original sources.
//added
which is often the case as per comments in this thread with people generally feeling the commercial web has gobbled up original and niche content. Surely it can only be that way because the gateways to the web have made it so.
And web rings to proudly be part of :)
The era of ratemypoo . com (I've not checked if this site still exists or what, ymmv).
I was wondering why the photos looked like so poorly compressed.
The commercialisation of the internet was a mistake.
I found a bookmarklet (on HN) that will take you to a random "old internet" webpage: https://wiby.me/surprise/
Just pressed it, it sent me to https://holyjoe.net/, a personal website of a reverend from 1995, last updated in 2020 based on its 'poetry' page.