15 ms·

Making the web fun again

706 points by kyledrake 13y ago

xbuzz 13y ago
Love it! It's Angelfire/GeoCities for devs. :D
- Afforess 13y ago
  infographic- you are dead. No idea why, your 5 comments seem pretty tame. Over-aggressive link filtering? Email the admins.
- onaclov2000 13y ago
  Glad at least one person mentioned Angelfire, I still have an account there, didn't really go anywhere with it in the last 10 years though. LOL
  - onaclov2000 13y ago
    Most of the site is dead, but I found this gem. That's me Jumping off a cliff. http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html
scottohara 13y ago
this has been a lot of fun to work on. I think it could be really important for letting new (and old) developers have a place to really test out coding and design.
lmm 13y ago
So does the author want this to be a place for quirky fun by people who aren't web experts, or for srs designers? That My Little Pony page they linked to might scale better than a LAMP stack, but I'll guarantee it took more expertise to create. People who don't know CSS but have interesting things to say are much better served by a service like, well, tumblr - which allows plenty of customization, but also allows you to simply write, and have it look reasonable, with the attention on your actual content. There's certainly value in a site that only serves static files and thus has low expenses, but to attract the geocities demographic I'd want some kind of friendly editing frontend - even github pages is a huge step forward from editing HTML by hand.
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  From reading it, it sounds like it's for both. GeoCities wasn't just about quirky fun, there was some actually decent websites. GeoCities wasn't about things being super friendly, it had a learning curve there. You had to sit down and read up on HTML and write it up and iterate on your failures, and maybe people don't want that anymore but at least someone is offering another way.
  - lmm 13y ago
    Back in the day it felt like most GeoCities sites were made with FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Do they even exist any more? Would those kind of static sites be acceptable on today's web?
    - nicholassmith 13y ago
      I think both do in various forms. I'm sure they'd be acceptable to the 90% of people who aren't involved in the tech scene, or are overly fussed on design.
    - satellitecat 13y ago
      I actually kind of miss static sites. These days everything seems to be about pumping out new content, like a newspaper, whereas static sites were more like books. They had chapters, an order to read, table of contents... you explored them, rather than just read through them backwards.
    - alan_cx 13y ago
      I know its like admitting that you wear your mums underwear, but I still like dreamweaver....
- tambourine_man 13y ago
  …and have it look reasonable… And boring. I guess that's the point he's trying to make, a place for experimentation.
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MarkHarmon 13y ago
The author does a great job of calling potential users to action. One of the cool things about the old myspace.com was the ability to customize a profile, it gave users a way to express themselves. I'm sure people made money off of "theme makers" and other web tools that otherwise would not have gained popularity. NeoCities could be the catalyst for a new wave of sites that aim to make it easier for users to personalize their website on NeoCities. Sometimes all it takes to revitalize an idea is to present in a slightly different way.
- minimaxir 13y ago
  Ironically, the "customization" of Myspace's wacky profiles with animated backgrounds and autoplaying music is what led people to the more streamlined Facebook, and we know what happened after that. My theory is that design is cyclical. We had GeoCities/MySpace, then Facebook/Twitter, and now we're back to Instagram/Snapchat for expressing creativity.
  - MarkHarmon 13y ago
    If improvements are made on each cycle then we should end up with something better than we had before. Iterative development on a grand scale. hehe.
alexsilver 13y ago
Has anyone heard of Google Sites? http://sites.google.com/ http://sites.google.com/
- mistermann 13y ago
  Informed people won't build on it for fear google will arbitrarily shut it down some day.
  - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
    That may be true for some definition of informed but I'm inclined to think that there are many informed people using gmail (and other Google services) and this fact leads away from your assumption.
    - siddboots 13y ago
      But it's perfectly reasonable to think that Google might drop a service like "Sites" if they aren't able to monetize it, or if they think that it competes with another of their services. It isn't currently reasonable to think that of gmail.
      - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
        Nor to think that of [voluntary contribution supported] neocities?
  - exuser 13y ago
    But my neocities website was arbitrarily shut down just a couple of hours ago. And I must wonder if it was the only one.
ebbv 13y ago
Yeah, no, Geocities might have had 0.01% worthwhile content but it was a vast wasteland of garbage. The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content. Really, any platform that enables everybody to contribute anything they want is going to sink to the lowest common denominator. The platform needs a built in way to highlight the best of it to have any worth whatsoever. Most Twitter feeds are unreadable garbage, the reason the platform is a success though is that it has built in ways to find, discover and follow the very best it has to offer. It's also got a very narrow use case that happens to coincide very well with the skills of comedians and comedy writers. Geocities' narrow use case only coincides with the skills and talents of artists, and they already have Deviantart and their own gallery websites. There's no compelling reason for them to use Geocities/Neocities as their platform. Best of luck but I'm skeptical this is going to ultimately be worthwhile.
- PavlovsCat 13y ago
  What happened to making a website for yourself, or to show to friends? What's so wrong with making a bad website rather than none?
  - ebbv 13y ago
    The argument here isn't between people being able to make websites or not. The point is "Is Geocities as a platform worth anything?" People can make websites themselves elsewhere.
    - sejje 13y ago
      And they can easily make great websites at geocities. I don't understand your objection to this service.
    - sanderjd 13y ago
      Not nearly so easily and cheaply as they once could on Geocities. It seems true to me that it is actually more difficult and expensive to put up a simple amateur static arbitrary page of HTML in 2013 than it was in 1999. Even ignoring idealism and nostalgia aside, there is clearly an unfilled niche here.
rickdale 13y ago
I used to love geocities growing up. Making fake billing error sites and spamming them out was a hobby of teenage me, and most importantly geocities taught me that you can view the source! to any website. I remember when I first learned about viewing the source to a website, I was so pumped to go through some actual working code and then recreate it in geocities. When I was twelve I figured out how to email forms to myself, which would have been much harder to execute without geocities.
- Trufa 13y ago
  I remember the first website I "hacked" (read inspected the html code), I was sure I was onto something...
joshuahedlund 13y ago
I'm excited about the potential here. Moore's law etc allows geocities-style websites to be maintained for significantly less cost than it did a decade ago. I hope the next generation has as much fun learning HTML as I did. Something else has changed besides the technology costs, though. I'm old enough to have used geocities, but not old enough to know or remember if it was truly "anonymous" and "uncensored." Was it? Regardless I wonder if Neocities will have a harder time maintaining those qualities in today's world.
rcavezza 13y ago
Thinking back, it's very possible that Geocities is a key reason I am a developer today.
- criswell 13y ago
  Definitely for me! I plugged away in Microsoft Notepad and did all this fun, interesting stuff locally in the browser but I never had a place to share it. It was getting kind of lame not being able to share it easily. Enter: Geocities.
grey-area 13y ago
Upvote for a great idea whose time has come around again. The people who used to try their hand at making their own website on geocities moved on to sites with less control like MySpace and then FaceBook, but something was lost along the way - the amateur spark that made the early web fun. Basic HTML and CSS is really quite simple and it'd be better if more people learned to use it. I know social sites add a different dimension to online sharing, but they also come with the illusion of privacy, intrusive adverts, online games, lame jokes, encouragement to comment on the meme of the day etc. Static html is a great choice because it dramatically cuts the requirements, and because the vast majority of homemade websites don't need to be dynamic, very rarely change, and even a beginner can open a basic html file and start editing. One little thing I think they could add are some visual controls for editing the look of your site on the fly - for example they could have a simple control panel to change basic attributes of the page like background colour, fonts, text sizes etc. and show you the CSS code that does it. That could write to the CSS as their current online-CMS type files do so that it could be edited later. Integrate that with webfonts and you could delivery some really beautiful styling tweaks without people even having to learn CSS and start to teach people to write simple web markup with online tutorials.
- kamjam 13y ago
  Even static HTML is no longer static, with people's knowledge of JavaScript increasing and great libraries like jQuery/YUI etc bringing more power to the masses. I mean, think about how dynamic you can make a site with the use of AJAX and feeding content from various content stores around the web. Very exciting as you say.
aridiculous 13y ago
As a designer (an imposer of order), this was surprisingly inspiring! In 2004, the trend was towards order and now feel (Ok, hoping?) the pendulum might be swinging a bit more towards chaotic freedom.
- TravisLS 13y ago
  Not a designer here, but this comment reminded me of the movie "Helvetica", which describes the same pendulum effect happening in font design over the years. Couldn't agree more that a swing the other way would be a great development.
adaml_623 13y ago
Might want to put in a little thought towards a (N)SFW mode...
TravisLS 13y ago
I LOVE this idea, and it's totally fine if it becomes "a vast wasteland of garbage" as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Technically, so is YouTube, but you probably don't look at all the garbage. You look at the good stuff that surfaces to the top. Occasionally, you stumble on a gem. It may have some struggles getting off the ground. After all, if you just want to put something on the internet, there are now many many ways to do that. But for many people, the first step beyond their Tumblr page is still a total mystery. I learned HTML and Javascript because when I was 14, I wanted a website for my comedy troupe (no longer active). I spent hours researching free web hosting and stumbled upon Geocities. That kicked off a life of programming and a love for the web that has never died. There are still people out there who would love to learn HTML and have some more control over what they put online. Bravo to Kyle for making it possible. Make a donation - even if you don't think you'll personally use it. It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something.
