Side quest to a side quest, bringing back a museum of Queen’s Engineering history.
Craig Calvert and I shipped Legend of the Greasepole on CDs in 1998. The part of the CD not stuffed with the game, we filled with “The LegendWeb,” a tribute to Queen’s Engineering traditions. It included a ton of “making of” material about the Greasepole game. McKay Savage (also Sci ’99) was the hero who wrote up a “Legends and Traditions” section including a ton of cool historical photos.
The site was built in Microsoft FrontPage 98, and if that ever was a good idea, it certainly devolved over the past 25 years into the epitome of a hot mess.
I got 2 opinions from Gemini and Claude about how we might resurrect it, blended what I thought best of both, and then Claude and I worked together to resurrect it. By which I mean, Claude did all the heavy lifting and was tremendously patient as we figured out a cleaner taxonomy, and tried to copy the look and feel of the game, but online.
Why Bother
Migrating this was pure-play “someday maybe” activity I never would have actually found time for. 56 pages of nested frames, FrontPage metadata, and late-90s HTML. After resurrecting the game it felt like unfinished business and I hope this brings others some moments of nostalgic delight.
Workflow Notes / How We Did It
Claude migrated the site to 11ty, a modern static site generator. Then we did a taxonomy / optimization exercise together: 56 pages to 24, 4 levels of navigation to 2. The taxonomy was interesting and a good opportunity to get advice from 2 agents. Strong example of adding a “force multiplier” to something I’m meh at.
I need to learn to thread the needle between DIY and asking the agent to help. Occasionally I found myself asking it to copyedit when it was just as easy to update the 11ty .md myself.
I found some of my writing from 1999 about neural nets, genetic algorithms, and the AI architecture. It is cringey, but I’ll keep it as a time capsule. I’m old enough now to hear people speak with absolute confidence about eras I lived through and be… a little revisionist. So the 1999 writing stays intact.
Now I need Craig’s help to unify and enhance the design. But I’m 100% sure we can do it quickly.
Visit It
A 1998 CD-ROM tribute to Queen’s Engineering traditions, back from the dead.
P.S. A little Easter Egg is this Sci ’99 year crest, taken from a 1990s 3D render and added to a golden leather jacket by Nano Banana. Sci ’99!!
