Mindenkilapja.hu

» see mindenkilapja.hu as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Free homepage services are the part of the early web I actually lived in, though never this one. Mindenkilapja.hu was Hungarian, and in those years I was in Turkey on a 33.6k modem putting pages on whatever local host would hand them out for nothing. Same product, different country, and every screen in it is legible to me without a word of Hungarian.

The name means everyone's page. On 20 February 2004 the address was still a splash screen with a hamarosan.gif on it, Hungarian for coming soon, under the title "mindenki lapja | 2004". The paragraph below it described a framework where a registered user could advertise themselves or publish their own pictures and media files, with a homepage finished inside a minute. It said it particularly wanted to support young talent, then immediately added that anyone of any age could use it.

By the time it had grown up it was the full Hungarian free-hosting package, with a blog and a gallery hanging off a single login, free, paid for by Adverticum ad zones down the side of every page. The meta tags on the front page carried a rating of Safe For Kids and an author field pointing at econtent.hu, which is the company that ran the whole thing.

~ the chronicle ~

~ what the captures show ~

The ArchiveTeam record says the service ran until August 2018. The captures are more specific than that. On 4 June 2018 the Wayback Machine pulled a 15,871-byte homepage, the real one, with the ad zones and the Facebook id still in the head. On 9 June it pulled 3,451 bytes. Somewhere in those five days the entire service was taken out and something else was put in its place.

The August date in the record is simply the last capture of the replacement, taken on the 14th, just before the domain started handing out redirects in September. It is an easy mistake to make, because the replacement kept the name, kept the branding, and kept offering registration to anybody who clicked.

~ the thin relaunch ~

What arrived was a single-page Bootstrap site, mobile-first, with a navigation bar whose four items all scrolled to anchors on the same page. It still said Mindenkilapja.hu across the top. It still said KÉSZÍTSD EL A SAJÁT WEBLAPOD NÉHÁNY KATTINTÁSSAL, make your own webpage in a few clicks, with Of course completely free in bold underneath. The Regisztráció and Bejelentkezés buttons both pointed at live URLs.

The one thing missing was the member sites. The old homepage had been a directory into other people's pages, which is the only reason a free host matters. The new one was a marketing page for a service with nothing behind it. That version held on until mid-August 2018, then began 301-ing, and the last capture of anything substantial at the address is from 2 April 2023.

~ the name now ~

mindenkilapja.hu answers 200 today, at 306 KB. It is a WordPress install running since December 2024, publishing Hungarian lifestyle articles under the tagline Minden egy kattintásra, everything one click away. Its own schema block gives a first publication date of 17 December 2024.

Fourteen years of a real free-hosting service, then a few months of a hollow landing page wearing its logo, and after a long gap a content farm with no connection to either. Anyone counting status codes would call the address healthy. Nobody who had a page there in 2009 would recognize a pixel of it.

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