- ninetenel 13y ago
  > "a vast wasteland of garbage" Accurate description of hacker news right there :>
  - nollidge 13y ago
    Accurate description of literature, and art, and movies, and...
    - stephengillie 13y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
  - duiker101 13y ago
    So why are you here again?
    - scott_karana 13y ago
      For the gems, of course! :)
infographic- 13y ago
Wow look at that negativity. Geocites had awesome content and taught me HTML. (Ok frontpage and the web taught me) >The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content. No that makes sites that focus on design, ads and lots of crap rather than content. Today's "flat design" is just the web circa '96 all over again.
jiggy2011 13y ago
One of the most important parts of geocities functionality was allowing users to integrate their static HTML sites with the backend functionality provided by Yahoo. Stuff like guestbooks,hit counters and even chatrooms. From what I remember you dumped some magic tag in there which was parsed by the server which added a chunk of HTML that was dynamically generated. Does Neocities have something like this? You could do all sorts of fun things with this, like javascript games which allow site owners to create lobbies for their website. So something like: <Game gametype="bomberman" lobby="mylobbyname">
- ramayac 13y ago
  This: "You could do all sorts of fun things with this, like javascript games which allow site owners to create lobbies for their website.", this is a jackpot!
- nrivadeneira 13y ago
  Geocities was great before this happened. I was on Geocities before it was acquired by Yahoo and it was literally just static HTML sites. Guestbooks, hit counters, etc. were all just added into your HTML without special tags.
  - jiggy2011 13y ago
    How did you have stuff which relies on a server backend (like guestbooks) without having the server inject HTML somehow?
    - Lexarius 13y ago
      CGI-based images or pages. I don't believe GeoCities let users upload their own CGI scripts, but I believe they had a set of pre-defined CGI tools you could call. You could also set up things like guestbooks using an external service. It wasn't unusual to see "Guestbook provided by $FOO" at the bottom of guestbook pages. Kind of like Disqus, but before JavaScript.
      - 13y ago
awolden 13y ago
What is going to prevent this platform from becoming a massive spam fest or a link farm to other sites?
- leke 13y ago
  It will probably get blacklisted by Google like with the .co.cc domains.
  - chebucto 13y ago
    Easily solved with webrings and pages of links.
WayneDB 13y ago
See also (kind of): YTMND.com
ronilan 13y ago
Why http://neocities.org/blog http://neocities.org/blog and not http://blog.neocoties.org http://blog.neocoties.org ?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- nicholassmith 13y ago
  They use subdomains for the sites that are created so blog.neocities.org would be one possible domain used up.
- delluminatus 13y ago
  It looks like neocities uses subdomains to host user sites.[1] They probably don't want to pollute the subdomain "space" with their own content. They probably have some kind of automatic rewrite thing going on as well. Now I'm wondering how you do the auto-subdomain thing. Maybe have *.neocities.org A record to the same IP and then have the HTTP server parse the URL? [1] from the blog: http://mlpfim.neocities.org/ http://mlpfim.neocities.org/
- Bosence 13y ago
  http://blog.neocities.org/ http://blog.neocities.org/ points to it (incorrectly, but it tries), at least. I wonder if that's user created or not.
leke 13y ago
Neocities is just so handy. Like last night, I read the 2012 doomsday forum was going read only, and the search feature was being disabled. So I made a quick google custom search feature: http://2012forum.neocities.org/ http://2012forum.neocities.org/ and asked the maintainer to link it on the site.
digitalsushi 13y ago
I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago. I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame. The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting. During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug. And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this. Neophilia. And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.
- tdec 13y ago
  You're not. Happy seeking !
- alan_cx 13y ago
  Im 41, I might have been mucking around with the internet before you, and while a hell of a lot is fantastic about the internet now, yeah, Im kinda lost and homeless too. Know what you mean. Not to say the internet , or web is or has gone wrong, just kinda forgotten something very important, very vital. What Neocities is doing is good, and I hope it works, but I'm not sure how this addresses that our, er, alienation (not sure if that is the right word) though. I read that they want to, and that is good, but I don't see anything they offer that really does that. What if we had some sort of SubWeb (have I just invented that word? I really like the sound of it!!!) which you have to use the command line to access? :)
  - digitalsushi 13y ago
    I wanted to reply to you because you struck a chord with me - yes, emphatically I must agree that command line interfaces have forever been a sieve that collects a certain mentality. I don't want to label this subset of people because I will not do it correctly, but I believe it is assured that a predilection for CLI invokes precisely some sort of human artifact that is aligned with being a geek.
resu_nimda 13y ago
Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. It's funny, because I've always felt Facebook was a huge improvement over MySpace for exactly this reason. Now, reading this article, I thought "Wait a second, have I gotten it backwards? Crazy adventures do sound more fun than clinical suburbs." On the other hand, what people did with the old MySpace was actually pretty terrible, and maybe this is just tapping into GeoCities nostalgia. I don't know, the jury's still out. But, here's one issue: the freedom and low barrier to entry of GeoCities led to a lot of basic and poorly thought out designs. Many were not really "designed" at all, and that certainly led to some wacky surfing safaris. One reason that things have homogenized is that we've developed a much stronger expectation for how websites should look and act. But, these are complex to design and develop - well out of reach of the average individual - so we glom onto template services that provide a nice design and out-of-the-box functionality: comments, social, CMS, etc. And yeah, most sites on the respective platforms look relatively the same. In order to break that, there's going to be a necessary degradation in sophistication. Which is fine with me, I'm down for the punky DIY vibe. But, this quote worries me a little: And we have great CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and a new, even simpler one that Scott O'Hara is working on called Ground Floor, that makes web sites look pretty good even if the designer doesn't use or understand CSS at all. What's everyone's #1 criticism of Bootstrap websites? They all look the same. What happens if this turns into BootstrapCities?
- freehunter 13y ago
  To all of your points, I say: who cares? Who care if everyone uses Bootstrap? Who cares if no one does, and it all looks terrible? You know why Geocities was both popular and ugly? It wasn't all because it was 1995, it was partly because we were 15 years old and we were having fun experimenting with everything we could get our hands on. Your comment takes this site way too seriously. I'd like to read your critical analysis of the challenges faced by a civil engineer trying to make a feasible plumbing system in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit.
  - 13y ago
phantomb 13y ago
I'm not sure what this is trying to be. If it's supposed to get people who know nothing about web to create pages, it should really have some handrails and tutorials (or at least links to tutorials). As far as I can tell the new user creating their first page basically just gets a huge wall of xml in their face. If it's really just trying to be hosting for people who know what they're doing and that's it, well, I'm a cheap bastard and I host my static page on Dropbox for thousands of times the free storage. I guess here the ugly url would be slightly shorter?
thomasfl 13y ago
I strongly recommend reading the Ruby source code for NeoCities on Github https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web NeoCities uses Sinatra, Slim templates and Sequel for database queries and migrations. The code is a pure joy to read. Ruby is not the fastest language, but for an initial release of a minimum viable product it's perfect. If you decide take on investors you can pay someone else to rewrite the thing in java later.
tomw1808 13y ago
The idea is great. Really like it. But what I REALLY like is the browse-function with the little thumbnails of the hundreds of websites which look exactly the same crappy and shitty way as in the good old days. http://neocities.org/browse http://neocities.org/browse It just shows me that people still don't know nothing about design, they have no idea what it takes, how much time & knowledge and they are like spoiled kids from the idiot-save steps that facebook&co took to maintain a "good" (at least stable) design after putting some text in a textbox and press enter.
haddr 13y ago
I would appreciate if they could relax a bit a list of filetypes you can upload there. if you want to use some webfonts for your CSS you will be surprised that it's impossible to upload your own TTF file (freeware of course) :(
lettergram 13y ago
I like the idea and think it will be both an adventure and worth while, but it'll never be what it used to be. Here's why: My friends never really made there own websites or anything even close, but when myspace came along everyone suddenly became interested in the ability to customize their profile page. This alone created would be programmers out of my friends, figuring out how to manipulate each page to add interesting layouts via HTML, picking music to add to the page and figuring out how to embed pictures, videos, music, links, etc. The point is, that myspace was in many ways better than Facebook, and a transition from webpages to social networking. With myspace essentially gone, my friends have on multiple occasions told me they missed the ability to make themselves unique, but when I suggest them making their own webpage they call claim it too hard, costly, no way to network, etc. Perhaps neocities can make it, but to hit a larger market it'll need more social networking that allows the qualities of facebook chat (why ALL of my friends switched from myspace). If you could add in the social networking aspect, it would trump the need for facebook and open the door for a whole new realm of people.
- chriswarbo 13y ago
  I would claim that Neocities should specifically not add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site. I think the difficulty with doing that is that social network integration is almost exclusively focused on consumption. At the lowest end of the spectrum are the widgets containing information from within the network. That's a reasonable way to direct users from a Web site into a network (eg. a user visiting a newspaper's site may go and visit the newspaper's Facebook page) but it's useless at getting people from the network to go to a site. Nobody goes to Bob's Web site to check his Facebook status; they do it from within Facebook. The situations where this can work well are: 1) Consumer APIs with machine-readable results. The simplest mashup, data visualisation, interactive game, etc. can be made really interesting when it has real-world data to play with. As an example, one of my first programs was a balls-on-springs physics simulation, but I drove it with artist similarity data from last.fm (audioscrobbler at the time). 2) Producer APIs allow data to persist once the static page is closed. This could be as simple as posting a highscore from a game, all the way up to posting the result of a Web-based creative application. What programmer didn't throw together a "paint program" as soon as they found out how to get the mouse position and make a line on a canvas?
