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NeoCities can now handle two million web sites
- scottohara 13y agothat's awesome!
- gpxl 13y agoWeb Scale FTW!
- schrodingersCat 13y agoFinally, a place for code minimalists to shine. This is great
- mehrzad 13y agoIf only it were a .is domain, other than that it's perfect.
- toomuchtodo 13y agoKyle, Can we talk about making sure your sites get pulled into the Internet Archive? Or does that not fit the vision for your site?
- kyledrake 13y agoSure! Send me an e-mail.
- drblast 13y agoHey kyle, I don't have a comment other than to say thanks for doing this. It's great. I've been meaning to publish a few short articles about javascript online, but I didn't get around to it because of a lack of decent free hosting like this. Neocities makes it trivial enough that I'll have the time. Thanks again!
- CyberDroiD 13y agoWhy the snark troll?
- enraged_camel 13y agoHuh?
- toomuchtodo 13y agoPlease forgive my original post if it sounded like there was any snark. Some people may not want all of their sites stored forever. Some people are cool with it. It was really just an honest question, and no snark was intended.
- jiggy2011 13y agoI think he misinterpreted what you said. "Can we talk about making sure your sites get pulled into the Internet Archive" could mean "make sure your site is indexed and archived properly" or could mean "make sure that your site dies and is relegated to the archives".
- toomuchtodo 13y agoI meant the first one. Definitely the first one.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- gamegod 13y agoKyle, I died a little inside when I saw the preview of the new "beautiful front page". It's a great webdesign, but I thought the part of the appeal of your site was the ghetto-fabulousness? The redesigned front page makes it look like a Wix competitor. I thought you wanted something that looked plain and boring, but accessible to everyone (like the blog). With a super modern fancy web design, you make the site look like Tumblr, Twitter, and all those sites that you're trying to rebel against. You might risk losing your audience by sending the wrong message.
- kyledrake 13y agoI don't know what "ghetto-fabulousness" means but NeoCities is not a revolt against good web design, and it's not a ghetto. I like beautiful web sites. I love the new site design. I think most people will appreciate the new site. I have metrics, so if they don't, I'll know pretty quickly and make the appropriate adjustments. Thank you for your concern though.
- kyledrake 13y agoJust so everybody knows what we're talking about, this is the screenshot of the new front page design we're working on: https://raw.github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web/master/files/wireframes/homepage03x.png https://raw.github.com/kyledrake/neocities-web/master/files/...
- blitzo 13y agoPlease don't implement this design. Current one is thousand times better. Minimalistic is more natural for this kind of sites.
- kyledrake 13y agoThis discussion is interesting, because I just recently listened to an interview with Tegan And Sara on NPR regarding their new album that almost perfectly emulates this (minimalism vs polish). They wanted to make their music more approachable to a wider audience, and their hardcore fans revolted because they just wanted to hear more of the same stuff. In the end, they were right, and the new album was successful. Musicians (and artists in general) have to evolve, and there is a risk of alienating people with that evolution. I certainly don't want to make people not like NeoCities because the design changes. However, having a good design makes the site more approachable and accessible for more people, which is the goal of NeoCities: to get people to start making web sites again, even if they aren't a member of the skilled web design crowd. HN has an appreciation for minimalism (that I almost always share), but I want to involve and inspire all users, and not just make it for our demographic, if that makes any sense. If you had any suggestions specific to the design to improve it, I would love to hear your thoughts, but I do think it's a good design. It has site screenshots on the front page, a great top backdrop, good colors, and an awesome site mascot.
- semiprivate 13y agoNeoCities desperately needs a terms of service.
- kbojody 13y agoJust a heads up, the "Discussion on Hacker News" link points right back to the article and not Hacker News.
- PavlovsCat 13y agoI enjoy neocities so much. All those people making silly things or taking their first HTML steps makes me grin from ear to ear every time I hit /browse. Big kudos, may neocities be here to stay!
- Fuzzwah 13y agoFolders? Pretty please....
