20 Years Ago on AOL.com: Dec. 10, 1998 -- "You've Got Mail" Premiere and Dynamic New Headlines... Finally

December 10, 1998: We went with "You've Got Meg!" to promote the NYC premiere of You've Got Mail, the 2-hour product placement that I still haven't seen. The text promo also references Tomb Raider III downloads.

More importantly, we finally added a dynamic news headline onto the page! As I recall, the mechanism was a simple include file that pulled in the top headline from My News, automatically truncating it. I don't remember at this point if we sent people directly to the article or just to the My News main page.

Note that from here on out, you'll only see the news headline block on screenshots pofthe live page; the headline block didn't show up on the preview server.

Note that the page was still static; you wouldn't see a new headline unless you refreshed the page. (I don't remember if we had a meta-refresh on the page.) At the time I took this screenshot (10:05am ET), the top headline was "House Likely to Get Articles," referring to articles of impeachment for the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal:

[Series note: In the late 1990s, I programmed the content for the AOL.com home page, which relaunched with a new design on July 14, 1998. I printed screencaps and saved them. 20 years later, I'm scanning them in and posting them with a little commentary under the tag #20YearsAgoOnAOLcom.]