An early exploiter
On the topic of my early websites, what you see in the previous post is a cleaned-up version of my site. My real first site was a monster with tons of Javascript which abused IE to try and make you set my site as the homepage as well as add it to the favorites. It did this on loading and unloading - making it a big pain. Another nasty piece of JavaScript that I had put in was something like this
window.open(document.location);
Now, a piece of code like this in the unload event handler can make sure that no one leaves your website (almost). I remember people battling with over 50-60 windows trying to shut down my website!
After finishing my masterpiece work in HTML, I posted a message on the www.webpagesthatsuck.com forum,asking people to evaluate my website. I posted the message and forgot to check it for 2 days - I was so sure that no one would bother commenting on my site.
When I actually *did* check the forum, I got the shock of my life - my post was at the top of the forum with a flaming icon next to it - it had gotten over 100 replies. Overnight, my site counter jumped from around 35 to around 2500. Reading through the replies, I wanted to go hide somewhere. With my website (and its JavaScript code), I had managed to crash around 25 computers not to mention causing a lot of people a LOT of pain.
One comment I remember really well is from a guy who had viewed my website on a Mac. I had a childish piece of JavaScript which tried to disable right-click (I thought this act would protect my source code - what did I know back then?). This guy said something like this -
..I can understand why you might want to disable right click - but please do realize that the Mac doesn't have a concept of a right mouse button. No amount of damn clicking works on your site! Thanks to you, I lost over 3 hours of Photoshop work...
As you can probably imagine, I silently cleaned up my site and prayed that no body from that forum would find my house :-)
Another Disclaimer : All this happened around 4 years ago when I was first learning computers - my web development efforts are a lot better nowadays.:-)