20260430-natural_web_exploration.txt

I was looking for images from Smallville. I love the show, at least
before it became a proto-Justice League thing, and thankfully(?) the
last true unbought search seems to be image searches. I was using DDG,
as usual, in a GUI browser, and I was delighted to find
smallville.marianobayona.com . It is a Web 1.0 website: full of static
data, good ol' HTML, and that distinct Geocities vibe that ruled the
late '90s and early '00s.

Afterwards I went and visited the site in Links2 in graphics mode and
read more on it. It's all in Spanish, which I thankfully know enough
to read with minimal confusion. It's actually kind of beautiful: he
kept the pages up in remembrance of his wife. He, at least, was a big
fan of Superman and seemingly a few other heroes/comic book
characters.

I also saw towards the bottom of one of the pages that it was made
with WebFacil (WebEasy). I followed that link and found another time
capsule page with an old-school WYSIWYG HTML editor. I'm not going to
get it, but I like it.

The last thing I found was that Mariano's site is actually a treasure
trove of old pictures, from Smallville, his life, and other things he
liked. It is truly a personal website. Outside of the "Page made with
WebFacil" footer, I didn't see any ads. None. The webpage was made for
him to share his thoughts and interests, not to sell something or claw
toward the top of search results. That's something the modern Web has
been missing for a long time.

It just made me feel good and I wanted to share.