d23 13y ago
> When Yahoo shut down GeoCities, they did much more than delete a bunch of ... Limp Bizkit MIDI files. Ugh, guilty as charged.
d23 13y ago
Please tell us what you're doing to prevent all the data from being lost if Neocities goes down. I don't want this to turn into another.. well, Geocities.
- alan_cx 13y ago
  If it were me, nothing. Users should back up. If the admins back up too, well, that is a bonus.
  - d23 13y ago
    Absolutely disagree. The entire tragedy of GeoCities was that it is now inaccessible. On a personal level, of course you should have local backups. But for the sake of the project/culture at large, there needs to be a long-term plan.
goshx 13y ago
Thank you, I really missed websites like this: http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/ http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/ :D
- MrBra 13y ago
  is that a responsive webpage? :D
- frankcaron 13y ago
  Needs more <marquee>marquee</marquee>.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Not only is it NSFW, it's also NSFA (anywhere)
pearjuice 13y ago
Think about adding a social aspect. "Following" cities for example and having a feed with updates (a la Github) of the stuff you follow. This way you will add user-to-user interaction and will help you with surfacing good content.
- dkresge 13y ago
  I sincerely wish we had had the foresight to explore this further. Early "homesteaders" of GeoCities would select their URL based on a loose ontology of (neighbor)"hoods" and (sub)"burbs" (a fashion oriented page might be hosted at /FashionAvenue/Catwalk/1493). While this certainly made scaling the backend easy, it also created a sense of community (keeping an eye on your "neighbors", the mad rush to get a site with a hot address (/1000) when a new burb would open). The need to provide a simple path for all of Yahoo!'s users led to the now familiar "/username", but I'm not entirely certain it was for the better. ( I recall one conversation where we considered providing the ability to tag derelict homesteads with virtual spray paint )
SloughFeg 13y ago
I wish there was an easier way to browse than just "recently updated" sites. Some sort of search and criteria filter would make it a lot better.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  How about a web ring?
pbhjpbhj 13y ago
I don't get it. Geocities was right at the time, we have Wordpress (and yes MySpace and Tumblr and Google Sites and Apples site builder and Yahoo pages and Wix et cetera) and a million different blogging platforms now that fill most of what Geocities was (I had an account there). For the rest of it there are better implementations of things like photo sharing (and now video sharing) or sharing guitar tabs or artwork or music or ... >"It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something." // You can get a free domain name and run your own server with only a few clicks of the mouse now. So, like I said, I don't get where "neocities" fits in to the web of today.
- drakeandrews 13y ago
  Tumblr (assuming it survives as it exists now) fills the niche that geocities once did, except it slaps a nice UI on making updates and presents some minor restrictions on what you can do (you need to find somewhere to put some of your assets that can't really be hosted by tumblr themselves). Their theme editor even has (if my memory does not trick me, I'm at work and don't particularly want to log into my tumblr dashboard) a reasonable HTML editor. If all the eye melting gif backgrounds, autoplay music and late-90s knock off novelty cursors are anything to go by, a lot of tumblr is probably a more worthy descendant of geocities. There is certainly a shitton of content created on tumblr, even if you discount the value from aggregation. In addition, Neocities 10mb limitation hugely limits what you can do. Setting aside 1MB for CSS, JS and images and assuming you have a 85/15 content/markup split in your files, you get ~150k words. If you even dare adding images, the possibilities for archiving any content you produce are shot.
- Swannie 13y ago
  I agree, WiX is today's version of GeoCities... with Flash or HTML5 - desktop publishing for the web. It's full of interesting content - a lot of photos, unsurprisingly!
yannisp 13y ago
Anyone have a repo of the old gifs that were most common? I'm thinking of things like the under construction stickman or the rotating wordart welcome sign. I am a little sad that security of web browsers has gotten better. I remember offering people free cup holders by opening up their disk trays :-)
- jimbosis 13y ago
  This might help a little: http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/ http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022) Also http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/ http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/ (not exactly what you asked for, but... interesting that it's still up there) (found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862)
hippich 13y ago
I must say that today you can do quite complex apps using just JS. So this might take off in unexpected way easily.
sergiosgc 13y ago
You know what is the mega-feature that is missing? Git integration. Yeah, it's geek, I know, but it would be a phenomenal way to publish a website (edit, commit, push).
- dfasoebg 13y ago
  Try Heroku, it's basically the same but with git instead.
- l1ghtm4n 13y ago
  Even better than git for publishing, I like the "fork" concept as applied to the more general web. Forget copyright issues for a moment... if you could fork sites here it would allow for really fast site creation where you can build off others' creations.
  - zrail 13y ago
    Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki[1] is basically what you describe. To edit a wiki page you have to fork it into your own wiki, which I think automatically creates links and things. It's interesting but I haven't explored it nearly as much as I'm sure it deserves. [1]: http://wardcunningham.github.io http://wardcunningham.github.io
- mixmastamyk 13y ago
  Bitbucket can do this too. Name the repo: USERNAME.bitbucket.org
- simantel 13y ago
  I think GitHub pages serves that niche well. NeoCities seems like it's more built for the beginner, which is something I can't say of git.
- yesbabyyes 13y ago
  Something like GitHub Pages? http://pages.github.com/ http://pages.github.com/
- septnuits 13y ago
wyck 13y ago
Want a throwback, services that are pre-1993 still exists: http://sdf.org/ http://sdf.org/ , but a geocities retro revival is just a fad.
8ig8 13y ago
I think it's a shame that GeoCities is gone, and I totally respect this new effort, but isn't NeoCities one missed credit card payment away from the same fate? There's a lot of eggs in that basket.
robodale 13y ago
Yes, for the love of god do this.
skotzko 13y ago
A poetic manifesto. Well done.
sktrdie 13y ago
This is kind of ridiculous sorry. The Web is so interesting today because it moved forward from a read-only kind of system, which you seem to so happily advertise with this NeoCities website. And I totally disagree about Facebook. It has given me the ability to communicate very creatively with my friends. Much more than any read-only HTML site will ever dream of. Who cares about its boring interface, the power lies in the content and ability it has given me to easily share this content with my friends. How will NeoCities adress the challenges we already faced 10 years ago, that is that users will want to input data, and interact with these static sites, rather than just read them? Sure it's fun and creative to share static content... it's also fun and creative to share static images (flickr). But the medium of the Web has much more potential than simply being a repository of static resources.
- rocky1138 13y ago
  We can use Java applets for interactivity.
rocky1138 13y ago
Kyle, I love neocities. Not trying to toot my own horn but instead share the similar feeling we have. It's great to read exactly what I've been feeling: http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimited-internet/ http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unli... Thanks so much!
ChuckMcM 13y ago
Sadly, this won't make the web fun again. So two things that are important to note here, the first is that the 'fun' part of the web was learning new things and static HTML, even dressed up with HTML5 goodies, will be fun if you don't know these technologies but no more or less fun than doing the same thing on a Raspberry Pi or something similar. Its the 'learning' that is fun, and the web was more 'fun' when you were learning it because it was all new, and once you learned enough about it to see it for what it was, the parts that are less seemly start to dominate your vision and it feels less fun. Which brings us to the second part. The second part, and I don't have a good solution for this, is that folks will use this, and they will put good content on them and they will get page views and searches and what not. Then the 'link authority' of neocities will start to rise because, well it has a bunch of good content. Once it crosses a threshold (which is sadly pretty low) then a crap ton of SEO types will start creating pages on it to boost the organic rating of various web sites. And then Google will penalize neocities, and the good stuff will become unfindable (on Google at least) because Google won't index it, or they will pump down host rank to the point where it shows up on the results on page 3. Just prior to that people will build sites on it that do drive by malware injection using javascript. The preferred cloaking vector for that these days seems to be a script reference that points out to something that looks like jquery but really isn't. Then the owner is going to get a lot of threatening letters from lawyers who were told by people who got hijacked to "get the bastards who did this!" and the bad guys will be well cloaked but the neocities ownership will be just standing there, an easy target (for hassling at least, register your DMCA agent right now if you haven't already to avoid the copyright trolls). And at the end of the day the real reason the web isn't fun anymore will become apparent. There is too much money to be made by manipulating it, and so its full of bad actors who are chortling away while stealing billions of dollars from hapless 'lusers.'
- neilk 13y ago
  You're thinking like a programmer. Learning HTML is not fun at all, for the vast majority of people. It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are more ways to explain the varying quality of community sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains. You're also assuming that everybody wants to get search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What if the whole point is to make pages about your pet cat, just because? Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course this could fail utterly as the customers that Neocities wants probably don't distinguish between URLs and search queries.)
sinak 13y ago
Geocities was great, and I'm really glad Kyle is doing this. The very very first site I built (in junior high) is still live and kicking on freeservers: http://sina.8m.com/ http://sina.8m.com/ Certainly it falls in the "vast wasteland of garbage" category, but I'm glad it's still online.
erik14th 13y ago