- HarrietJones 13y agoI'm glad to hear you're up and running and funded Kyle. I was a bit wary to donate (though I did), as I feared that the idea wouldn't get going. But it's an important thing. There needs to be a place where people (youngsters) can just play with HTML. I hope that the focus continues to be on providing a space for people to create their first website. I think there's pressure to make this more about providing a safe uncensored haven for free speech, but geocities was great because it gave people a way into website design. You don't need SSL. You just need a place for uploading and creating web pages. You don't need a Terms of Service. Anyway - personal visions vary, and it's probably best not to focus on the tiny areas where we may disagree. Good luck with this. I really mean that.
- ljd 13y agoYou own a .org so if the US Government wanted to seize your assets it would be difficult but if they wanted to paste their ugly MS paint logo up when people hit neocities.org they are more than welcome to.
- exgeocitiesuser 13y agomy site got pulled(erased)after the first day WTF?
- dave809 13y agoI'm pretty sure there was some name collisions or something the first day. I think it's been fixed since then
- exgeocitiesuser 13y ago/ name collisions? whatever -i had a whole page i put up there i also donated 14 bucks in bitcoins to this guy and he just destroyed my site
- Fuzzwah 13y agoHe didn't destroy it, someone found a bug and used it to destroy your site.
- RobertHoudin 13y agoMy sites are gone too! WTF?
- exgeocitiesuser 13y agoi dont believe that for a second /hey kyle how about you send my bitcoins back to the adress they came from
- dhekir 13y agoOne thing I really miss from Geocities is the "structured browsing" that allowed me to find sites from a given subject without using search by word. Also, I miss letting the user decide what is the subject of his/her site and where to put it in the hierarchy. It doesn't fit for some sites, but it did give a sense of "organization" that textual search cannot really match... especially when you don't know what you're looking for exactly, or just randomly browsing. I also liked the naming. I didn't even know what "Cape Canaveral" meant at the time, but I do remember there were lots of interesting (for me) sites that ended up under this directory.
- kyledrake 13y agoThere are tags implemented, it's just a matter of me getting them into the browse. I probably should have mentioned this in the blog post.. oops. :-)
- mhd 13y agoI don't know what kind of tags you're talking about, but in my experience they tend to create tighter groupings than "neighborhoods" like Geocities. You'll get a "whovian" tag instead of a general sci-fi group, most likely (and even "sci-fi" seems a bit limited/boring). Speaking of ages gone by, I wonder whether you could do something new with the good old webring format...
- kin 13y agoever thought of using https://www.inkfilepicker.com/ https://www.inkfilepicker.com/? or is it too expensive?
- daturkel 13y agoWoo, thanks for the shoutout to Ten Megabyte Manifesto [0] again. 20 megabytes is likely a good thing (and I guess I have to update my manifesto a little bit! though I maintain that you can still build quality stuff in under 10MB of html/css/js), and the promise of a better upload interface is great too. I'm hoping you'll choose to/be able to implement directory support but any improvement in the meantime is great. Keep up the good work. [0] http://10mbmanifesto.neocities.org/ http://10mbmanifesto.neocities.org/
- drivingmenuts 13y agoI would argue that if you want directories, etc., implement your own version of neocities. Apparently the code is available.
- kyledrake 13y agoDirectories are not impossible, I'm just not sure how to make the interface for them look good and work well. It's more a UX problem than a coding one. I would love some suggestions/sketches/wireframes to improve the editing dashboard to enable this. Please send me an e-mail if you have any ideas here.
- daturkel 13y agoYeah I agree it's not a simple suggestion on my part. I'm by no means an expert on UI/UX and so I'm a bit out of my depth here, but I'm hoping that someone can suggest a design that lends itself well to this. In the meantime, while it's way more complicated than what you're going for, dropbox's upload interface might be worth looking at.
- ruficornis 13y agoWhat about something like mod_dir? Maybe just ftp for the interface? Would that require more overhead or dangerous permissions? Maybe.
- steveklabnik 13y agoAs much as there has been lots of trash talking here about Neocities due to it being 'just' HTML and CSS, I teach high school kids on a semi-regular basis (teaching summer camp right now) and that's the thing they're _most_ jazzed about. I told them all to sign up. They were super pumped.
- da02 13y agoWhy are they most jazzed about HTML and CSS? Is it because they can create something immediate and show it to others online?
