Glitch wants to take you back to the first website you ever made

Do you remember the first website you ever built? If you’re anything like me, I’ll wager it was in the 1990’s. You hacked together some HTML you found online, and crossed your fingers that it’d work. You learned through experimentation, and trial-and-error.

Back then, the Internet was pure. Pristine. Simple. But over the past few years, that’s changed. Web development has become shrouded with complexity. It’s not just HTML, CSS, and JavaScript anymore.

Aspirant developers are told they have to learn HAML, LESS, CoffeeScript, React and whatever else fly-by-night bullshit Hacker News is spruiking. Honestly, I don’t care. I’ve tuned out at this point, and I’m not alone.

Which is why I love Glitch, from Fog Creek. We’ve written about this site before. Essentially, it’s a playground where you can remix other people’s code in a safe and self-contained environment.

Now, it’s taking a stab at static web pages, and lets anyone build and deploy pages without leaving the browser.

In short, Glitch wants to be the place where you build your first website. It wants to be the place where you taste code for the first time.

For a bigger challenge, you can edit existing static web pages. In a delightfully nostalgic twist, GoMix has carbon copies of an old-school MySpace page, Movable Type, GeoCities, Neopets, and more.

It even packs a replica of the first webpage ever, which was built by Tim Berners-lee over 25 years ago.

Even if you already know how to code, is totally worth visiting, just for the trip down memory lane. You can see the full list of template pages here.