The dream of the 90s is alive on the Internet

A few months ago, over coffee with an old friend, I came up with the idea for an online directory site that would link to the best of the Internet in the 1990's and 2000's, before the social media giants took over our online lives.

There was a certain uniqueness to the Internet before everything was filtered through the social media firehose. Websites had their own personal styles. Their visual aesthetic was often tacky, for sure, but there was a personality that shone through the sites of those years that rarely exists in today's hyper-homogenized online landscape.

Unfortunately, many of the gems of that bygone era no longer exist. Geocities shut its doors in 2009. Sites which rely on Macromedia Flash (Flash was never, and will never, be an Adobe product to me!) have been rendered mostly defunct due to lack of working plugins on modern browsers. But I was able to uncover some of my favorite sites from those heady years.

Teejay's List is a living portal to that time and place.