That brought me sweet memories. Great idea <3
vanderZwan 13y ago
http://☁.neocities.org/ http://☁.neocities.org/ Hah! (where have I seen that demo before?)
lolsecurity 13y ago
Request URL: http://neocities.org/create http://neocities.org/create Request Method: POST Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Received Cookie: neocities: [REMOVED SESSION DATA] My create-account form and session cookie over HTTP? Not a fan. Grab a cert from startssl or similar!
agentultra 13y ago
I love little tools that let people explore their creativity. Geocities was certainly one of the earlier ones. But perhaps the OP is viewing it with rose-tinted glasses? Sure it exposed you to becoming a creator on the web but I think that was mostly a historical accident. We can only appreciate it in hindsight. It's not like Geocities was the best way to create and host web pages. Today I think webmaker.org is a step in the right direction. But for most people I think initiatives and projects like this will remain rather niche. If you're not technically inclined to learn new skills and technologies to get content on the web you don't have to. There are plenty of great, free tools for putting your content online and hosting it for free.
erickhill 13y ago
Complete tangent, but I love how the NeoCities ico image is a brutally rendered globe, probably in 256 colors. When you view it directly, it even rotates. Let the GIF march begin! Again! http://neocities.org/favicon.ico http://neocities.org/favicon.ico
frankcaron 13y ago
I don't think anything proves this point more than the "This is a webpage" post that hit 1 on HN a few days ago.
exuser 13y ago
My webpage and account were apparently deleted. No explanation or warning was given. Needless to say, I won't be using neocities again, nor can I recommend it to anyone I know.
- chris_mahan 13y ago
  Go get a debian vm for $15/yr at buyvm.net (happy customer, no other relations) and build your fancy site there.
  - exuser 13y ago
    Sure sure, but now I'm here, and I'm letting people know a very important thing: don't trust this guy with your website. You might end up spending hours working on it, building it up only to have it deleted because... actually you won't even know why, he won't let you know. Utter lack of respect for the users.
    - chris_mahan 13y ago
      I agree. that's lame. Also, I wonder how one goes about having one's own neocities site deleted.
mumbi 13y ago
Great idea. I've never been so bummed out as when I found out Geocities was dying.
networked 13y ago
Please add the ability to sort the websites by recency and by (weighted) hits when browsing through http://neocities.org/browse http://neocities.org/browse.
tommymarshall 13y ago
"They deleted the ability for people (both old and new to the web) to easily create web sites, and be in complete control of the content and presentation they provide to their audience." That makes no sense whatsoever. Does no one remember the extra JS/CSS to hide advertisements?
taopao 13y ago
I welcome a return to mass market creativity instead of paint-by-number UGC linked to real names.
drivingmenuts 13y ago
Somewhere, I have the code laying around to build a webring ...
michaelochurch 13y ago
Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. Rarely do we create things on these networks; Instead, we consume, and report on our consumption. This is a brilliant observation. Facebook started as a scrappy but fun college thing, and now it's a platform for people to brag about travel and the food they eat. To get anything decent out of humans, you have to create a context for excellence. Otherwise, it's Sturgeon's Law that sets in. That is a natural way of things, even when the technology is well-designed. This is similar to complaints about job sites or dating sites because "the sites are broken". No, the sites are fine. They do their jobs extremely well. It's people that are broken. The problem is that there's no money in creating a context for excellence, and the economic pressures on an organism like Facebook to mediocritize (remember that this often happens by default; no one explicitly decides to make their platform shitty) are just too powerful.
jlgaddis 13y ago
Would you like to sign my guestbook? http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html
dendory 13y ago
I would be interested to see how far people manage to stretch what can be done in 10megs. I bet it would surprise many.
IanCal 13y ago
Interesting idea. I wonder how you'll deal with the problems with anonymity though. You've no record of who signed up for anything, and creating a page is easy. What will you do when someone puts child porn up? What about any other 'illegal' content? Copyrighted content? Libellous content?
leoplct 13y ago
Your vision is great, but which is the difference to open a blog on wordpress.com?
sras 13y ago
http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/ http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/
poub 13y ago
What would make the web sexy again is to find a solution to allow "privacy"! Privacy IS cool.
boneheadmed 13y ago
It's interesting that in the 80s when home computers were new, you essentially started your computer at the command line and could code in something like Basic right away. A lot of non-technical people learned at least some programming, because of this. When GUIs came this faded out. A similar parallel in the 90s with the internet is that people learned HTML, because in many ways tools were limited and it was relatively easy to create a page that was respectable enough. Now that so many web pages are "covered" in CSS and/or created with higher level tools, it will be interesting to see if many non-technical people will be attracted to creating their own web pages. I hope so.
SkyMarshal 13y ago
There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. GeoCities infinite customizeability + HTML5 client-side web app capability may be just that. Excellent, good luck!
hmart 13y ago
The opposite path of Medium
kmonsen 13y ago
If there was an API for uploading files I would use this for a static blog :-)
ChrisNorstrom 13y ago
Idea: If neocities users let you put Google Adsense ads on their pages they'll get upgraded to 30mb for free. At least this way you can have some income. I love the idea and passion you have for this, your story and purpose, but as soon as I read "I'm paying for the servers out of pocket, which is tough for me because I currently don't have a large income," and "My goal is to pay for the site through donations" I just sighed. I've seen this so many times before. Founders who have a deep seeded fear or hatred of money or rich people. So much so that they've convinced themselves to go on a neurotic journey to "change the world" or "do something good for humanity" while refusing to be profitable or make money like the "evil greedy rich" that they despise. I hope you steer clear of that. I hope you find a way to make neocities profitable, sustainable, and I hope it brings in so much income that you can grow neocities and keep it free for decades while not having to worry about your mortgage or kid's college fund. BTW, my favorite is http://clock.neocities.org http://clock.neocities.org
- whiddershins 13y ago
  Deep seated
amerika 13y ago
This article made my day. The standardization/normalization of the web -- specifically, PageRank, Wikipedia, Facebook, and what's now totally recombinant "web design" -- has ruined the frontier aspect necessary for actual innovation.
yaix 13y ago
There are many such sites on the web where you can easily and for free create a web site with plain HTML, and many of them have been around for 10+ years and give you more than 10MB. What's the big deal here, appart from the name?
lloeki 13y ago
There are lots of things to be done, even with static content (from the server PoV). Right next to this entry stands "A dark room", which is entirely static server-side. Regarding the "airport kid" saddies, someone pointed out how he longed for the C64 days and put one up again. I see this as an opportunity. What can you achieve with 10M and HTML+JS? While the web seems to look like "old stuff" there's lots to be done with WebGL, canvas, websockets... All of this now available to everyone for free. No domain name to own, no DNS to set up, no VPS or RPi+FTTH to own, no hacking around to squat Heroku or GAE with static content. Think outside the box and show off your skills, folks. Push the envelope. That's the hacking spirit.
Tichy 13y ago
I miss neighborhoods, the sense of belonging...
muuck 13y ago
The 3D spinning globe favicon is a nice touch.
jaakl 13y ago
What does this really mean: "as long as it's not illegal to host it"? This site is globally accessible, but legal rules are local. If you host something which is illegal say in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (not that hard to do), and make it available over neocities also to Saudi Arabia, then is it illegal or not? Well, in practice for sure KSA will just block whole domain, and probably you don't care. I think whole youtube is still blocked in Turkey because of single bad video. Where are physically your servers? Also I'm afraid according to many countries you would be legally responsible to the content what you help to publish. So any single page with questionable content may end up badly for you. Geocities worked because these nasty legal problems did not come up yet, Internet was a marginal non-serious thing, and even if bad content was published then no-one noticed or reacted to it. Now a web is the mainstream media, and you may find out that technical hosting of some bytes is really smallest problem in the global publishing business. In order to follow all laws of all the countries where you operate (i.e. from where your site is accessible) you need to monitor the content, react to notifications etc.
serginho 13y ago
The website is AWFUL. Lato Regular font, green color. Web 2.0 is awful.
flyblackbox 13y ago
I can't wait for the visual editor!
mayanks 13y ago
wow!! This is crazy. Been sleeping on this idea for the past 3 months or so. But for my day job, I would have definitely taken a stab at it. kudos for starting this.
kodeater 13y ago
I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page. Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!
kodeater 13y ago
I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page. Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!
kodeater 13y ago
I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page. Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!
kodeater 13y ago
I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page. Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!
allnamestaken 13y ago
Maybe you should ban this asshole: http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
sasteven 13y ago
An important part of bringing people back to an interactive web is to do away with the 'browser' concept and bring back symmetrical web clients. I still actively use the SeaMonkey web browser, and a big part of the reason I do is it still has an integrated WYSIWYG HTML composer component. I have an 'edit' action item for any web page I visit, and cut-and-past capability between browser and composer windows. Hosting a website permanently is just a matter of getting an account on freeshell.org and setting up your ~/html directory to face the web. If you want a decent amount of space and the ability to use the PHP and MySQL backend, you can make a one time donation of ~30 dollars (can't remember the exact amount) for a lifetime upgrade.
celwell 13y ago
yes... limp bizkit MIDIs. I used to have Break Stuff on my neopets store.
renoirb 13y ago
This is so cool. Good idea, I am sure people will like it! <rant>I wished NeoCitites mentions to ignore W3Schools, mention W3Fools and the WebPlatform.org project as the starting point.</rant>

