Star Hopper, a very important sparkle pony

Cizzy’s site — Collection pics, info, graphics, and adopts. The webmaster specialized in Swedish ponies. Copyright 1998. Still accessible.

Worlds Apart — Hosts a fanfic of the same title. Unsure about date of origin since update log has entries as recent as 2024. Still accessible.

Nethilia’s Stables — Documents customs, an unboxing, and The Minty Experiments (in which the webmaster disassembled a G3 Minty). Unsure about date of origin. Still accessible.

Silverfall’s Ponytopia — A reference for G3 collectors, active from 2003–2007. Includes an index of G3 figures and accessories by year and a news archive that documented each month’s new releases. The webmaster stopped updating in 2007 and chose to leave the site up as an archive. Still accessible.

AppleJack’s My Little Pony Page — Contains collection pictures, Most Wanted lists, and artwork from an MLP fan named Tarah. Some links are broken (such as those for a collaborative chain fanfic and the Map of Ponyland webring). Unsure about date of origin. Still accessible.

Map of Ponyland — Navigation page for members of the webring of the same name. Site created in October 1998. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

The Pony Playhouse — A wealth of pony-related resources and activities by Tapestry. The games and music player were unfortunately Flash-based, and the craft images and button graphics wouldn’t load for me, but Tapestry’s collection pictures and free image archive are intact. Earliest capture is from around December 2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

Ribbons and Rainbows — Commentary, customs, and coloring pages by Dava. The pages on fandom controversies and pony restoration tips are particularly interesting. Copyright 2000–2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

Color the 80s — Coloring book scans from classic 80s cartoons. The MLP, Moondreamers, Lady Lovely Locks, Jem, Popples, and Care Bears links work. The earliest capture is from October 1999. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

Moondancer’s Dream — Collections, art, pony indexes, opinion essays, and more all framed like a story. Narrative passages and artwork allow the reader to explore the world and ‘meet’ characters. Earliest captures are from 2000–2001. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

Lullabye Nursery — Provides animated adopts for other MLP sites. Earliest capture is from 1999, but the October 2000 captures have the most adopts still visible. Accessible via Wayback Machine.

Yes, each website was like a little island. When I first made my website Google did not exist. The best way to get "outside" traffic was to get your website on Yahoo, which at the time was a curated web directory. For example, it might have a category for Collectibles, then a subcategory for Toys, and finally a sub-sub-category for My Little Pony.

But like I said, this was a curated list. They wouldn't list any old website. So webrings and "links" pages were how people build bridges between those little islands.

What led to the decline of personal websites imo was the rise of easy to create forums like those hosted by Proboards. Not that message boards didn't exist before (in fact the MLP Trading Post, the oldest existing MLP site, is a message board created in the late 90s), but ProBoards etc made them easy for anyone to set up. The message board era did spark new ways to be creative, like RPG boards, so a lot of positive things came out of them. Some of the pony RPGs were quite serious and had a ton of lore and their own vernacular, like the End of The Dream board.

But I do have a special fondness for the Geocities days. Even the format of those websites made them feel like physical places; you chose a "neighborhood" based on your interests where your website "resided." My Geocities neighborhood was Shadowlands which was fantasy themed, and my sub neighborhood was Area51. It was also easier to be your own crazy self on them. After all, your website wasn't communal like a message board. It was all yours!

Some people did create ponysonas, and made customs of them too! The fanfic of this era was wonderful, and a big departure from FIM fanfiction, which is typically very grounded in canon. Even AUs like Fallout Equestria are just "what-ifs" of canon.

But the early era MLP fanfics would rarely be set in canon; pony collectors would look at their collection of childhood toys and imagine their own world, relationships, and characters for the ponies. In one story Glory might be the queen. In another you'd find Glory as a villainous outcast. In a third story the writer might have gender-flipped Glory and made him the boyfriend of the main character. Etc. A lot of MLP collectors were fans of fantasy literature and TV shows, and were eager to try their hand at making their own fantasy world.

Pony a Day: Bonus!

I’m sure it counts if you photograph the same pony multiple times, but I’m trying to do one pony a day so I can (slowly) photograph my entire collection, so we’ll call these bonus photos.

Next panel, the happy bunny is holding a blue pony doll and asks the droopy bunny, "Where's yours?" The droopy bunny glares with their arms crossed.

MLP x 1920s, The Grand Galloping 20s.

I suppose it’s been culturally decided that it’s an unnecessary step in the bedtime process. We’re busy bastards, aren’t we? Who makes their bed every morning, I mean, really?

Perhaps, also, our clothing is no longer of the material and methodology where you have to spend extra time/attention/tools on them. Pyjama cases may have had some benefit - extending the life of the pyjamas, or something. Perhaps it was more common in those days for mice to climb into your silk pyjamas, or they kept them from being attacked by dogs, or something. It’s possible that there are unspoken benefits to keeping your pyjamas in a stuffed toy, which previous generations knew instinctively and we have forgotten. Some people are like that, they maintain rituals and practices that don’t get written down, and so become arcana. My father-in-law owns special clothing maintenance tools such as shoe trees (which you place in your shoes every night at night) and trouser presses (in which you leave your worn-but-not-dirty trousers overnight so they are crisp in the morning). He irons his pocket handkerchiefs - why? so that they fold into a precise pocket shape, with the same fold pattern as plastic-wrapped disposable tissues: the optimised shape for pockets. You are not going to read in the literature about there being a reason for ironing pocket handkerchiefs. It is a habit that is not captured by history. You have to speak to a practitioner to even consider that there is a specific value in pocket handkerchief folding. Maybe we operate at a remove from the people who could have told us why they bothered with the idea and then stopped.

You can buy a selection of pyjama cases online, but with no explanation of why you’d want to, it’s hard to see how this helps. The only real thing i can see is that it’s cute and tidies the pyjamas up, but we’ve all decided that untidy pyjamas are a problem that doesn’t need solving.