9 ms·

Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

416 points by matthberg 10y ago

jmduke 10y ago
Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy that it exists. Geocities and Angelfire and all of those weird web sandboxes are where I first wrote code, and what led me to pursue software engineering as a career.
- whichdan 10y ago
  Same! Homestead and Geocities were just enough to introduce me to Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and a year or two later I ended up becoming a web standards nerd. Fast forward fifteen years and I'm managing other engineers now.
- SuzyM 10y ago
  I taught myself HTML from a children's book(!) and Geocities hosted my first amateur website; I miss it still. I liked that there was an option for hand-coding your HTML rather than use a website builder, an option most free hosts don't now have. I am very grateful for Neocities!
  - Fej 10y ago
    Same here... except it was (Free)webs. Back then, they let you code your own pages as long as you put a little banner that had their logo on it somewhere on each page. Don't know if they do anything like that anymore.
- krapp 10y ago
  Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming. I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.
  - simcop2387 10y ago
    Oh geez I forgot all about tripod doing that. That's one of the places I originally cut my teeth with perl. That and Matt's script archive (though I was quickly fixing or rewriting those as I learned)
  - nandhp 10y ago
    I just checked my old Tripod site -- it's still there, but the CGI appears to have broken: The proxy server could not handle the request GET /cgi-bin/hello.cgi. Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    I built a service specifically to be a CORS sql database and user management api backend for neocities last year. The example app was forum single page app. I pimped it here but it didn't get any traction. It was my "wouldn't it be cool if" from building geocities sites back in the day. I guess there are a lot of other avenues for learning to code nowadays.
- jneal 10y ago
  Same here. My first web page was on "expage" but I quickly ended up on Geocities and Angelfire for quite awhile. When I finally moved on to 'real' hosts I used Hypermart and Virtualave to host my Perl.
kyledrake 10y ago
Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github webhook deploys, etc.). We just finished migrating to SSL (for everything, including hosted sites). I've had to do some pretty crazy stuff to make the site work, some of which is not documented well and I think the HN crowd would find pretty interesting. For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap". I would love to share how to do that with people, there is approximately zero information online or in books on operating anycast networks. My new years resolution was to get better at writing about some of the crazy tech I've had to do for the site. If you're interested, there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to for our blog where it will be posted in the future: https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml Again, thanks go to HN. Site literally wouldn't exist without it, you were basically our seed investor. Feel free to ask me questions, I'll try to answer. That's something you're supposed to do with your investors, right?
- adrianm 10y ago
  I'm sure you've heard this a million times by now, but I first got into web development because of Geocities in the mid-90s as a very young kid. Looking back, it was almost certainly the gateway drug that led me down the path to where I am today. So it's nice to know that something like this still exists and might inspire the next generation of programmers.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Same here. HTML was my first language. I missed the creativity of the old web. Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress. I do work very intentionally on not living in the past, though. The epiphany that led me to Neocities was that creating your own weird static HTML site was not an anachronistic activity, but rather something that was simply too early for it's time. I think it has become relevant and modern because of the massive improvements to HTML/CSS/JS. The theory seems to be panning out: https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse
lawpoop 10y ago
let's create a crowd-sourced effort to migrate archived geocities sites to neocities.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Easter egg time: https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ Works for any Geocities neighborhoods. Jason Scott (@textfiles) gave me the idea when I was at the Internet Archive.
  - bisby 10y ago
    I love easter eggs in open source code. I was able to easily find this in the code and learned a bit about neocities and geocities URL formats in the process. I was expecting that neocities sites would have similar URLs to geocities (in the neocities.org/server/user/page format). This is a fun way of learning about stuff.
    - kyledrake 10y ago
      Unfortunately the way web security works these days, there is no concept of path origin security, so sites in the neocities.org domain would be able to execute XSS attacks and steal session cookies and whatnot. Subdomains (site.neocities.org) are considered a different origin, and that allows us to prevent attacks to the main site. It's not perfect, there have been attack vectors in the past (which have been mitigated by some security features, such as HttpOnly cookies). Path origin policies are being considered right now. They're currently being referred to as suborigins: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/ https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/ What I would really like to see is a CSP option for cookie access control, but unfortunately it appears to have been shelved for the moment: https://www.w3.org/TR/csp-cookies/ https://www.w3.org/TR/csp-cookies/ https://twitter.com/kyledrake/status/818931856238407680 https://twitter.com/kyledrake/status/818931856238407680
  - teddyh 10y ago
    Why not link to reocities.com instead?
tbirdz 10y ago
Kyle, thanks so much for all your hard work setting up Neocities! I think it's a wonderful thing you are doing. Also, since we're talking about neocities, here, does anyone have any cool neocities sites they know of and want to share? Just post a reply to this comment, so folks who want to have other neocities discussions can easily collapse all the links at once.
- xanamander 10y ago
  This Serial Experiments Lain fan site gets passed around a lot. Be careful, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. https://fauux.neocities.org/ https://fauux.neocities.org/
