A time machine for the forgotten internet — wander back into a random corner of the 1996-2010 web.
English · 中文
EdgeWander is a small, aesthetic web toy. You press a single button and it throws you into a random corner of the early internet — a GeoCities homepage, a 2001 forum thread, someone's long-silent LiveJournal, a 1999 Chinese portal. Every destination is a real capture pulled from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine.
The whole site is dressed up to match: scanlines, phosphor burn-in, flickering pixel fonts, a DIP-switch for language, a tiny crosshair cursor. It feels less like a website and more like a broken piece of hardware still glowing in the corner of a room.
Most of the pages this site sends you to were made by teenagers, amateurs, and strangers who are probably no longer online. They used blinking GIFs, visitor counters, webrings, guestbooks. Then the web got "professional" and all of that got paved over.
EdgeWander is half museum, half shrine: press the button, visit a ghost.
Two features lean into that feeling:
A guestbook. Click the rust-colored button on the home page, type your name (and a line, if you want), submit. Everyone who has ever done this is stored forever.
Every signature floats as a star in a dark phosphor sky. They drift, they occasionally glitch out from "bad signal," and they stabilize again. The more people sign, the denser the night.
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Bilingual, no reload. A tiny DIP-switch toggle in the top right flips every string on the site between English and 中文 — body copy, buttons, error messages, loading phases, modal, footer.
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Real visitor counter. Upstash Redis
INCRbacks a 7-digit pixel flap counter at the top of the home page. No analytics, no tracking — just one integer that ticks up when someone new shows up. -
The time machine is actually a race. Pressing WANDER fires six parallel CDX queries to the Internet Archive against random nostalgic domains. First one to come back wins, the rest are aborted. A cold CDX call from mainland China can take 15-50 seconds for a single domain — racing six hides the long tail and usually lands a result in 12-18 seconds.
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Zero images, anywhere. Every retro effect — scanlines, noise, beveled metal, the DIP switch, the cursor reticle, the manufacturer's nameplate in the footer — is CSS, SVG, and DOM. No textures, no pre-rendered sprites. First-load JS is about 140KB.
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Custom cursor. A pixel crosshair with a phosphor trail follows the mouse. Over interactive elements it turns green and snaps into a tighter "lock" state; mouse-down collapses it into a red shutter. Respects
prefers-reduced-motionand quietly disables itself on touch.
Live site: https://edge-wander.vercel.app/
Or run it locally — works without any env vars thanks to an in-memory Redis fallback. See SETUP.md for the full Upstash + Vercel walkthrough.
git clone https://github.com/comui520/edgewander.git
cd edgewander
npm install
npm run devThen open http://localhost:3000.
| Layer | What it is |
|---|---|
| Framework | Next.js 14 (App Router) |
| Runtime | Edge Runtime for all API routes |
| Language | TypeScript |
| Styling | Tailwind CSS + hand-written CSS for the CRT effects |
| Motion | Framer Motion |
| Fonts | Press Start 2P · VT323 (self-hosted via next/font) |
| Database | Upstash Redis (with a transparent in-memory fallback for local dev) |
| Archive source | Internet Archive CDX Server API |
| Deploy | Vercel |
Every retro visual effect is pure CSS/SVG — no image assets. The whole aesthetic is about 500 lines of CSS in src/app/globals.css.
This project is released under a source-available, non-commercial license.
- ✅ You may clone, read, fork, self-host, modify, and share.
- ✅ You may use it for personal, educational, or artistic purposes.
- ❌ You may not sell it, use it in a commercial product, or host it behind paid access.
See LICENSE for full terms. If you want to build something commercial on top of it, open an issue first and we'll talk.
Made by comui520 together with Claude. The real heroes are the Internet Archive and the countless anonymous people whose 1999 homepages are still accidentally findable today. Long may their visitor counters tick.