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PinPics: 25 Years and Counting


TheTwins

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Since 2025 will be a year of celebrating the official 25 years of Disney Pins, we thought it'd be fun to put up this special forum board where we'll be adding regular posts to "look back" on different aspects and events in the Pin Trading community over the last two-and-a-half decades. And where better to start than by looking at the PinPics website! 

 

Thanks to the Wayback Machine, we can still view parts of the site as early as April 2000, just four months after PinPics first appeared on the World Wide Web. After all the months I've spent working on the upcoming website update, it's been particularly fun to go back in time to see what it all looked like in previous decades. So many things have changed online! Things that are less than basic today were "cutting edge" back then. 

 

Click on photos to enlarge.


APRIL 2000

Here's the oldest view of PinPics available on WM. There's no way to see inside the "Click to Enter", but I think we all get the simplicity of the design.  Thanks to Britt and Figgy's hard work back then, we're all still here enjoying ourselves today! 

2000-04.jpg

 


NOVEMBER 2000

Seven months later, PinPics underwent a total redesign and stepped up in the world with a simple monogram logo of their own! Here's a view from early December, complete with Thanksgiving Pooh theme.

 

2001-02 Logo.jpg

 

2000-12.jpg

 

In the new design here, take a look at the "Search Pins" page to see which attributes and origins were available twenty-four years ago. It's amazing how much this has changed, that's for sure!

 

2000-12 Search Page.jpg

 


APRIL 2001

The holiday theme changed for Valentine's Day 2001, but come April 1st (and it wasn't an April Fool's joke) an even better design was unveiled. This included the first official PinPics logo, featuring the site name on a roll of 35mm film. (That must show my age, because it looks totally normal!)

 

2001-07 Logo.jpg

 

The changing themes were still a thing, and this screenshot shows the site in July 2001 with a very Patriotic Eeyore. 

 

2001-07 4th of July Theme and Update.jpg

 

I was able to click around in here a bit, and the list of new features with this site design was particularly cool! It includes "a new option . . . added to the "My PinPics" section to allow you to edit your lists of owned pins, tradable pins, and wanted pins all on the same screen."

 

2001-07 New Features from April.jpg

 


 

SEPTEMBER 2001

Within a few months, the holiday theme was replaced with a generic pinky-mauve color, along with an animated GIF of the American flag (presumably since this was post 9-11).

 

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Here's a look at the "View Pins" page during this time.

 

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MARCH 2007

This site design stayed around 'til the first weeks of March 2007 when the main color changed to blue and the layout received a slight refresh by the updating of the text and fonts. The 35mm logo remained untouched.

 

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It's interesting to see the updated Search page from the same era.

N.B. Selections for non-Disney pins included Looney Tunes and Rainforest Cafe!

 

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MAY 2012

In the second week of May there were visible changes coming to PinPics for the first time in a long while. Britt and Figgy were moving on, though still owners, and had welcomed Anthony and Samantha Medina to the team -- as well as debuting what would become a new site logo on the homepage!

 

2012-05.jpg

 

A couple of months went by and an announcement about the "new" PinPics site was posted to the front page. The new look would be released in two stages and previewed at an event. In fact, it sounds an awful lot like the same things we're dealing with today. Times really haven't changed too much. :scoop:

 

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DECEMBER 2012

After a lot of work, a completely new design was released in December 2012, being the look that would remain in place for the following ten years!

 

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The pin listing pages themselves weren't updated right away, but I was able to get a look at one in the Wayback Machine that shows the old format. Let's just say that websites have come a long way since the early 2000s.

 

2012-12 Old Pin Page.jpeg

 


 

NOVEMBER 2013

Big changes arrived by the end of 2013, and the long-awaited redesign of the pin pages was released. This was the first time that the basic software running the background of the site had been updated since the original release.

 

2013-11 New Pin Page Design Whole.jpg

 


 

APRIL 2023

Sadly, the type of coding on the site affected the Wayback Machine from capturing a successful snapshot for ten years. (At least, I couldn't get one to load with anything more than a blank page or a long string of code. The site had really had minor changes from the views above until the redesign in released in March 2023. Here's the front page:

 

2023-04.jpg

 

The pin pages were the same as those in use currently, save for a few minor changes made to the code since.

 


 

November 2023

And there was one more update to the site's front page before it was moved to the current software and design. This shows an addition of "Under New Management" on the logo, along with new boxes featuring Scoop's Pin Post and some YouTube highlights (that doesn't seem to load in the WM).

 

2023-11 Last before Invision.jpg

 


 

 

NOVEMBER 2023

The front page was redesigned in November 2023, using the software that now runs the PinPics forum and other pages on the site. Once again, it's a multi-part upgrade and an all-new database is in store for 2025.

 

2024-12.jpeg

 

Wow! It's been twenty-five years and PinPics is still going strong. There have been three different owners over the years, scores and scores of volunteers, and thousands of users. Looking forward to 2025 and all the things in store for the Pin Trading community -- with lots of successful trades in store! :scoop:

 

~ Sarah

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