  - akavel 10y ago
    Note: [SEIZURE WARNING] I suppose, for those for whom it may apply -- the linked page has a weird moire-like fast-blinking pattern, epileptics be careful.
ausjke 10y ago
what is the key difference comparing to wordpress.com
- mi100hael 10y ago
  You can write your own site from scratch. Wordpress is an existing content-management web application.
- ausjke 10y ago
  why the down-vote, I'm indeed curious about the difference?
- marktangotango 10y ago
  There are a lot of differences. A Wordpress sites html is generally rendered serverside, by php code with access to plugins and a database. Wordpress can do things like post forms, run surveys, you can pretty much implement any web app you care to with Wordpress and plugins. It's a very mature platform. Neocities sites are static HTML, meaning once your files are uploaded,they don't change. Neocities doesn't do POST, there is no database backend or code running on the server. Now in 2017, CORS allows client side apps to do just about anything traditional web apps have done, without page tranistions, given an appropriate backend. The difference is that html rendered by javascript on the client typically isn't indexed by search engines, while html served from a domain are. That's one significant difference, there are others.
  - krackers 10y ago
    In that case is it fair to compare it to github pages?
    - marktangotango 10y ago
      Yes, and there are several other 'static' web site hosting platforms.
  - ausjke 10y ago
    Thanks. that helps a lot, though I don't quite get "CORS allows client side apps to do just about anything traditional web apps have done, without page tranistions, given an appropriate backend", thought CORS is just a secure measure.
partycoder 10y ago
I used Geocities. I think it still exists in Japan. Back then, HTML templates/generators were very mainstream. Nowadays that use case was largely replaced by what we now call blogs. Many of those websites were in fact proto-blogs. Later, as bandwidth increased, digital cameras became mainstream and processing power increased, photo sharing was added as common use case. Try downloading a 2 megapixel+ PNG with a dial-up connection... very slow. Now we take it was granted. Now in addition to blogs, you also have Google Sites, wikia, and countless others... including Wikipedia.
bredren 10y ago
The welcome page, including the UX on how card data entry works is really great. Taking notes.
cJ0th 10y ago
Thanks for this! I remember the first time Neocities was introduced to HN. Very happy to see it is still going strong!
steve918 10y ago
I really love Neocities. I have used it to host https://www.makersatwork.com/ https://www.makersatwork.com/ for some time and have donated to Neocities and participated in their Kickstarter campaign.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
Pulce 10y ago
I teach 65+ y.o. people to have a web page on the net, so I love your work! :)
dicroce 10y ago
I've always thought geocities could have been facebook. People just wanted a page to post pictures and share with their friends. Geocities could have automated something like that....
- pbhjpbhj 10y ago
  MySpace shows that it wasn't just about having a page to share images and stuff IMO. Geocities & MySpace had little consistency across pages. But Facebook won by starting off with trend-setters (college kids) and using network effect as it's foundation. In the UK FriendsReunited filled the "share pictures and info" hope too and briefly was pretty massive.
hoodoof 10y ago
What is the underlying architecture?
RUG3Y 10y ago
I've been on Neocities for a while and I really love it! It's refreshing.
Kapura 10y ago
I've used Neocities for something like two years now to host my game development portfolio and other miscellaneous docs. I've been super happy with the ease of creating and uploading content, and I recommend it whenever somebody technical is looking for a cheap static hosting option.
Apocryphon 10y ago
I wonder what the Yahoo! dismantling will do to all of the Geocities content. Hopefully they lay dormant in archive somewhere, clearly labelled.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  As I understand it, it's gone. They possess no archive, except for what was backed up by web archivers. I could be mistaken. I spent years trying to acquire what remains of Geocities, which is the domain itself, geocities.com. I got closer than you would expect, but was told it was being "used internally" so they couldn't divest of it. I was also told I wasn't the first person that inquired. As I understand it, geocities.com will go to Verizon (unless that falls apart), who will do god knows what with it. Right now it redirects to Aabaco Small Business, which I think is a spinoff that's not part of the deal. Aabaco curiously has an office in Beaverton, OR, a suburb of Portland, where I live. I've been meaning to drop by their office randomly with a jello mold or something and say hi. I really want to relaunch geocities.com. I'd love it if someone gave me the domain so I could do that, but I'm not holding my breath.
  - aidenn0 10y ago
    FWIW the e-mail address foo@geocities.com is an alias for foo@yahoo.com and I still have several accounts using that address.
avenoir 10y ago
Ah, the name brings back some memories. A long time ago, about 15 years in total, when hosting a PHP site was too expensive for a 15-year-old and free hosting usually came with ads there was a community on neopages.net which offered no cost ad-free PHP hosting. The only thing you had to do to get it was submit an entry on neopages forums containing a link to your current site along with a description of why you deserve a subdomain on neopages. You'd then get judged by hosted members and either get an account or try again. Neopages was the community of teenage geeks that got me hooked on PHP after I outgrew GeoCities. Curious if any of you guys know what i'm talking about or had a site hosted there? :) Some of you are likely in your early to mid 30s now.
rdiddly 10y ago
Neocities is a brilliant name on 3 levels: Obvious: rhymes with Geocities, and is one letter different from Geocities Less obvious: the prefix neo makes it a "new" Geocities Subtle, and my favorite: seemingly everyone on the web today is jacked into a Matrix of "walled gardens" where they are tended and farmed, and Neo is the name of a guy who undoes that shit.
jimnotgym 10y ago
I showed my 9yo this and now he has a site about minecraft. I showed my 14yo and now she is building a gallery for her manga. My other kid is away but he is the one who is really going to love it. I really like this site.

