88×31 STATS & MORE

This page gives some background info, stats and links for further reading about 88x31 buttons. Click here if you are looking for the dataset.

SOME STATS (more to come)

88x31 buttons (incl. dupes): 76,199
88x31 buttons (unique): 29,257

88x31 buttons make up only 356 MB of the whole GeoCities data. Even less if you remove the huge amount of duplicates (147 MB). That's ~0.015%.

The oldest button that I could find was last modified 16th October 1995. Fittingly, it is a good old "Netscape Now!" button, a real classic. The most recent button file that I could find was last modified on 2nd September 2009. Nearly 14 years after the oldest button!

Back when GeoCities started offering free websites, the size limit for the whole webspace was 2MB. You've probably sent a meme multiple times that size to a friend this week.
The smallest button that I could find is only 87 bytes (uhhh the white one if you couldn't tell) while the largest one is a whopping 392.9 kB...

... yeah, its a Rupert Grint fan GIF.

NEEDLES IN THE DIGITAL HAYSTACK OR YOINK88X31.SH

Finding a few small GIFs in a specific resolution hidden in roughly 1000GB of 90s and 00s personal websites is not a task that should be done by hand, you'd probably need years to sift through countless Harry Potter fanpages, personal sites of dudes in JNCOs and edgy atheist manifestos that even Richard Dawkins would find a bit much.
Therefore I decided to write a small shell script that would incrementally unzip parts of the Geocities archive, find all image files within the unzipped folders and then check their dimensions. Only files with a width of 88 and a height of 31 pixels would then get transferred into a new folder.

  1. Get a list of all 7z.001 files in the archive. (Archive Team use split 7zip archives for compression)
  2. Loop through the split archives and unpack them with 7zip
  3. Also extract the resulting .tar file
  4. Delete the .tar again (not needed anymore)
  5. Get a list of image files from the extracted folder
  6. Use ImageMagick's identify command to check for image dimensions
  7. If an image has 88x31 dimensions, move it to an output folder
  8. Delete the extracted folder
  9. Back to step 2 again, until finished
Duplicates were removed with fdupes. This program checks MD5sums and does byte by byte comparisons so it only detects exact matches. You'll probably encounter a few buttons that look the same to the human eye but are a tiny bit different on the byte level. I haven't found a good solution for this problem yet.

LINKS & FURTHER READING

This may be the single biggest collection of 88x31 buttons on the internet but it is certainly not the only one. Many people have collected these buttons for years, some old, some quite new because online subcultures like indieweb or smolweb have repopularised 88x31 as a means of exchanging links to other cool personal websites that defy the monotonous appearance and content of the corporate web.

The Cyber Vanguard's 88x31 collection (4540 buttons)
Yesterweb's 88x31 buttons(~1000 buttons)
Anlucas' collection (700+ buttons)
Neonaut's NeoCities buttons (4536 buttons)
Capstasher's very aesthetic collection(A LOT of buttons)
hekate2's 88x31 Button Maker
Sadgrl's 88x31 Button Maker

Not 88x31 but related links:


ARCHIVE TEAM
OoCities
neocities.org
One Terabyte of Kilobyte Age
GeoCities neighborhoods
>>>BACK TO 88x31 ARCHIVE<<<

hellnet.work's own 88x31 button