# Where to get assets for xanders.page Verified live in August 2026. Sites in this scene do come and go, so if one is dead, the Wayback Machine usually still has it. **The one rule: download, do not hotlink.** Save the file into `img/` and point at your own copy. Hotlinking steals someone else's bandwidth and your site breaks the day they move the file. This was the etiquette in 1999 and it still is. --- ## 88x31 buttons The currency of the old web. Ordered by how useful they are to you. | Source | What it is | |---|---| | [THE 88x31 ARCHIVE](https://hellnet.work/8831/) | 31,119 unique buttons scraped from the GeoCities archives before it died in 2009. The big one. | | [The 88x31 GIF Collection](https://cyber.dabamos.de/88x31/) | About 4,500 classic buttons, GIF format, nicely browsable | | [A.N. Lucas's Collection](https://anlucas.neocities.org/88x31Buttons) | 700 or so, including the famous Netscape Now and IE badges | | [Yesterweb Buttons](https://yesterweb.org/graphics/buttons) | Community made and community shared | | [PixelProfile Archive](https://pixelprofile.github.io/88x31_archive.html) | Another solid browsable set | **Making your own:** [Sadgrl.online](https://sadgrl.online/) has a button maker plus a pile of other webmaster tools. Worth a browse generally, it is one of the central resources for this whole scene. You will want three or four of your own buttons for xanders.page, so other people can link you. Put them on a `pages/buttons.html` page with a "download, do not hotlink" note, exactly like the Skruffy64 page did. ### Dropping them in ```html whatever ``` Buttons are listed once, in `BUTTON_LINKS` at the top of `js/buttons.js`, and every view of them is built from that one table: the collection page, and My Buttons on Pages 98. This used to say the marquee list is written twice and both copies had to be updated. There is no marquee any more: it was taken off the front page, and `js/buttons.js` is no longer even loaded there. The CSS and the markup are both kept, commented, in case it comes back somewhere else. --- ## Animated GIFs and general old web graphics | Source | What it is | |---|---| | [GifCities](https://gifcities.org/) | Internet Archive's GeoCities GIF search engine. 4.5 million GIFs, 1.6 million unique. Got a semantic search upgrade in 2025 and you can filter by size. This is the motherlode. | | [Cinni.net](https://cinni.net/) | Neocities site with a large graphics and resources collection | | [Neocities gifs tag](https://neocities.org/browse?tag=gifs) | Browse other people's sites and see what they are using | GifCities is where your under-construction signs, spinning envelopes, dancing babies, flaming NEW banners and dividers come from. --- ## Frutiger Aero wallpapers | Source | What it is | |---|---| | [Frutiger Aero Archive](https://frutigeraeroarchive.org/) | 4000+ wallpapers, plus videos, icons and history. This is the site you screenshotted. Start here. | | [Windows originals section](https://frutigeraeroarchive.org/wallpapers/windows_original_files) | The actual Vista and 7 shipped wallpapers, original files | | [Graphics OEM section](https://frutigeraeroarchive.org/wallpapers/graphics) | The bubble-and-fish stock art that defines the look | | [frutiger-wallpapers.com](https://frutiger-wallpapers.com/) | Original PNG downloads | | [frutiger-aero.org](https://frutiger-aero.org/wallpapers) | 4K versions | ### What is actually in img/wallpaper, and how to get it back **This section is the disaster recovery plan, and it has to stay true.** `.gitignore` excludes `img/wallpaper/` and says out loud that losing it is "an afternoon of re-downloading from sources that are written down in ASSETS.md". That promise was not true while this section listed five sites and never said which one the files came from. 350 files, in 7 category folders, all originally 1920x1200 JPEGs: - `animals_and_bugs` - `art` - `celebrations` - `games` - `landscapes` - `nature` - `other` They came from the **Frutiger Aero Archive**, the first row of the table above. The category folders are mine, not the archive's: it does not sort them this way, so re-downloading means sorting again. Two generated folders sit alongside them and are NOT part of the collection: - `img/wallpaper/_thumbs/` is rebuilt by `python tools/thumbs.py` - `img/wallpaper-small/` is written by `python tools/shrinkwall.py --write`, the same 350 images at 1600px wide. 384MB becomes 76MB, which matters because the cycler swaps one in as a full page background every 45 seconds on a laptop from 2010. `js/manifest.js` lists every file by name, because a browser cannot read a directory over HTTP. Rebuild it with `python tools/manifest.py` after adding or removing anything. **Watch the contrast.