416 points by matthberg 10y ago

Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy that it exists. Geocities and Angelfire and all of those weird web sandboxes are where I first wrote code, and what led me to pursue software engineering as a career.

whichdan 10y ago
Same! Homestead and Geocities were just enough to introduce me to Frontpage and Dreamweaver, and a year or two later I ended up becoming a web standards nerd. Fast forward fifteen years and I'm managing other engineers now.
SuzyM 10y ago
I taught myself HTML from a children's book(!) and Geocities hosted my first amateur website; I miss it still. I liked that there was an option for hand-coding your HTML rather than use a website builder, an option most free hosts don't now have. I am very grateful for Neocities!
- Fej 10y ago
  Same here... except it was (Free)webs. Back then, they let you code your own pages as long as you put a little banner that had their logo on it somewhere on each page. Don't know if they do anything like that anymore.
krapp 10y ago
Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming. I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.
- simcop2387 10y ago
  Oh geez I forgot all about tripod doing that. That's one of the places I originally cut my teeth with perl. That and Matt's script archive (though I was quickly fixing or rewriting those as I learned)
- nandhp 10y ago
  I just checked my old Tripod site -- it's still there, but the CGI appears to have broken: The proxy server could not handle the request GET /cgi-bin/hello.cgi. Reason: Could not connect to remote machine: Connection refused
- marktangotango 10y ago
  I built a service specifically to be a CORS sql database and user management api backend for neocities last year. The example app was forum single page app. I pimped it here but it didn't get any traction. It was my "wouldn't it be cool if" from building geocities sites back in the day. I guess there are a lot of other avenues for learning to code nowadays.
jneal 10y ago
Same here. My first web page was on "expage" but I quickly ended up on Geocities and Angelfire for quite awhile. When I finally moved on to 'real' hosts I used Hypermart and Virtualave to host my Perl.

kyledrake 10y ago

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github webhook deploys, etc.). We just finished migrating to SSL (for everything, including hosted sites). I've had to do some pretty crazy stuff to make the site work, some of which is not documented well and I think the HN crowd would find pretty interesting. For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap". I would love to share how to do that with people, there is approximately zero information online or in books on operating anycast networks. My new years resolution was to get better at writing about some of the crazy tech I've had to do for the site. If you're interested, there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to for our blog where it will be posted in the future: https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml Again, thanks go to HN. Site literally wouldn't exist without it, you were basically our seed investor. Feel free to ask me questions, I'll try to answer. That's something you're supposed to do with your investors, right?

