The year was 1999 and the cool thing to do (OK, I was never cool in high school, but bear with me here) was to start a website. So I got myself a copy of HTML for Dummies and a free Geocities site (remember Geocities?) and built my first website!

(Confession: The Oscars Trivia Page—as it was then called—wasn’t the first website I build with my nascent HTML skills; I first built a Geocities site called Andrew’s Funny Forwards. Before there were memes or viral social media posts, there were funny emails your friends would forward you, and the idea was to collect all of those emails, categorize them, and host them in one place. That site got a lot of views—which I know because view/visit counters were all the rage in those days—but the time I devoted to it petered out quickly, and it died an inauspicious death when Geocities shut down. Perhaps unfortunately for me, since there’s probably something on there that could get me cancelled, portions of the site technically live on on the Internet Archive.)

At the time I was particularly obsessed with the Academy Awards. I’d loved movies all my life but only successfully stayed awake for the entire Oscar ceremony about two years earlier. Someone gifted me a copy of of an Oscars trivia book and so naturally I decided it was the perfect subject for a website.

I was by no means a graphic designer, but I managed to stand up a site with a whole bunch of information and a relatively small number of inaccuracies. My most impressive achievement at the time was that the site ranked #1 on Google when you searched for Oscars Trivia. As a result, each year as awards season rolled around, I’d get inquiries from national press and mentions in publications like Variety, the Tampa Bay Times, and my hometown paper the Hartford Courant.

The death of Geocities and the 2012 rebuild

I maintained the site sporadically over the years, mostly just making a few changes each winter when the new crop of nominees was announced. In 2012, after Yahoo! bought and killed Geocities, I had recently started working in a more tech-focused role. I decided my late-90s HTML wouldn’t cut it anymore, so I used the opportunity of rebuilding the site to learn modern CSS, XHTML, some JavaScript, and a fair bit of Excel and VBA work to help generate all that code. That also when Geocities.com/OscarTrivia became, officially, OscarTrivia.com.

Version 3 — HTML5, SASS, PHP, and mobile responsiveness

In 2019, I decided to rebuild the site once again. This time the motivation was similar: I wanted to learn some new technologies and in the process build a more maintainable, more semantic, more accessible site. The new version uses SASS CSS pre-processing, PHP to modularize the site components and make it a bit more maintainable, HTML5 semantic tags for accessibility and ease of development. Additionally, the site is fully mobile responsive—a feature which was important not only because that’s the direction the web has moved in, but also because I frequently pulled it up on my phone to check facts or trivia.

As of this writing, I’m considering a partial rebuild to integrate with some third-party APIs and to pull some data dynamically from a MySQL database. I’ve also considered fully or partially moving the site to WordPress, but I’m a bit too nostalgic for the hand-coded (in Notepad, no less) HTML that started it all and I’m not sure I’m ready to pack that in just yet. I don’t know what the future holds for OscarTrivia.com, but as my oldest-surviving web project, it still holds a special place in my heart.

You can check out the site itself at OscarTrivia.com, and you can find reasonably good approximations of the 2001-era Geocities site (including the <scroll> tag, in all its glory) and 2012 XHTML version on the Internet Archive’s WayBack Machine.