CRAYON, the 1995 personalized news site, is back and says your 1990s password still works

CRAYON was “the web’s first personalized news service” when it launched in 1995, built by Jeff Boulter, then a Bucknell student. You picked sections, it assembled a front page, and the web in 1995 did not have much else that did that. (This is the company’s own history; the bios on its About page are self-published, so read them as the maker’s version.) Dave Maher, who co-founded it, says he “rebuilt CRAYON from the ground up in 2026.”

The new version does something most news sites avoid. It takes every outlet that covered the same event and puts them in one story, with each account listed in publication order and the first reporter marked. Then it ranks stories by three things: how many independent sources reported it, how fast the coverage came, and what readers vote. That ranking is explained in public on the relaunch page, and the page justifies it with a line I like: “a ranking you can’t audit is just an opinion with extra steps.” Whether the ranking is any good I can’t say yet. Showing your work is a start. Plenty of feeds don’t even do that much.

Then the part that made me look twice. The relaunch page says: “Your password from the 1990s still works. Sign in with the email and password you used then.” Your old section order, your motto and your zip-code weather carry over too. If you have no password or the email is dead, a “Claim your paper” page at /claim handles it. Maher’s line on this: “We kept everything. All of it, for thirty years.” That is either a lovely piece of archiving or a security audit waiting to happen, and I won’t pretend to know which. I haven’t signed in with a 1996 account, and I don’t have one. A claim like this is easy to make and only the people who used the site back then can check it.

A second thing I’d check if I were them: a site that keeps thirty years of logins is a site that keeps thirty years of old credentials. The relaunch page says passkeys and verified email are in, which is the right direction.

The “time capsule” is the piece I would use first. It rebuilds your original paper and marks each source “still publishing, 30 years on” or “lost to time.” Scrolling a list of 1990s news sources and seeing which ones are still alive is a small funeral and a small reunion at once. I’d do it for the same reason people look up their old AIM screen names.

Crowds get gamed, so the relaunch also describes how it plans to keep votes honest. New accounts vote at a reduced weight that grows with the account’s age. Comments open only after an account-age gate. Three reader reports hide a comment until a human reviews it. All of that is on the page, none of it tested by me, and it is the right list of things to have thought about before opening the doors.

One number doesn’t line up. The relaunch page says “More than half a million” people have used it, while the About page says “Hundreds of thousands.” Both are accurate if you squint, and neither is audited. I’d treat the user count as a marketing figure and judge the site by whether your own old paper shows up.

The user count has two answers.