Shrines are more commonly known as fansites, the name under which the most content is written about them. The term “shrine” usually refers to a specific character or person, but with the dominance of Neocities the two terms have more or less blended together, and you’ll see shrines full of links rather than considering themselves their own source of truth, or a collection of eulogies to socks.
For all intents and purposes, an internet shrine is just a webpage crafted (usually from scratch) devoted to a specific thing that the author loves. Or hates. Many are retro or pay omage to the style of their topic material.
It’s possible that one of the most well-known ones (and one of the first I discovered) is sadgrl’s t.A.T.u. shrine, which I consider a great read and a good start to an expedition into many others. She describes shrines as webpages dedicated to specific topics, hobbies, or interests
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Shrines I either want to see you make or that I’ll make at some point in the future:
- Remi Wolf! (are you kidding me the style possibilities here!)
- Aground!
- Jungle
- ABBA
- the Kingdom series
- Electric Guest
Before clicking on any of these, note that Lighthouse is extremely cross with me for all of these given the fact that almost no compression is done and assets are linked multiple times for redundancy. Data charges may apply. With that said, even in all their uncompressed glory, all these pages are probably still less than a 16MB Apple Watch review.
LaPeer
My favorite super-indie artist, who stopped making music around 2018.
The only musician whose songs force me to visualize a setting if the one I’m in doesn’t correlate to its atmosphere.
cb.vu
FreeBSD 7.1-STABLE (CB.VU) #3 ---- Welcome to cb.vu ----
cb.vu was a fake terminal website that seemed to have been hosted beginning in 2006 and expiring in late 2021. During that time, almost nothing about it changed, other than the quote it would begin with (none after 2015).
There were an obscene amount of these quotes, though, so rather than reproduce them here, you can trawl through the archives yourself, which I consider more fun anyway.
I remember going to the site in my bookmarks sometime in 2022–2023 and finding that it was gone. I had later lost that bookmark, either by removing it at that time or by the inevitable loss of things like that.
In 2024, when composing this site, I remembered of the page, but as a regular web search proved futile, I asked Meta AI if it could generate a site that matched what I remembered about it.
It turned up blank.
About a week later I randomly recalled the domain name, and went straight to its archives.
This shrine is a reformat to HTML5 of the original that embeds and fixes all JavaScript and CSS in the document, sans a few URLs, either broken or for display only, that still point to archive.org.
There are a few links that, as far as I know, can’t be archived, or would be useless to: the site uses a Java applet for ssh and PHP scripts for fortune and ping.
Archiving the terminal page and unixtoolbox.xhtml, the book that Colin admits was the only reason that cb.vu existed at all, is about the best I can do.
Any kind of telemetry (MaxMind) or location grabbing has been commented out, and the IP replaced to 192.0.2.0. In the source, JavaScript lines whose first column is a comment were made by me to either remove default functionality or delimit functionality I patched in.
One of these “removals” was a line that read
if hostname === '' || hostname == 'cb.vu' || hostname == 'www.cb.vu' which is laughably rudimentary code to prevent the page from loading if it’s not on the original site.
The page as archived with inline scripting can’t even go in the 250KB club; it’s about ten thousand lines.
I wager that for the most part our protagonist Colin Barschel knew little more than a beginner would about the web. Most of the business logic is either a giant if statement to decide what command the user is running or a giant array of every line in each psuedofile, and the rest is third-party. I do forfeit that this could be just what the state of the web was in 2006, though.
Remember when I said a shrine could be something the author hates?
This is a Google homepage redesign in a handful of kilobytes, and looks better than the multi-megabyte crap that it currently is.
There is zero JavaScript. It’s done with a simple form.
To be realistic, this wasn’t necessary, and the new tab page of Chromium is a much more effective redesign.