Reece's Area 51
by Reece Donovan
This site found it's way onto the internet circa 2004. This site was the successor of Reece's Madness Center, having moved from Freeservers to Angelfire. Angelfire allowed more freedom in creating HTML pages and as a result I added a complete overload of widgets/scripts to the homepage.
Unfortunately it went the way of most free servers - plastered with code destroying ads. Above is a entire site copy I've pulled down to show what it used to look like, but you can still visit the destroyed http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/reecesarea51
Some historical information about the site:
About making an archive copy of the site:
Stuff that doesn't work any more because browsers grew up/the world changed:
Unfortunately it went the way of most free servers - plastered with code destroying ads. Above is a entire site copy I've pulled down to show what it used to look like, but you can still visit the destroyed http://www.angelfire.com/scifi/reecesarea51
Some historical information about the site:
- Uses my old email address "[email protected]"
- Operated under the ShortURL "flash51.2ya.com"
- Due to size limits on Angelfire, I used "250free" to host the bigger source files (downloads, game files etc.) under "flash51.250free.com". Despite it's then generous 250mb web space, the site was often unreliable and gave a big orange error screens often. If memory serves me correct, they then also enforced size limits or got rid of cross-linking - rendering it completely useless for my purposes.
- All "Guestbook" and "Poll" entries were lost when Lycos shut down HtmlGear in April 2012
About making an archive copy of the site:
- I used the Wayback Machine to get historical references to the HtmlGear images used and to restore various expired components of the site
- Replaced "sine wave scroller" with embedded youtube video as java applets are no longer trusted after many security violations!
- I added a 800px wide DIV container to some pages (standard resolution for the day), as on modern resolutions some of the pages just looked ridiculous
- Recoded the flash header and bottom menus as they had absolute references to angelfire urls
- I had to reconstruct the flash header from the compiled SWF assets as the orignal FLA source file was lost
- Replaced all photos that went missing from my local copies
- Hunted down fonts, games and downloads that were lost on 250Free
- Removed all ads!
Stuff that doesn't work any more because browsers grew up/the world changed:
- The "right-click" inhibitor. When a user attempted to right click, an alert would appear:
"If you want material email me at [email protected]" - Featured coloured scrollbars using script from the "DHTML" website
- Java applet version of sine wave scrolling text from ANFYTEAM (blocked for security)
- Pass-It-On from HtmlGear
- Poll from HtmlGear
The following people had logons for the hidden page:
- Reece Donovan
- Jason Dennert
- Sarah Symes
- Angelo Marcantonio
- Anthony Axon
- Luke Warren
- Tom Winship
- Matthem Leoncini
- Daniel Hedwards
(In the archive copy site, you can use username ="guest" password ="pass" to gain access to the hidden page)