706 points by kyledrake 13y ago

xbuzz 13y ago

Love it! It's Angelfire/GeoCities for devs. :D

Afforess 13y ago
infographic- you are dead. No idea why, your 5 comments seem pretty tame. Over-aggressive link filtering? Email the admins.
onaclov2000 13y ago
Glad at least one person mentioned Angelfire, I still have an account there, didn't really go anywhere with it in the last 10 years though. LOL
- onaclov2000 13y ago
  Most of the site is dead, but I found this gem. That's me Jumping off a cliff. http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html http://www.angelfire.com/nd/tysonb/newmexico/index.html

scottohara 13y ago

this has been a lot of fun to work on. I think it could be really important for letting new (and old) developers have a place to really test out coding and design.

lmm 13y ago

So does the author want this to be a place for quirky fun by people who aren't web experts, or for srs designers? That My Little Pony page they linked to might scale better than a LAMP stack, but I'll guarantee it took more expertise to create. People who don't know CSS but have interesting things to say are much better served by a service like, well, tumblr - which allows plenty of customization, but also allows you to simply write, and have it look reasonable, with the attention on your actual content. There's certainly value in a site that only serves static files and thus has low expenses, but to attract the geocities demographic I'd want some kind of friendly editing frontend - even github pages is a huge step forward from editing HTML by hand.

nicholassmith 13y ago
From reading it, it sounds like it's for both. GeoCities wasn't just about quirky fun, there was some actually decent websites. GeoCities wasn't about things being super friendly, it had a learning curve there. You had to sit down and read up on HTML and write it up and iterate on your failures, and maybe people don't want that anymore but at least someone is offering another way.
- lmm 13y ago
  Back in the day it felt like most GeoCities sites were made with FrontPage or Dreamweaver. Do they even exist any more? Would those kind of static sites be acceptable on today's web?
  - nicholassmith 13y ago
    I think both do in various forms. I'm sure they'd be acceptable to the 90% of people who aren't involved in the tech scene, or are overly fussed on design.
  - satellitecat 13y ago
    I actually kind of miss static sites. These days everything seems to be about pumping out new content, like a newspaper, whereas static sites were more like books. They had chapters, an order to read, table of contents... you explored them, rather than just read through them backwards.
  - alan_cx 13y ago
    I know its like admitting that you wear your mums underwear, but I still like dreamweaver....
tambourine_man 13y ago
…and have it look reasonable… And boring. I guess that's the point he's trying to make, a place for experimentation.
- 13y ago

MarkHarmon 13y ago

The author does a great job of calling potential users to action. One of the cool things about the old myspace.com was the ability to customize a profile, it gave users a way to express themselves. I'm sure people made money off of "theme makers" and other web tools that otherwise would not have gained popularity. NeoCities could be the catalyst for a new wave of sites that aim to make it easier for users to personalize their website on NeoCities. Sometimes all it takes to revitalize an idea is to present in a slightly different way.

minimaxir 13y ago
Ironically, the "customization" of Myspace's wacky profiles with animated backgrounds and autoplaying music is what led people to the more streamlined Facebook, and we know what happened after that. My theory is that design is cyclical. We had GeoCities/MySpace, then Facebook/Twitter, and now we're back to Instagram/Snapchat for expressing creativity.
- MarkHarmon 13y ago
  If improvements are made on each cycle then we should end up with something better than we had before. Iterative development on a grand scale. hehe.

alexsilver 13y ago

Has anyone heard of Google Sites? http://sites.google.com/ http://sites.google.com/

mistermann 13y ago
Informed people won't build on it for fear google will arbitrarily shut it down some day.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  That may be true for some definition of informed but I'm inclined to think that there are many informed people using gmail (and other Google services) and this fact leads away from your assumption.
  - siddboots 13y ago
    But it's perfectly reasonable to think that Google might drop a service like "Sites" if they aren't able to monetize it, or if they think that it competes with another of their services. It isn't currently reasonable to think that of gmail.
    - pbhjpbhj 13y ago
      Nor to think that of [voluntary contribution supported] neocities?
- exuser 13y ago
  But my neocities website was arbitrarily shut down just a couple of hours ago. And I must wonder if it was the only one.

ebbv 13y ago

Yeah, no, Geocities might have had 0.01% worthwhile content but it was a vast wasteland of garbage. The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content. Really, any platform that enables everybody to contribute anything they want is going to sink to the lowest common denominator. The platform needs a built in way to highlight the best of it to have any worth whatsoever. Most Twitter feeds are unreadable garbage, the reason the platform is a success though is that it has built in ways to find, discover and follow the very best it has to offer. It's also got a very narrow use case that happens to coincide very well with the skills of comedians and comedy writers. Geocities' narrow use case only coincides with the skills and talents of artists, and they already have Deviantart and their own gallery websites. There's no compelling reason for them to use Geocities/Neocities as their platform. Best of luck but I'm skeptical this is going to ultimately be worthwhile.

PavlovsCat 13y ago
What happened to making a website for yourself, or to show to friends? What's so wrong with making a bad website rather than none?
- ebbv 13y ago
  The argument here isn't between people being able to make websites or not. The point is "Is Geocities as a platform worth anything?" People can make websites themselves elsewhere.
  - sejje 13y ago
    And they can easily make great websites at geocities. I don't understand your objection to this service.
  - sanderjd 13y ago
    Not nearly so easily and cheaply as they once could on Geocities. It seems true to me that it is actually more difficult and expensive to put up a simple amateur static arbitrary page of HTML in 2013 than it was in 1999. Even ignoring idealism and nostalgia aside, there is clearly an unfilled niche here.

rickdale 13y ago

I used to love geocities growing up. Making fake billing error sites and spamming them out was a hobby of teenage me, and most importantly geocities taught me that you can view the source! to any website. I remember when I first learned about viewing the source to a website, I was so pumped to go through some actual working code and then recreate it in geocities. When I was twelve I figured out how to email forms to myself, which would have been much harder to execute without geocities.

Trufa 13y ago
I remember the first website I "hacked" (read inspected the html code), I was sure I was onto something...

joshuahedlund 13y ago

I'm excited about the potential here. Moore's law etc allows geocities-style websites to be maintained for significantly less cost than it did a decade ago. I hope the next generation has as much fun learning HTML as I did. Something else has changed besides the technology costs, though. I'm old enough to have used geocities, but not old enough to know or remember if it was truly "anonymous" and "uncensored." Was it? Regardless I wonder if Neocities will have a harder time maintaining those qualities in today's world.

rcavezza 13y ago

Thinking back, it's very possible that Geocities is a key reason I am a developer today.

criswell 13y ago
Definitely for me! I plugged away in Microsoft Notepad and did all this fun, interesting stuff locally in the browser but I never had a place to share it. It was getting kind of lame not being able to share it easily. Enter: Geocities.

grey-area 13y ago

Upvote for a great idea whose time has come around again. The people who used to try their hand at making their own website on geocities moved on to sites with less control like MySpace and then FaceBook, but something was lost along the way - the amateur spark that made the early web fun. Basic HTML and CSS is really quite simple and it'd be better if more people learned to use it. I know social sites add a different dimension to online sharing, but they also come with the illusion of privacy, intrusive adverts, online games, lame jokes, encouragement to comment on the meme of the day etc. Static html is a great choice because it dramatically cuts the requirements, and because the vast majority of homemade websites don't need to be dynamic, very rarely change, and even a beginner can open a basic html file and start editing. One little thing I think they could add are some visual controls for editing the look of your site on the fly - for example they could have a simple control panel to change basic attributes of the page like background colour, fonts, text sizes etc. and show you the CSS code that does it. That could write to the CSS as their current online-CMS type files do so that it could be edited later. Integrate that with webfonts and you could delivery some really beautiful styling tweaks without people even having to learn CSS and start to teach people to write simple web markup with online tutorials.

kamjam 13y ago
Even static HTML is no longer static, with people's knowledge of JavaScript increasing and great libraries like jQuery/YUI etc bringing more power to the masses. I mean, think about how dynamic you can make a site with the use of AJAX and feeding content from various content stores around the web. Very exciting as you say.

aridiculous 13y ago

As a designer (an imposer of order), this was surprisingly inspiring! In 2004, the trend was towards order and now feel (Ok, hoping?) the pendulum might be swinging a bit more towards chaotic freedom.

TravisLS 13y ago
Not a designer here, but this comment reminded me of the movie "Helvetica", which describes the same pendulum effect happening in font design over the years. Couldn't agree more that a swing the other way would be a great development.

adaml_623 13y ago

Might want to put in a little thought towards a (N)SFW mode...

TravisLS 13y ago

I LOVE this idea, and it's totally fine if it becomes "a vast wasteland of garbage" as mentioned elsewhere in this thread. Technically, so is YouTube, but you probably don't look at all the garbage. You look at the good stuff that surfaces to the top. Occasionally, you stumble on a gem. It may have some struggles getting off the ground. After all, if you just want to put something on the internet, there are now many many ways to do that. But for many people, the first step beyond their Tumblr page is still a total mystery. I learned HTML and Javascript because when I was 14, I wanted a website for my comedy troupe (no longer active). I spent hours researching free web hosting and stumbled upon Geocities. That kicked off a life of programming and a love for the web that has never died. There are still people out there who would love to learn HTML and have some more control over what they put online. Bravo to Kyle for making it possible. Make a donation - even if you don't think you'll personally use it. It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something.

ninetenel 13y ago
> "a vast wasteland of garbage" Accurate description of hacker news right there :>
- nollidge 13y ago
  Accurate description of literature, and art, and movies, and...
  - stephengillie 13y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon's_Law
- duiker101 13y ago
  So why are you here again?
  - scott_karana 13y ago
    For the gems, of course! :)

infographic- 13y ago

Wow look at that negativity. Geocites had awesome content and taught me HTML. (Ok frontpage and the web taught me) >The reason being that's what a platform like Geocities enables; garbage. It empowers people who are willing to put in basically no effort to make a static page with no scripting. That's not a recipe for amazing content, that's a recipe for bottom barrel content. No that makes sites that focus on design, ads and lots of crap rather than content. Today's "flat design" is just the web circa '96 all over again.