** The glass panels are translucent, so a busy wallpaper shows straight through and text gets hard to read. That is the same trap the dark themes hit. If it happens, raise the alpha on `.well` and `.navlist a`. --- ## Icons The Frutiger Aero Archive has an icons section. Beyond that, search for Vista and Windows 7 icon packs, or extract them from a Vista ISO on archive.org. **This is done.** The sidebar uses real icons: twenty `` at 16x16, one per nav link, drawn from `img/icons/` by `tools/icons.py`. The gradient squares this paragraph used to describe are gone. ### The Windows 98 icons, in `img/icons98/` These are a **separate set that Pages 98 uses on its own**, and the two must not be mixed. `img/icons/` holds the Vista and Windows 7 icons: photographic, soft edged, drawn at 256px. `img/icons98/` holds 16x16 and 32x32 icons with a hard black outline and a fixed palette. Put an Aero icon on the 98 desktop and it reads as a screenshot of two different computers. They came from a **windows98-icons** pack, extracted from the shipped Windows 98 resource DLLs. The 36 files in `img/icons98/` were picked out of roughly 1,750 by hand and renamed to what they do here, so the names in the markup say `computer@32.png` rather than `computer_explorer-3.png`. The mapping, if you ever want to swap one: | here | in the pack | |---|---| | `computer` | `computer-3` / `computer-1` | | `mines` | `game_mine_1-0` / `game_mine_1-1` | | `notepad` | `notepad-1` / `notepad-0` | | `paint` | `paint_file-2` / `paint_file-0` | | `console` | `console_prompt-0` / `console_prompt-1` | | `web` | `entire_network_globe-2` / `entire_network_globe-1` | | `buttons` | `html-1` / `html-0` | | `gifs` | `image_old_gif-0` / `image_old_gif-1` | | `webring` | `world_star-0` / `world_star-1` | | `guestbook` | `address_book-0` / `address_book-1` | | `saver` | `display_properties-2` / `display_properties-0` | | `shutdown` | `shut_down_normal-0` / `shut_down_normal-1` | | `recycle` | `recycle_bin_empty-0` / `recycle_bin_empty-1` | | `warning` | `msg_warning-0` / `msg_warning-2` | | `gallery` | `camera-0` / `camera-1` | | `settings` | `settings_gear-0` / `settings_gear-1` | | `help` | `help_book_cool-0` / `help_book_cool-1` | The pack ships several variants of each icon: 4 bit and 8 bit colour at 16, 32 and 48 pixels. The ones taken are the 8 bit versions, which is what a 98 desktop actually showed once you were past the default 16 colour mode. **On the licensing:** these are Microsoft's original icon bitmaps. They are not Microsoft's to give away and they are not mine to relicense. They are here as a personal homage on a personal site, which is the same footing as every other piece of Windows iconography on the web, and it is worth knowing that is what it is rather than assuming a licence exists. If you ever wanted the site to be unambiguously clean, these would be the files to redraw. --- ## Fonts Aero used **Segoe UI**, which is licensed to Microsoft and not redistributable. Two honest options: - **Selawik**, Microsoft's own open source metric-compatible substitute for Segoe UI. Free, on GitHub. This is the right answer. - Leave the stack as it is. The CSS already falls back to Lucida Grande on Mac, which is the correct system font for that era anyway and looks right. ### The Windows 98 font `fonts/msw98ui-regular.woff` and `fonts/msw98ui-bold.woff` are **MS W98 UI**, a conversion of **MS Sans Serif**, the system UI face of Windows 3.1, 95, 98 and ME. Released free, credited to Microsoft for the original bitmaps, to [Lev Leontev](https://stackoverflow.com/a/54023769) for the conversion to an outline format, and to martyr for the corrections that made it render correctly at small sizes. It is declared in `css/win98.css` and applies only to Pages 98. It moved there from `css/desktop.css` so that a 98 window frame is lettered correctly on every page