adrianm 10y ago
I'm sure you've heard this a million times by now, but I first got into web development because of Geocities in the mid-90s as a very young kid. Looking back, it was almost certainly the gateway drug that led me down the path to where I am today. So it's nice to know that something like this still exists and might inspire the next generation of programmers.
- kyledrake 10y ago
  Same here. HTML was my first language. I missed the creativity of the old web. Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress. I do work very intentionally on not living in the past, though. The epiphany that led me to Neocities was that creating your own weird static HTML site was not an anachronistic activity, but rather something that was simply too early for it's time. I think it has become relevant and modern because of the massive improvements to HTML/CSS/JS. The theory seems to be panning out: https://neocities.org/browse https://neocities.org/browse

lawpoop 10y ago

let's create a crowd-sourced effort to migrate archived geocities sites to neocities.

kyledrake 10y ago
Easter egg time: https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ Works for any Geocities neighborhoods. Jason Scott (@textfiles) gave me the idea when I was at the Internet Archive.
- bisby 10y ago
  I love easter eggs in open source code. I was able to easily find this in the code and learned a bit about neocities and geocities URL formats in the process. I was expecting that neocities sites would have similar URLs to geocities (in the neocities.org/server/user/page format). This is a fun way of learning about stuff.
  - kyledrake 10y ago
    Unfortunately the way web security works these days, there is no concept of path origin security, so sites in the neocities.org domain would be able to execute XSS attacks and steal session cookies and whatnot. Subdomains (site.neocities.org) are considered a different origin, and that allows us to prevent attacks to the main site. It's not perfect, there have been attack vectors in the past (which have been mitigated by some security features, such as HttpOnly cookies). Path origin policies are being considered right now. They're currently being referred to as suborigins: https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/ https://w3c.github.io/webappsec-suborigins/ What I would really like to see is a CSP option for cookie access control, but unfortunately it appears to have been shelved for the moment: https://www.w3.org/TR/csp-cookies/ https://www.w3.org/TR/csp-cookies/ https://twitter.com/kyledrake/status/818931856238407680 https://twitter.com/kyledrake/status/818931856238407680
- teddyh 10y ago
  Why not link to reocities.com instead?

tbirdz 10y ago

Kyle, thanks so much for all your hard work setting up Neocities! I think it's a wonderful thing you are doing. Also, since we're talking about neocities, here, does anyone have any cool neocities sites they know of and want to share? Just post a reply to this comment, so folks who want to have other neocities discussions can easily collapse all the links at once.

xanamander 10y ago
This Serial Experiments Lain fan site gets passed around a lot. Be careful, it's a bit of a rabbit hole. https://fauux.neocities.org/ https://fauux.neocities.org/
- akavel 10y ago
  Note: [SEIZURE WARNING] I suppose, for those for whom it may apply -- the linked page has a weird moire-like fast-blinking pattern, epileptics be careful.

ausjke 10y ago

what is the key difference comparing to wordpress.com

mi100hael 10y ago
You can write your own site from scratch. Wordpress is an existing content-management web application.
ausjke 10y ago
why the down-vote, I'm indeed curious about the difference?
marktangotango 10y ago
There are a lot of differences. A Wordpress sites html is generally rendered serverside, by php code with access to plugins and a database. Wordpress can do things like post forms, run surveys, you can pretty much implement any web app you care to with Wordpress and plugins. It's a very mature platform. Neocities sites are static HTML, meaning once your files are uploaded,they don't change. Neocities doesn't do POST, there is no database backend or code running on the server. Now in 2017, CORS allows client side apps to do just about anything traditional web apps have done, without page tranistions, given an appropriate backend. The difference is that html rendered by javascript on the client typically isn't indexed by search engines, while html served from a domain are. That's one significant difference, there are others.
- krackers 10y ago
  In that case is it fair to compare it to github pages?
  - marktangotango 10y ago
    Yes, and there are several other 'static' web site hosting platforms.
- ausjke 10y ago
  Thanks. that helps a lot, though I don't quite get "CORS allows client side apps to do just about anything traditional web apps have done, without page tranistions, given an appropriate backend", thought CORS is just a secure measure.

