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UpdateSofts.com

It has been such a long time but today, August 8th, 2012, I have just found out that a homepage which was designed by me years ago (circa 2007?) is still up and running here http://www.updatesofts.com/.

It is the homepage for UpdateSofts forums. A kinda underground one where I used to come to get warez in the early days. It was the largest one in Vietnam for quite a long time (in warez, probably the second largest one in general being below DDTH). But no more now I think, people are now a little bit better when it comes to software piracy, they will try to buy it when it's possible especially when many international software companies have resellers in Vietnam (namely Kaspersky, Microsoft, etc.) with a good pricing for the market. I remember the time when software and game store popped up everywhere. It's so easy for highschool boys to visit one of them on the way home, spent a few minutes reading the "NEW GAME" list and paid eight thousand VND (an equivalent of $0.5 at the time) to buy the game CD. So easy! Getting the operating system or utilities is basically the same, just get to the store, pick up some CDes: one for the Microsoft Windows XP SP3 Professional, one for Microsoft Office 2003 Professional, etc. (I feel bad for Microsoft now hehe). When internet access became better, people only need the OS disc, the rest can be downloaded from sites like UpdateSofts. Good days! I was the 338th member of the site. I think I joined the same month it lauched. Mostly because one of the site founder is my all time favourite people (ngocha85, please do not think it's a girl, he chose his wife's name as his username across almost every site I know).

Back to the homepage, looking back to the source code I'm glad I put a few credits to myself back then.

This is the second line in the source code



Not sure why it's here though. Probably because I put the HTML page up in my website so Mr. QAD can get it easily. Back in that days, I was "feelXtheXlife" in "The Life Corp" with my buddies in highschool. Good a picture that I took a long time ago here too, haha:


And this is taken from the metadata section of the HTML page:

content=Pon name=author>
content="© Pon" name=copyright>

Not bad I would say. I knew enough back then to use quotes with string like "© Pon" but skip them when it's possible. Quite smart eh!? But as I looked further into the mark up, it's clear that I used something like Microsoft Frontpage to create the page (all the tags are in UPPERCASE, perfect-but-inconsistent usage of quotes, generator as "MSHTML 6.00.5700.6" in the metatag). But it's still quite good of myself I think.

Talking about the CSS, I made the page not long after learning about a technique that create smooth border without images (back in that time, border-radius haven't existed yet, people have to use images to create them). The trick was using 3 level of containers and make them a few pixels smaller than each other so we have a quote-smooth border effect. In the HTML page, the main CSS selector is ".kutebox", so cute!

I have put the entire HTML page up here just in case the site decides to remove it in the future. I certainly do not hope so! http://files.daohoangson.com/public/www.updatesofts.com.html

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