- steveklabnik 13y agoThis is http://codenow.org/ http://codenow.org/ in NYC, by the way. The organization partners with my employer, Jumpstart Lab. This particular iteration is six weeks, all the kids did a weekend with us during the school year. Last week was reviewing very basic programming concepts in Ruby, then this week, we did ruby-processing, and then Sinatra, so the HTML came into play. I think it's because it's a more graphical medium; many of them can see how it's 'neat,' but when doing just textual stuff, they get bored easily. The processing was kinda interesting, but I think the simplicity of making something graphical was what really made them get pumped. Then, now they're more excited to learn more Ruby so that they can build more complex sites, but (at least with this group) it's a means to an end. We haven't actually deployed anything public yet, so they haven't been able to share, I bet that'll be another huge leap in interest.
- da02 13y agoThanks for the info. I wish I had this back in the 90s. Did they try Ruby Shoes (or whatever replaced it) as a fun side GUI project?
- steveklabnik 13y agoYes! Their very first lessons were with Hackety Hack, actually. They did some shoes-ing after that.
- ferdo 13y agokyledrake, you are the spirit of old school geeks that made computing cool. Gracias.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- derekp7 13y agoI just tried signing up for a page, and at the bottom of the signup form is instructions for entering two words. But no two words show up, and there is no place to enter them. Is this due to load issues? Edit: The re-captcha works in Firefox and Internet Explorer, but not in Chrome.
- ph0rque 13y agoJust came here to say this. I think the issue is with this (seen in the console): [blocked] The page at https://neocities.org/new https://neocities.org/new ran insecure content from http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge?k=6Lfa6eISAAAAAGJIt1N9lMIK1owOXkgT0yswUZJk http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge?k=6Lfa6eISAAAA.... [blocked] The page at https://neocities.org/new https://neocities.org/new ran insecure content from http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:400,700,900,400italic http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:400,700,900,400i.... [blocked] The page at https://neocities.org/new https://neocities.org/new ran insecure content from http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge?k=6Lfa6eISAAAAAGJIt1N9lMIK1owOXkgT0yswUZJk http://www.google.com/recaptcha/api/challenge?k=6Lfa6eISAAAA....
- Axsuul 13y agoHe needs to change the assets URLs to ://
- salimmadjd 13y agoI just donated [1] $10 to the project and I haven't even setup an account yet. I just think providing an anonymous account on the internet is very important, especially in today's world of constant monitoring and eavesdropping. I hoped others on HN donate what little they see fit. [1] > Confirmation number: 1PC46364PK792033N
- ErikAugust 13y ago"Domain Names yourname.neocities.org is pretty good, but there's nothing more powerful than owning your own domain. When you own your own domain, you are in control. I want to make it easy for people to add their domain name to NeoCities, and just as easy to move their content elsewhere if they decide they don't want to use us (or want to step to something more powerful like their own server). I will be implementing domain support eventually. I'm not sure what the timeline on this is yet, it's a more difficult thing to implement, but I think it's important. So we're going to do it. Domains themselves cost money, but we will not be charging for linking domains to NeoCities sites because I feel that having your own identity that you control is important." ...but what about my page? http://ns1.neocities.org/ http://ns1.neocities.org/
- fredsted 13y agoThey should have made users' domains be <name>.users.neocities.org or got a shorter domain solely for users like <name>.neociti.es (which is not registered!)
- kyledrake 13y agoWe're not using any subdomains and we never will. Even www just gets redirected to the https://neocities.org https://neocities.org version. If I did need to use subdomains for provisioning, I would probably just get another domain exclusively for it. You can run a nameserver without having to attach it to ns1.neocities.org. Enjoy your new site. :-)
- ErikAugust 13y ago"You can run a nameserver without having to attach it to ns1.neocities.org." Haha. You most certainly can. Thanks for creating the project, should be fun.
- autodidakto 13y agoNo rss feed for the blog?
- king_magic 13y agoCan I recommend a simple link from NeoCities blog posts directly to the main page of NeoCities? Somewhere visible and easily accessible - would be awfully convenient.
- thevert 13y agoThe recaptcha is not https so I can't register in chrome
- Simple1234 13y agoI love NeoCities, I'm glad it exists.
- jggonz 13y agoThis looks like a really powerful platform for people that just want to throw up information on the web with minimal effort. I felt motivated, and just put together a post on using one of our products on neocities.org http://georgeinenglish.com/easily-add-trending-data-neocities-org-homepage/ http://georgeinenglish.com/easily-add-trending-data-neocitie... Enjoy!