partycoder 10y ago

I used Geocities. I think it still exists in Japan. Back then, HTML templates/generators were very mainstream. Nowadays that use case was largely replaced by what we now call blogs. Many of those websites were in fact proto-blogs. Later, as bandwidth increased, digital cameras became mainstream and processing power increased, photo sharing was added as common use case. Try downloading a 2 megapixel+ PNG with a dial-up connection... very slow. Now we take it was granted. Now in addition to blogs, you also have Google Sites, wikia, and countless others... including Wikipedia.

bredren 10y ago

The welcome page, including the UX on how card data entry works is really great. Taking notes.

cJ0th 10y ago

Thanks for this! I remember the first time Neocities was introduced to HN. Very happy to see it is still going strong!

steve918 10y ago

I really love Neocities. I have used it to host https://www.makersatwork.com/ https://www.makersatwork.com/ for some time and have donated to Neocities and participated in their Kickstarter campaign.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

Pulce 10y ago

I teach 65+ y.o. people to have a web page on the net, so I love your work! :)

dicroce 10y ago

I've always thought geocities could have been facebook. People just wanted a page to post pictures and share with their friends. Geocities could have automated something like that....

pbhjpbhj 10y ago
MySpace shows that it wasn't just about having a page to share images and stuff IMO. Geocities & MySpace had little consistency across pages. But Facebook won by starting off with trend-setters (college kids) and using network effect as it's foundation. In the UK FriendsReunited filled the "share pictures and info" hope too and briefly was pretty massive.

hoodoof 10y ago

What is the underlying architecture?

RUG3Y 10y ago

I've been on Neocities for a while and I really love it! It's refreshing.

Kapura 10y ago

I've used Neocities for something like two years now to host my game development portfolio and other miscellaneous docs. I've been super happy with the ease of creating and uploading content, and I recommend it whenever somebody technical is looking for a cheap static hosting option.

Apocryphon 10y ago

I wonder what the Yahoo! dismantling will do to all of the Geocities content. Hopefully they lay dormant in archive somewhere, clearly labelled.

kyledrake 10y ago
As I understand it, it's gone. They possess no archive, except for what was backed up by web archivers. I could be mistaken. I spent years trying to acquire what remains of Geocities, which is the domain itself, geocities.com. I got closer than you would expect, but was told it was being "used internally" so they couldn't divest of it. I was also told I wasn't the first person that inquired. As I understand it, geocities.com will go to Verizon (unless that falls apart), who will do god knows what with it. Right now it redirects to Aabaco Small Business, which I think is a spinoff that's not part of the deal. Aabaco curiously has an office in Beaverton, OR, a suburb of Portland, where I live. I've been meaning to drop by their office randomly with a jello mold or something and say hi. I really want to relaunch geocities.com. I'd love it if someone gave me the domain so I could do that, but I'm not holding my breath.
- aidenn0 10y ago
  FWIW the e-mail address foo@geocities.com is an alias for foo@yahoo.com and I still have several accounts using that address.

avenoir 10y ago

Ah, the name brings back some memories. A long time ago, about 15 years in total, when hosting a PHP site was too expensive for a 15-year-old and free hosting usually came with ads there was a community on neopages.net which offered no cost ad-free PHP hosting. The only thing you had to do to get it was submit an entry on neopages forums containing a link to your current site along with a description of why you deserve a subdomain on neopages. You'd then get judged by hosted members and either get an account or try again. Neopages was the community of teenage geeks that got me hooked on PHP after I outgrew GeoCities. Curious if any of you guys know what i'm talking about or had a site hosted there? :) Some of you are likely in your early to mid 30s now.

rdiddly 10y ago

Neocities is a brilliant name on 3 levels: Obvious: rhymes with Geocities, and is one letter different from Geocities Less obvious: the prefix neo makes it a "new" Geocities Subtle, and my favorite: seemingly everyone on the web today is jacked into a Matrix of "walled gardens" where they are tended and farmed, and Neo is the name of a guy who undoes that shit.

jimnotgym 10y ago

I showed my 9yo this and now he has a site about minecraft. I showed my 14yo and now she is building a gallery for her manga. My other kid is away but he is the one who is really going to love it. I really like this site.