Updating old websites is something that many front-end developers are routinely tasked with, but not many projects call for the modernization of sites that have not been touched in decades. Mads Stoudman was 20 years old when he created the first website for the comics shop he had been working at since he was a teenager; he was definitely the right man for the job when he was called upon to update the site, but he did not realize it would be so difficult.
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In a developer blog post, Stoudman explained how the e-commerce database used by the shop only offered a command line interface of incredible complexity, and it lacked an HTTP integration because it was originally developed in the mid-1980s. He ended up using a Microsoft Visual Basic solution in order to launch the website, and that was the solution the comics shop kept for next two and a half decades.
The reason the database still worked for so many years is that Microsoft did not take long to develop and launch Active Server Pages, which were quite ugly but provided an easy way to launch apps such as databases on the nascent World Wide Web. The layout of the website was what you would expect in the mid to late 1990s; it may not have been pretty, but there was a certain simplicity to it that makes it pleasantly nostalgic.
Stoudman set out to rebuild the website with the intention of keeping as much of the original simplicity as possible. There was another aspect of the project that made it even more appealingto Stoudman: The shop was about to drown in debt and file for bankruptcy, so he took on the project as a labor of love. He decided to keep the ASP database because it had worked wonders for more than two decades, but he went with modern e-commerce sensibilities for the purpose of making Google aware of the site.
In the end, Stoudman spent about two weeks working on the site, but he actually chose to reuse most of the original code, which made the project more complicated; however, it also made it more endearing. For more information click here https://dev.to/madsstoumann/updating-a-25-year-old-website-42jm.
