Ancient Jackie Chan Pages Haunt RandomHouse.com

Joel Schlosberg found some ancient, bitrotten pages on the servers of RandomHouse.com that are true cyber-relics. His words follow:

"Here's one of the oldest and most ghostly book promotion websites I've ever seen: Random House's website for Jackie Chan's autobiography "I Am Jackie Chan: My Life in Action", published in 1998 -- and sure enough (by both internal evidence of datedness and checking the Wayback Machine), the page hasn't been modified much since 1998: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/iamjackiechan/

Note first of all that a lot of it consists of book excerpts, so that's not particularly dated. But moving on....

The first thing that sticks out is the color scheme: yellow and white text on a red -- and I mean screamingly bright, fire truck-red -- background. If one looks a bit more carefully, one notices that the graphics are conspicuously dithered GIFs.

There's also an early use of Java to add interactivity: namely, a simple Concentration game where the cards are Jackie Chan in various poses: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/
iamjackiechan/matchgame/index.html

But the real gold is the links page: http://www.randomhouse.com/features/
iamjackiechan/links.html
There's a page of "Jackie Chan Windows 95 Desktop Themes", and best of all, a bunch of xoom.com webpages! (The URL's are spelled out on the page, making it easier to find such gems.)

And while the vast majority of links are simply broken links, there are a few still-functioning sites that show signs of ghostliness:
http://www.geocities.com/Hollywood/Set/8801/
http://www.web-vue.com/ -- "This page last updated : 8/16/01"
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Dojo/1310/

Even better, some of the pages have a banner ad for the original site!
http://www.geocities.com/Tokyo/Dojo/1310/jcbanner.gif
http://www.web-vue.com/images/jcbanner.gif"

Thanks, Joel, for pointing out these mouldering pages. They yield a unique view of Web 1.0 aesthetics and sensibilities.

ReganBooks is Now a Ghost Site

This week, HarperCollins scrapped its ReganBooks imprint in the wake of the over-the-top conduct of its former editor, Judith Regan. Consequently, it removed all links to ReganBooks from its main corporate site.

What's left behind is this ghost site. Just about everything is busted or missing, and this page will likely succumb soon as well. So now's the time to take a last, not so fond look at ReganBooks, the fecund source of so much subliterary sleaze.