Pint of Ale: Ten years old!?
Mike has uncovered the precursors to Pint Of Ale, two websites he created ten years ago!
January, 1998. A 20 year old IT student in Sheffield called Mike made a new year resolution. The kind that only a 20 year old student with only 10 hours of lectures a week could make - to drink in 100 pubs before the year was out. This student (who’d never heard of real ale and liked nothing more than a cold Carling) would diligently record each pub in an Access database and then write the software to turn the pubs from the database into a website containing each review. This was 1998, when you browsed the net using Netscape, or the fast gaining Internet Explorer 4. When even the websites of large companies were single-column grey affairs peppered with animated men next to “under construction” signs. When nobody had heard of web accessibility and when if you had a 32K modem at home you were really cutting edge.
I was sorting through some old backup CDs tonight and I came across the original Pint Of Ale. In 1998 it was called Mike’s Pubs. Later that year, my “web developer” skills on the increase, it became Down The Pub. It was hosted on Fortune City and it even made an appearance in a 1999 issue of Internet magazine as one of the “top 100 home pages in the UK”!
Looking at these sites now, it’s hard to hide the embarrassment of some of the content, but I’ve uploaded them to this site in all their horrid orange glory:
Here are some of my favourite bits, very much tongue in cheek…
Star Pub? Or CRAP stamp?
The pubs that begin with B page has it all! Berlins Bar in Sheffield has received the official ‘CRAP’ stamp, yet the British Oak is an official ‘Star Pub’, complete with little icon. The pubs are categorised: Quiet, Night Out, Mix, Loud, Disco (!?), Old Man / Locals, Real Ale, Seaside, and my favourite, Campers!!
English? Factual? Or just drunken?
It seems I hadn’t learned how to use apostrophes by the time I was 21 (who says the education system is crap?) and my reviewing skills were, um, under developed:
- Situated opposite one of the worst nightclubs I’ve ever had the misfortune of going in, this could possibly be one of the worst pubs. Nah, I suppose it’s not that bad, but it isn’t in a very good condition and they really should put something in the empty Fighting Corner that was there when I was
- We ended up having one too many and Andy fell down a hole…
- I went here to Andy’s 21st birthday party. Look - that’s the only reason I went OK!? OK?
- I thought it was a bit pokey and ‘back-streety.’
- This place is the pits. It’s big and I regret the day Jez and I drove past and I said “That looks interesting” It was. In a I think I’m going to get beaten up now type of way. Nasty.
- The last pub on the Epic Leeds tour so my memory should be more clouded than any of the other pubs. I don’t think I liked it in here much. Sorry.
A redesign and an award
Looking at the Down the Pub home page, I was very prod to have been awarded Cool Citizen - I mean, wouldn’t you!? 
User comments
Beating the blog commenting craze by a few years, Down The Pub allowed users to add their own reviews, like this very intelligent one from Strena.
More ambitious
The ‘rebrand’ came with much more lofty goals. Whereas Mike’s Pubs was just Mike’s Pub Guide, Down The Pub used the subtitle, The Definitive Pub Guide! And with 160+ reviews, who could argue!?
Much more refined ratings
I’d obviously matured during the course of 1998, gone was the ‘CRAP’ rating. It was replaced with the far more mature:
- Star Pub
- PANTS
- Too Drunk!
It’s really made me laugh, looking through these two old websites. The first one is over ten years old and it’s amusing to see some of the things I wrote back then. I hope you’ll take a look and remember what the web was like back then and how a 20 year old student looked at the pubs he visited.