jiggy2011 13y ago

One of the most important parts of geocities functionality was allowing users to integrate their static HTML sites with the backend functionality provided by Yahoo. Stuff like guestbooks,hit counters and even chatrooms. From what I remember you dumped some magic tag in there which was parsed by the server which added a chunk of HTML that was dynamically generated. Does Neocities have something like this? You could do all sorts of fun things with this, like javascript games which allow site owners to create lobbies for their website. So something like: <Game gametype="bomberman" lobby="mylobbyname">

ramayac 13y ago
This: "You could do all sorts of fun things with this, like javascript games which allow site owners to create lobbies for their website.", this is a jackpot!
nrivadeneira 13y ago
Geocities was great before this happened. I was on Geocities before it was acquired by Yahoo and it was literally just static HTML sites. Guestbooks, hit counters, etc. were all just added into your HTML without special tags.
- jiggy2011 13y ago
  How did you have stuff which relies on a server backend (like guestbooks) without having the server inject HTML somehow?
  - Lexarius 13y ago
    CGI-based images or pages. I don't believe GeoCities let users upload their own CGI scripts, but I believe they had a set of pre-defined CGI tools you could call. You could also set up things like guestbooks using an external service. It wasn't unusual to see "Guestbook provided by $FOO" at the bottom of guestbook pages. Kind of like Disqus, but before JavaScript.
    - 13y ago

awolden 13y ago

What is going to prevent this platform from becoming a massive spam fest or a link farm to other sites?

leke 13y ago
It will probably get blacklisted by Google like with the .co.cc domains.
- chebucto 13y ago
  Easily solved with webrings and pages of links.

WayneDB 13y ago

See also (kind of): YTMND.com

ronilan 13y ago

Why http://neocities.org/blog http://neocities.org/blog and not http://blog.neocoties.org http://blog.neocoties.org ?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
nicholassmith 13y ago
They use subdomains for the sites that are created so blog.neocities.org would be one possible domain used up.
delluminatus 13y ago
It looks like neocities uses subdomains to host user sites.[1] They probably don't want to pollute the subdomain "space" with their own content. They probably have some kind of automatic rewrite thing going on as well. Now I'm wondering how you do the auto-subdomain thing. Maybe have *.neocities.org A record to the same IP and then have the HTTP server parse the URL? [1] from the blog: http://mlpfim.neocities.org/ http://mlpfim.neocities.org/
Bosence 13y ago
http://blog.neocities.org/ http://blog.neocities.org/ points to it (incorrectly, but it tries), at least. I wonder if that's user created or not.

leke 13y ago

Neocities is just so handy. Like last night, I read the 2012 doomsday forum was going read only, and the search feature was being disabled. So I made a quick google custom search feature: http://2012forum.neocities.org/ http://2012forum.neocities.org/ and asked the maintainer to link it on the site.

digitalsushi 13y ago

I wanna share a thought I had about this a couple years ago. I'm 33, so I was 14 in 1994, the first time I got onto the web. It was as bare bones as it got. I think I beat the IMG tag by a few months, maybe. Anyways, don't hold me to facts here, I am just imparting a general time frame. The idea of the Internet, and the world wide web, was terribly abstract, new, confusing, delightful. It made wizards of us that could navigate it. As a burgeoning geek in desperate need of a personal identity, this digital playground was an infinite resource to push against. Each chance encounter with an online stranger a blank slate. It was exotic and alluring and exciting. During this era, a huge swath of us all were experiencing this at the same time. It was an overlap of our youth, the loss of innocence, and the explosion of this new universe. It was a hell of a drug. And we got addicted to the newness of it all. There's a word for this. Neophilia. And this concept, I feel, best describes the ennui I have felt for years now, the booming homogeny the web has turned into. The web has long since succeeded, but we were children of the laboratory. We lost our home and we've been trying, in vain, to find a new one ever since. I can't believe I am alone in this sensation.

tdec 13y ago
You're not. Happy seeking !
alan_cx 13y ago
Im 41, I might have been mucking around with the internet before you, and while a hell of a lot is fantastic about the internet now, yeah, Im kinda lost and homeless too. Know what you mean. Not to say the internet , or web is or has gone wrong, just kinda forgotten something very important, very vital. What Neocities is doing is good, and I hope it works, but I'm not sure how this addresses that our, er, alienation (not sure if that is the right word) though. I read that they want to, and that is good, but I don't see anything they offer that really does that. What if we had some sort of SubWeb (have I just invented that word? I really like the sound of it!!!) which you have to use the command line to access? :)
- digitalsushi 13y ago
  I wanted to reply to you because you struck a chord with me - yes, emphatically I must agree that command line interfaces have forever been a sieve that collects a certain mentality. I don't want to label this subset of people because I will not do it correctly, but I believe it is assured that a predilection for CLI invokes precisely some sort of human artifact that is aligned with being a geek.

resu_nimda 13y ago

Instead of having adventures into the great unknowns of the web, we instead now spend most of our time on social networks: boring, suburban gated communities, where everybody's "profile" looks exactly the same, and presents exactly the same content, in the same arrangement. It's funny, because I've always felt Facebook was a huge improvement over MySpace for exactly this reason. Now, reading this article, I thought "Wait a second, have I gotten it backwards? Crazy adventures do sound more fun than clinical suburbs." On the other hand, what people did with the old MySpace was actually pretty terrible, and maybe this is just tapping into GeoCities nostalgia. I don't know, the jury's still out. But, here's one issue: the freedom and low barrier to entry of GeoCities led to a lot of basic and poorly thought out designs. Many were not really "designed" at all, and that certainly led to some wacky surfing safaris. One reason that things have homogenized is that we've developed a much stronger expectation for how websites should look and act. But, these are complex to design and develop - well out of reach of the average individual - so we glom onto template services that provide a nice design and out-of-the-box functionality: comments, social, CMS, etc. And yeah, most sites on the respective platforms look relatively the same. In order to break that, there's going to be a necessary degradation in sophistication. Which is fine with me, I'm down for the punky DIY vibe. But, this quote worries me a little: And we have great CSS frameworks like Bootstrap and a new, even simpler one that Scott O'Hara is working on called Ground Floor, that makes web sites look pretty good even if the designer doesn't use or understand CSS at all. What's everyone's #1 criticism of Bootstrap websites? They all look the same. What happens if this turns into BootstrapCities?

freehunter 13y ago
To all of your points, I say: who cares? Who care if everyone uses Bootstrap? Who cares if no one does, and it all looks terrible? You know why Geocities was both popular and ugly? It wasn't all because it was 1995, it was partly because we were 15 years old and we were having fun experimenting with everything we could get our hands on. Your comment takes this site way too seriously. I'd like to read your critical analysis of the challenges faced by a civil engineer trying to make a feasible plumbing system in a Chuck E Cheese ball pit.
- 13y ago

phantomb 13y ago

I'm not sure what this is trying to be. If it's supposed to get people who know nothing about web to create pages, it should really have some handrails and tutorials (or at least links to tutorials). As far as I can tell the new user creating their first page basically just gets a huge wall of xml in their face. If it's really just trying to be hosting for people who know what they're doing and that's it, well, I'm a cheap bastard and I host my static page on Dropbox for thousands of times the free storage. I guess here the ugly url would be slightly shorter?

thomasfl 13y ago

I strongly recommend reading the Ruby source code for NeoCities on Github https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web https://github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web NeoCities uses Sinatra, Slim templates and Sequel for database queries and migrations. The code is a pure joy to read. Ruby is not the fastest language, but for an initial release of a minimum viable product it's perfect. If you decide take on investors you can pay someone else to rewrite the thing in java later.

tomw1808 13y ago

The idea is great. Really like it. But what I REALLY like is the browse-function with the little thumbnails of the hundreds of websites which look exactly the same crappy and shitty way as in the good old days. http://neocities.org/browse http://neocities.org/browse It just shows me that people still don't know nothing about design, they have no idea what it takes, how much time & knowledge and they are like spoiled kids from the idiot-save steps that facebook&co took to maintain a "good" (at least stable) design after putting some text in a textbox and press enter.

haddr 13y ago

I would appreciate if they could relax a bit a list of filetypes you can upload there. if you want to use some webfonts for your CSS you will be surprised that it's impossible to upload your own TTF file (freeware of course) :(

lettergram 13y ago

I like the idea and think it will be both an adventure and worth while, but it'll never be what it used to be. Here's why: My friends never really made there own websites or anything even close, but when myspace came along everyone suddenly became interested in the ability to customize their profile page. This alone created would be programmers out of my friends, figuring out how to manipulate each page to add interesting layouts via HTML, picking music to add to the page and figuring out how to embed pictures, videos, music, links, etc. The point is, that myspace was in many ways better than Facebook, and a transition from webpages to social networking. With myspace essentially gone, my friends have on multiple occasions told me they missed the ability to make themselves unique, but when I suggest them making their own webpage they call claim it too hard, costly, no way to network, etc. Perhaps neocities can make it, but to hit a larger market it'll need more social networking that allows the qualities of facebook chat (why ALL of my friends switched from myspace). If you could add in the social networking aspect, it would trump the need for facebook and open the door for a whole new realm of people.