- jstsch 13y agoJust some warm words. I love the concept and I think sites like this are very important to get fresh blood actively participating online (to be really online versus having a fixed flow tumblr blog). Keep the barrier of entry as low as possible... thanks a lot! :)
- jstsch 13y agoPS: the text editor has some quirks in Safari 7 where the caret is a few characters off sometimes (so when you type the characters appear in the wrong place). Might want to switch to a default <textarea> for Safari 7 for now...
- tripplethrendo 13y agoI can't create a page. The captcha doesn't appear and then I get an error when trying to create. I'm using Chrome if that helps.
- cabalamat 13y ago> The initial file upload interface is.. not so great. I'm going to be working to improve it. First with things like drag-and-drop file uploading, and then with an API to allow developers to write tools to upload files Regarding this API, do you intend re-inventing the wheel, or are you going to use something like ssh that people already have written tools around (e.g. rsync)?
- comex 13y agoUsing ssh without actually giving each user their own account on a Unix system is very hacky, but the native rsync protocol and/or WebDAV could work.
- kaoD 13y agoHow about (S)FTP? That was my first try and actually what made me dismiss NeoCities as a host. I wanted to upload a simple static (Jekyll) blog, but uploading manually put me off.
- qw 13y agoHave you considered supporting compressed files or compressing them automatically after uploads? HttpGzipModule and ngx_http_gunzip_module will handle these files automatically. A server can handle more pages and probably also decrease the disk load because of the smaller files.
- jtchang 13y agoSo many haters with the new design. I personally like the new look.
- dhawalhs 13y agoI had created a simple resume framework [1] which can used to create a online resume[2] from a json file using angular.js with exactly this kind of hosting infrastructure in mind. The goal was to reduce the entry barrier by not relying on any server side technology. Maybe I should finish off some of the outstanding issues. Links: [1] https://github.com/dhawalhshah/modern-resume https://github.com/dhawalhshah/modern-resume [2] http://dhawal.me http://dhawal.me
- graue 13y agoFYI kyledrake: The blog uses an http:// http:// link for its CSS, which makes the SSL version of the page insecure. Such insecure mixed content is blocked by default in Firefox 23+ (now in beta), so the page loses its styling for Firefox beta/alpha users, and soon for all Firefox users. (Edit: The CSS seems to also be blocked in recent Chrome and IE9, thanks thejosh.) One fix is to remove the protocol from CSS links, i.e. change this: <link href="http://blog.neocities.org/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" /> to this: <link href="//blog.neocities.org/bootstrap.min.css" rel="stylesheet" /> and likewise for any other CSS and JavaScript includes. This will use the same protocol being used to serve the page. Other than that, great work! Just wanted to point out this little issue.
- thejosh 13y agoChrome also blocks it as well.
- ChrisNorstrom 13y agoThis is quickly becoming the HN community's favorite little project. It's nothing new yet I just like seeing it flourish and get excited about it. Because there's no PHP code allowed it forces you to keep it simple. The anonymity just lets people really vent their frustrations or ideas without fear of messing up or having their credit card or name associated with it. And static CSS & HTML sites is where so many of us got started. I love it. Keep up the good work.
- HiFaraz 13y agoHow I've missed these: http://penguins.neocities.org/ http://penguins.neocities.org/
- Kiro 13y agoWhat's the point of this? Is it the new MySpace or are people supposed to host real projects on there?
- shawabawa3 13y agoIt's the new GeoCities, which is for very simple "my first webpage" type things
- ExpiredLink 13y agoIt's amazing that he doesn't mention the legal aspects of his site. People will of course publish illegal content there. How is he going to handle this? One illegal picture may take the whole site down.
- epsylon 13y agoKyle, I have a few gripes concerning the sign-up page: 1. It would be pretty cool if the availability of the name could be checked instantly 2. When there's an error on the signup page, for whatever reason: please don't RE-SEND a captcha if the previous one was validated, and please don't ask me to retype my password. Those two UX mistakes are very common, but as a user they are kind of infuriating. A quick suggestion as well: it would be cool if there was a way to manage several sites while logging on a single email / pw. Thanks a lot anyway!