When Lycos switched off the servers for Angelfire and Tripod on April 24, 2026, I felt a quiet, personal grief. I had not visited those sites in years, but I had grown up there. I was a teenager in the late 1990s and a college student in the early 2000s, and back then the web was not something you scrolled—it was something you built. If you wanted to be seen, you had to be both a coder and an artist. The most popular pages on GeoCities, Angelfire, and Tripod were not just functional HTML; they were digital canvases where visual flair and technical skill competed for attention. I remember my first homepage. It was on GeoCities, in one of those themed neighborhoods that made the early web feel like a digital suburb. I chose a username, opened a blank HTML file, and stared at a screen full of possibilities. I learned <body bgcolor>, <table>, <font face>, and the strange art of making images line up correctly. But the real work was the design. I needed a tiled...