chriswarbo 13y ago
I would claim that Neocities should specifically not add social networking aspects. If someone wants social features on their site then they can copy/paste snippets of HTML/CSS/Javascript into the static site. I think the difficulty with doing that is that social network integration is almost exclusively focused on consumption. At the lowest end of the spectrum are the widgets containing information from within the network. That's a reasonable way to direct users from a Web site into a network (eg. a user visiting a newspaper's site may go and visit the newspaper's Facebook page) but it's useless at getting people from the network to go to a site. Nobody goes to Bob's Web site to check his Facebook status; they do it from within Facebook. The situations where this can work well are: 1) Consumer APIs with machine-readable results. The simplest mashup, data visualisation, interactive game, etc. can be made really interesting when it has real-world data to play with. As an example, one of my first programs was a balls-on-springs physics simulation, but I drove it with artist similarity data from last.fm (audioscrobbler at the time). 2) Producer APIs allow data to persist once the static page is closed. This could be as simple as posting a highscore from a game, all the way up to posting the result of a Web-based creative application. What programmer didn't throw together a "paint program" as soon as they found out how to get the mouse position and make a line on a canvas?

d23 13y ago

> When Yahoo shut down GeoCities, they did much more than delete a bunch of ... Limp Bizkit MIDI files. Ugh, guilty as charged.

d23 13y ago

Please tell us what you're doing to prevent all the data from being lost if Neocities goes down. I don't want this to turn into another.. well, Geocities.

alan_cx 13y ago
If it were me, nothing. Users should back up. If the admins back up too, well, that is a bonus.
- d23 13y ago
  Absolutely disagree. The entire tragedy of GeoCities was that it is now inaccessible. On a personal level, of course you should have local backups. But for the sake of the project/culture at large, there needs to be a long-term plan.

goshx 13y ago

Thank you, I really missed websites like this: http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/ http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/ :D

MrBra 13y ago
is that a responsive webpage? :D
frankcaron 13y ago
Needs more <marquee>marquee</marquee>.
chris_mahan 13y ago
Not only is it NSFW, it's also NSFA (anywhere)

pearjuice 13y ago

Think about adding a social aspect. "Following" cities for example and having a feed with updates (a la Github) of the stuff you follow. This way you will add user-to-user interaction and will help you with surfacing good content.

dkresge 13y ago
I sincerely wish we had had the foresight to explore this further. Early "homesteaders" of GeoCities would select their URL based on a loose ontology of (neighbor)"hoods" and (sub)"burbs" (a fashion oriented page might be hosted at /FashionAvenue/Catwalk/1493). While this certainly made scaling the backend easy, it also created a sense of community (keeping an eye on your "neighbors", the mad rush to get a site with a hot address (/1000) when a new burb would open). The need to provide a simple path for all of Yahoo!'s users led to the now familiar "/username", but I'm not entirely certain it was for the better. ( I recall one conversation where we considered providing the ability to tag derelict homesteads with virtual spray paint )

SloughFeg 13y ago

I wish there was an easier way to browse than just "recently updated" sites. Some sort of search and criteria filter would make it a lot better.

rocky1138 13y ago
How about a web ring?

pbhjpbhj 13y ago

I don't get it. Geocities was right at the time, we have Wordpress (and yes MySpace and Tumblr and Google Sites and Apples site builder and Yahoo pages and Wix et cetera) and a million different blogging platforms now that fill most of what Geocities was (I had an account there). For the rest of it there are better implementations of things like photo sharing (and now video sharing) or sharing guitar tabs or artwork or music or ... >"It's worth it if it inspires even one kid to start building something." // You can get a free domain name and run your own server with only a few clicks of the mouse now. So, like I said, I don't get where "neocities" fits in to the web of today.

drakeandrews 13y ago
Tumblr (assuming it survives as it exists now) fills the niche that geocities once did, except it slaps a nice UI on making updates and presents some minor restrictions on what you can do (you need to find somewhere to put some of your assets that can't really be hosted by tumblr themselves). Their theme editor even has (if my memory does not trick me, I'm at work and don't particularly want to log into my tumblr dashboard) a reasonable HTML editor. If all the eye melting gif backgrounds, autoplay music and late-90s knock off novelty cursors are anything to go by, a lot of tumblr is probably a more worthy descendant of geocities. There is certainly a shitton of content created on tumblr, even if you discount the value from aggregation. In addition, Neocities 10mb limitation hugely limits what you can do. Setting aside 1MB for CSS, JS and images and assuming you have a 85/15 content/markup split in your files, you get ~150k words. If you even dare adding images, the possibilities for archiving any content you produce are shot.
Swannie 13y ago
I agree, WiX is today's version of GeoCities... with Flash or HTML5 - desktop publishing for the web. It's full of interesting content - a lot of photos, unsurprisingly!

yannisp 13y ago

Anyone have a repo of the old gifs that were most common? I'm thinking of things like the under construction stickman or the rotating wordart welcome sign. I am a little sad that security of web browsers has gotten better. I remember offering people free cup holders by opening up their disk trays :-)

jimbosis 13y ago
This might help a little: http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/ http://divshot.github.io/geo-bootstrap/ (via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5508061 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5474022) Also http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/ http://www.geocities.com/clipart/pbi/backgrounds/ (not exactly what you asked for, but... interesting that it's still up there) (found here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5919862)

hippich 13y ago

I must say that today you can do quite complex apps using just JS. So this might take off in unexpected way easily.

sergiosgc 13y ago

You know what is the mega-feature that is missing? Git integration. Yeah, it's geek, I know, but it would be a phenomenal way to publish a website (edit, commit, push).

dfasoebg 13y ago
Try Heroku, it's basically the same but with git instead.
l1ghtm4n 13y ago
Even better than git for publishing, I like the "fork" concept as applied to the more general web. Forget copyright issues for a moment... if you could fork sites here it would allow for really fast site creation where you can build off others' creations.
- zrail 13y ago
  Ward Cunningham's Smallest Federated Wiki[1] is basically what you describe. To edit a wiki page you have to fork it into your own wiki, which I think automatically creates links and things. It's interesting but I haven't explored it nearly as much as I'm sure it deserves. [1]: http://wardcunningham.github.io http://wardcunningham.github.io
mixmastamyk 13y ago
Bitbucket can do this too. Name the repo: USERNAME.bitbucket.org
simantel 13y ago
I think GitHub pages serves that niche well. NeoCities seems like it's more built for the beginner, which is something I can't say of git.
yesbabyyes 13y ago
Something like GitHub Pages? http://pages.github.com/ http://pages.github.com/
septnuits 13y ago

wyck 13y ago

Want a throwback, services that are pre-1993 still exists: http://sdf.org/ http://sdf.org/ , but a geocities retro revival is just a fad.

8ig8 13y ago

I think it's a shame that GeoCities is gone, and I totally respect this new effort, but isn't NeoCities one missed credit card payment away from the same fate? There's a lot of eggs in that basket.

robodale 13y ago

Yes, for the love of god do this.

skotzko 13y ago

A poetic manifesto. Well done.

sktrdie 13y ago

This is kind of ridiculous sorry. The Web is so interesting today because it moved forward from a read-only kind of system, which you seem to so happily advertise with this NeoCities website. And I totally disagree about Facebook. It has given me the ability to communicate very creatively with my friends. Much more than any read-only HTML site will ever dream of. Who cares about its boring interface, the power lies in the content and ability it has given me to easily share this content with my friends. How will NeoCities adress the challenges we already faced 10 years ago, that is that users will want to input data, and interact with these static sites, rather than just read them? Sure it's fun and creative to share static content... it's also fun and creative to share static images (flickr). But the medium of the Web has much more potential than simply being a repository of static resources.

rocky1138 13y ago
We can use Java applets for interactivity.

rocky1138 13y ago

Kyle, I love neocities. Not trying to toot my own horn but instead share the similar feeling we have. It's great to read exactly what I've been feeling: http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimited-internet/ http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unli... Thanks so much!

ChuckMcM 13y ago

Sadly, this won't make the web fun again. So two things that are important to note here, the first is that the 'fun' part of the web was learning new things and static HTML, even dressed up with HTML5 goodies, will be fun if you don't know these technologies but no more or less fun than doing the same thing on a Raspberry Pi or something similar. Its the 'learning' that is fun, and the web was more 'fun' when you were learning it because it was all new, and once you learned enough about it to see it for what it was, the parts that are less seemly start to dominate your vision and it feels less fun. Which brings us to the second part. The second part, and I don't have a good solution for this, is that folks will use this, and they will put good content on them and they will get page views and searches and what not. Then the 'link authority' of neocities will start to rise because, well it has a bunch of good content. Once it crosses a threshold (which is sadly pretty low) then a crap ton of SEO types will start creating pages on it to boost the organic rating of various web sites. And then Google will penalize neocities, and the good stuff will become unfindable (on Google at least) because Google won't index it, or they will pump down host rank to the point where it shows up on the results on page 3. Just prior to that people will build sites on it that do drive by malware injection using javascript. The preferred cloaking vector for that these days seems to be a script reference that points out to something that looks like jquery but really isn't. Then the owner is going to get a lot of threatening letters from lawyers who were told by people who got hijacked to "get the bastards who did this!" and the bad guys will be well cloaked but the neocities ownership will be just standing there, an easy target (for hassling at least, register your DMCA agent right now if you haven't already to avoid the copyright trolls). And at the end of the day the real reason the web isn't fun anymore will become apparent. There is too much money to be made by manipulating it, and so its full of bad actors who are chortling away while stealing billions of dollars from hapless 'lusers.'

neilk 13y ago
You're thinking like a programmer. Learning HTML is not fun at all, for the vast majority of people. It's 2013, Google is a lot smarter and there are more ways to explain the varying quality of community sites. Note how Neocities is all subdomains. You're also assuming that everybody wants to get search traffic. Everything on Facebook has a PageRank of NaN, and yet people still post. What if the whole point is to make pages about your pet cat, just because? Maybe an interesting strategy would be to make the whole site NOINDEX by default. Turning off NOINDEX could be a premium feature. (Of course this could fail utterly as the customers that Neocities wants probably don't distinguish between URLs and search queries.)

