Features: 50+ memes with full origin stories, This Day in Internet History, Lost Media Vault, Memory Wall, and a Retro Assets Library. Switch between Win95, WinXP, and Mac OS9 themes.
Built with Next.js, Prisma, and way too much nostalgia.
Launched oldwebdiary.com — a nostalgia site dedicated to early internet culture, fully skinned like a retro desktop OS. You can switch between Win95, WinXP, and Mac OS9 themes and the whole UI changes (window chrome, taskbar, fonts, button styles, even the desktop wallpaper).
What's inside:
- 50+ memes with full origin stories (Dancing Baby, Hamster Dance, Rickroll, Doge, etc.)
- This Day in Internet History — events that happened on today's date throughout internet history
- Lost Media Vault — Flash animations and old websites that nearly disappeared, with related-media suggestions
- Memory Wall — people share their earliest internet memories (AIM, GeoCities, LimeWire...)
- Retro Assets Library — downloadable Win95 sounds, cursors, wallpapers, fonts
Stack: Next.js 16, TypeScript, tRPC, Prisma + Supabase, Tailwind v4, Cloudflare R2, Vercel. Solo build, took about four weeks evenings/weekends.
Biggest technical challenges were eliminating a flash-of-wrong-theme on page load (solved with cookie-based SSR theme detection) and getting /vercel/og to reliably render meme images in edge OG cards (turned out .webp doesn't play nice with the edge runtime).
Would love feedback — especially on the retro UI details, since that's the whole point of the site.