that draws one, which the terminal also does. Pages Web stays on Selawik, the correct face for a Frutiger Aero site. See the comment at the top of `css/desktop.css` for why that scoping needs a class rather than just setting the font on `body`: a universal selector beats an inherited value, so `body` alone does nothing. **woff2 is listed first**, and that is the right way round, though it took two goes to get there. The reasoning that put `woff` first was that Safari did not support woff2 until version 10 and the 2010 MacBook runs Safari 7, so the old format had to come first or that machine would get no font. That is wrong about how `src` works. A browser walks the list and takes the first entry whose `format()` it UNDERSTANDS, skipping the ones it does not: an unknown format is stepped over, not fatal. So Safari 7 passes the woff2 entry and takes the woff underneath it either way, and listing woff first only meant every modern browser fetched the larger file for nothing. 46KB against 81KB for the regular weight. ### The BIOS font, and its licence `fonts/vga-9x16.woff` is **Web437_IBM_VGA_9x16** from the [Ultimate Oldschool PC Font Pack](https://int10h.org/oldschool-pc-fonts/) by VileR. It is a remake of the actual 9x16 character ROM a VGA card drew text mode with, which is what every BIOS on every beige box was rendered in. **Licence: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0.** Copyright 2016 VileR. The full text is in `fonts/VGA-FONT-LICENSE.txt` and it must stay there. What that obliges you to do, plainly: credit VileR wherever the font is used, which this file does and the header of `css/boot.css` does. Serving a font on a web page is not making a derivative of it, so the share-alike half does not reach the rest of the site. If you ever MODIFY the font file, that modification has to be shared under the same licence. 9x16 rather than 8x16 because 9 is what VGA text mode used on screen: the ninth column is the gap the hardware inserted between cells, and it is why DOS box drawing characters join up into unbroken lines. For other pixel and Y2K display fonts, dafont.com. Check each licence, some are personal use only. ### The American Megatrends logo `img/ami-logo.svg` is the AMI wordmark, supplied by the site owner, recoloured so the black text is visible on a black POST screen. It is period set dressing on a fictional machine, in the same category as the Intel Boot Agent banner and the Windows names elsewhere in the boot chain. It does not claim to be American Megatrends and nothing on the site is offered as their product. **Do not use Google Fonts.** It is an extra network request, it did not exist in 2004, and the whole point of this site is that it loads instantly. --- ## Music and sound - [VGMusic](https://www.vgmusic.com/) for MIDI files - The Internet Archive has large MIDI and mod collections If you add autoplaying music, add a mute button in the same breath. Autoplay without one is the single most hated thing about the old web and modern browsers block it by default anyway. --- ## Webrings Worth joining once the site is up. It is how people will actually find you, and it is where you will collect most of your buttons. Search Neocities for active rings that match your interests. --- ## Suggested folder layout This was written as a suggestion. It is what is actually there now, with two folders the suggestion did not anticipate: ``` img/ buttons/ 6,781 collected 88x31s, 90 in linked/, 4 in mine/ gifs/ dividers, banners, blinkies, in ads/ and exo.pet/ wallpaper/ 350 originals at 1920x1200, the archive wallpaper-small/ the same 350 at 1600x1000, and what the site SERVES icons/ the Vista and Windows 7 set, 16 and 32px icons98/ the Windows 98 set, which must not be mixed with it cursors/ GENERATED by tools/cursors.py ``` There is no `site/` prefix: this repo root IS the web root, so `img/` is reachable at `/img/`. And there is no `art/` folder yet, which the gallery page says in as many words. ## A note on licensing Most GeoCities era GIFs are of genuinely unknown origin and the scene treats them as shared culture. That is the norm and nobody will mind. But if a site says "do not take these" or asks for credit, respect it. And keep your own art clearly separated from found graphics, so you always know what is yours.