sinak 13y ago

Geocities was great, and I'm really glad Kyle is doing this. The very very first site I built (in junior high) is still live and kicking on freeservers: http://sina.8m.com/ http://sina.8m.com/ Certainly it falls in the "vast wasteland of garbage" category, but I'm glad it's still online.

erik14th 13y ago

That brought me sweet memories. Great idea <3

vanderZwan 13y ago

http://☁.neocities.org/ http://☁.neocities.org/ Hah! (where have I seen that demo before?)

lolsecurity 13y ago

Request URL: http://neocities.org/create http://neocities.org/create Request Method: POST Status Code: HTTP/1.1 302 Found Received Cookie: neocities: [REMOVED SESSION DATA] My create-account form and session cookie over HTTP? Not a fan. Grab a cert from startssl or similar!

agentultra 13y ago

I love little tools that let people explore their creativity. Geocities was certainly one of the earlier ones. But perhaps the OP is viewing it with rose-tinted glasses? Sure it exposed you to becoming a creator on the web but I think that was mostly a historical accident. We can only appreciate it in hindsight. It's not like Geocities was the best way to create and host web pages. Today I think webmaker.org is a step in the right direction. But for most people I think initiatives and projects like this will remain rather niche. If you're not technically inclined to learn new skills and technologies to get content on the web you don't have to. There are plenty of great, free tools for putting your content online and hosting it for free.

erickhill 13y ago

Complete tangent, but I love how the NeoCities ico image is a brutally rendered globe, probably in 256 colors. When you view it directly, it even rotates. Let the GIF march begin! Again! http://neocities.org/favicon.ico http://neocities.org/favicon.ico

frankcaron 13y ago

I don't think anything proves this point more than the "This is a webpage" post that hit 1 on HN a few days ago.

exuser 13y ago

My webpage and account were apparently deleted. No explanation or warning was given. Needless to say, I won't be using neocities again, nor can I recommend it to anyone I know.

chris_mahan 13y ago
Go get a debian vm for $15/yr at buyvm.net (happy customer, no other relations) and build your fancy site there.
- exuser 13y ago
  Sure sure, but now I'm here, and I'm letting people know a very important thing: don't trust this guy with your website. You might end up spending hours working on it, building it up only to have it deleted because... actually you won't even know why, he won't let you know. Utter lack of respect for the users.
  - chris_mahan 13y ago
    I agree. that's lame. Also, I wonder how one goes about having one's own neocities site deleted.

mumbi 13y ago

Great idea. I've never been so bummed out as when I found out Geocities was dying.

networked 13y ago

Please add the ability to sort the websites by recency and by (weighted) hits when browsing through http://neocities.org/browse http://neocities.org/browse.

tommymarshall 13y ago

"They deleted the ability for people (both old and new to the web) to easily create web sites, and be in complete control of the content and presentation they provide to their audience." That makes no sense whatsoever. Does no one remember the extra JS/CSS to hide advertisements?

taopao 13y ago

I welcome a return to mass market creativity instead of paint-by-number UGC linked to real names.

drivingmenuts 13y ago

Somewhere, I have the code laying around to build a webring ...

michaelochurch 13y ago

jlgaddis 13y ago

Would you like to sign my guestbook? http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html

dendory 13y ago

I would be interested to see how far people manage to stretch what can be done in 10megs. I bet it would surprise many.

IanCal 13y ago

Interesting idea. I wonder how you'll deal with the problems with anonymity though. You've no record of who signed up for anything, and creating a page is easy. What will you do when someone puts child porn up? What about any other 'illegal' content? Copyrighted content? Libellous content?

leoplct 13y ago

Your vision is great, but which is the difference to open a blog on wordpress.com?

sras 13y ago

http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/ http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/

poub 13y ago

What would make the web sexy again is to find a solution to allow "privacy"! Privacy IS cool.

boneheadmed 13y ago

It's interesting that in the 80s when home computers were new, you essentially started your computer at the command line and could code in something like Basic right away. A lot of non-technical people learned at least some programming, because of this. When GUIs came this faded out. A similar parallel in the 90s with the internet is that people learned HTML, because in many ways tools were limited and it was relatively easy to create a page that was respectable enough. Now that so many web pages are "covered" in CSS and/or created with higher level tools, it will be interesting to see if many non-technical people will be attracted to creating their own web pages. I hope so.

SkyMarshal 13y ago

There's nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come. GeoCities infinite customizeability + HTML5 client-side web app capability may be just that. Excellent, good luck!

hmart 13y ago

The opposite path of Medium

kmonsen 13y ago

If there was an API for uploading files I would use this for a static blog :-)

ChrisNorstrom 13y ago

Idea: If neocities users let you put Google Adsense ads on their pages they'll get upgraded to 30mb for free. At least this way you can have some income. I love the idea and passion you have for this, your story and purpose, but as soon as I read "I'm paying for the servers out of pocket, which is tough for me because I currently don't have a large income," and "My goal is to pay for the site through donations" I just sighed. I've seen this so many times before. Founders who have a deep seeded fear or hatred of money or rich people. So much so that they've convinced themselves to go on a neurotic journey to "change the world" or "do something good for humanity" while refusing to be profitable or make money like the "evil greedy rich" that they despise. I hope you steer clear of that. I hope you find a way to make neocities profitable, sustainable, and I hope it brings in so much income that you can grow neocities and keep it free for decades while not having to worry about your mortgage or kid's college fund. BTW, my favorite is http://clock.neocities.org http://clock.neocities.org

whiddershins 13y ago
Deep seated

amerika 13y ago

This article made my day. The standardization/normalization of the web -- specifically, PageRank, Wikipedia, Facebook, and what's now totally recombinant "web design" -- has ruined the frontier aspect necessary for actual innovation.

yaix 13y ago

There are many such sites on the web where you can easily and for free create a web site with plain HTML, and many of them have been around for 10+ years and give you more than 10MB. What's the big deal here, appart from the name?

lloeki 13y ago

There are lots of things to be done, even with static content (from the server PoV). Right next to this entry stands "A dark room", which is entirely static server-side. Regarding the "airport kid" saddies, someone pointed out how he longed for the C64 days and put one up again. I see this as an opportunity. What can you achieve with 10M and HTML+JS? While the web seems to look like "old stuff" there's lots to be done with WebGL, canvas, websockets... All of this now available to everyone for free. No domain name to own, no DNS to set up, no VPS or RPi+FTTH to own, no hacking around to squat Heroku or GAE with static content. Think outside the box and show off your skills, folks. Push the envelope. That's the hacking spirit.

Tichy 13y ago

I miss neighborhoods, the sense of belonging...

muuck 13y ago

The 3D spinning globe favicon is a nice touch.

jaakl 13y ago

What does this really mean: "as long as it's not illegal to host it"? This site is globally accessible, but legal rules are local. If you host something which is illegal say in Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (not that hard to do), and make it available over neocities also to Saudi Arabia, then is it illegal or not? Well, in practice for sure KSA will just block whole domain, and probably you don't care. I think whole youtube is still blocked in Turkey because of single bad video. Where are physically your servers? Also I'm afraid according to many countries you would be legally responsible to the content what you help to publish. So any single page with questionable content may end up badly for you. Geocities worked because these nasty legal problems did not come up yet, Internet was a marginal non-serious thing, and even if bad content was published then no-one noticed or reacted to it. Now a web is the mainstream media, and you may find out that technical hosting of some bytes is really smallest problem in the global publishing business. In order to follow all laws of all the countries where you operate (i.e. from where your site is accessible) you need to monitor the content, react to notifications etc.

serginho 13y ago

The website is AWFUL. Lato Regular font, green color. Web 2.0 is awful.

flyblackbox 13y ago

I can't wait for the visual editor!

mayanks 13y ago

wow!! This is crazy. Been sleeping on this idea for the past 3 months or so. But for my day job, I would have definitely taken a stab at it. kudos for starting this.

kodeater 13y ago

I think that the problem with GeoCities was not the content of the websites hosted in that platform but all those ads and popups annoying us all the time. If I'd redesign a similar I would take this as a bad example and try to keep it cool and easier to navigate. I think that the platform could not interfere in the hosted page. Congrats for the idea. That's a great action for sure!

kodeater 13y ago

allnamestaken 13y ago

Maybe you should ban this asshole: http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

sasteven 13y ago

An important part of bringing people back to an interactive web is to do away with the 'browser' concept and bring back symmetrical web clients. I still actively use the SeaMonkey web browser, and a big part of the reason I do is it still has an integrated WYSIWYG HTML composer component. I have an 'edit' action item for any web page I visit, and cut-and-past capability between browser and composer windows. Hosting a website permanently is just a matter of getting an account on freeshell.org and setting up your ~/html directory to face the web. If you want a decent amount of space and the ability to use the PHP and MySQL backend, you can make a one time donation of ~30 dollars (can't remember the exact amount) for a lifetime upgrade.

celwell 13y ago

yes... limp bizkit MIDIs. I used to have Break Stuff on my neopets store.

renoirb 13y ago

This is so cool. Good idea, I am sure people will like it! <rant>I wished NeoCitites mentions to ignore W3Schools, mention W3Fools and the WebPlatform.org project as the starting point.</rant>