MySpace Taught Me Web Design

Probably not.

You know what's awesome, though? MySpace profile pages had that hole in there.

The About Me box.

It didn't just take text.

You could throw in HTML, CSS, and it would run it.

Whatever you pasted in there overrode the layout, the colors, the styling.

Not part of it, the whole thing.

The background, the fonts, the colors, where everything sat on the page.

That was a bug.

It was just a bug, but a fun bug.

It's a bug that a couple million like-minded teenagers... all found around the same time and thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened.

If you're running a MySpace profile back in 2005 and people are loving it, yeah, you're probably not fixing that.

Do you remember the first time you landed on a page that didn't look like everybody else's? None of the blue and the white and the orange.

Somebody I knew back in high school had a custom background, custom fonts, the whole nine yards.

And I remember sitting there thinking, hold on, wait a minute.

You can do that? Nobody told me you could do that.

And when I found out, man, it was over.

Every spare hour I had went into that stupid MySpace page.

After school, on the weekends, sitting at the family computer in the computer room.

Remember those? Because, I mean, you know, there was no MySpace on your phone.

That wasn't a thing yet.

You wanted to work on your MySpace profile.

You sat there in the chair.

And there were sites for this.

You remember these? The layout sites, the code generators, page after page of pre-made themes.

Probably not.

You know what's awesome, though? MySpace profile pages had that hole in there.

The About Me box.

It didn't just take text.

You could throw in HTML, CSS, and it would run it.

Whatever you pasted in there overrode the layout, the colors, the styling.

Not part of it, the whole thing.

The background, the fonts, the colors, where everything sat on the page.

That was a bug.

It was just a bug, but a fun bug.

It's a bug that a couple million like-minded teenagers... all found around the same time and thought it was the greatest thing that had ever happened.

If you're running a MySpace profile back in 2005 and people are loving it, yeah, you're probably not fixing that.

Do you remember the first time you landed on a page that didn't look like everybody else's? None of the blue and the white and the orange.

Somebody I knew back in high school had a custom background, custom fonts, the whole nine yards.

And I remember sitting there thinking, hold on, wait a minute.

You can do that? Nobody told me you could do that.

And when I found out, man, it was over.

Every spare hour I had went into that stupid MySpace page.

After school, on the weekends, sitting at the family computer in the computer room.

Remember those? Because, I mean, you know, there was no MySpace on your phone.

That wasn't a thing yet.

You wanted to work on your MySpace profile.

You sat there in the chair.

And there were sites for this.

You remember these? The layout sites, the code generators, page after page of pre-made themes.