
Making the web fun again - kyledrake
http://neocities.org/blog/making-the-web-fun-again
======
TravisLS
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website for my comedy troupe (no longer active).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
> "a vast wasteland of garbage"

Accurate description of hacker news right there :>

~~~
duiker101
So why are you here again?

~~~
bpatrianakos
I'm here because it's like an abusive relationship. You think that this time
will be different and sometimes you get a sense that you might be right but
then you get disappointed every time and realize that things will never be as
good as they used to be. Please don't reply with a Wikipedia link to
"Whoever's Law" because that would make the abuse worse. The only thing even
worse than that would be a link to yourlogicalfallacyis.com.

~~~
eruditely
I was googling "Whoever's Law" hoping there would finally be a law named
"Whoever's Law", because holy shit are there a lot of "Laws" now.

------
digitalsushi
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.

~~~
alan_cx
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
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.

~~~
alan_cx
Yup, I agree. Same sort of thing where people put down the use of things like
Dreamweaver, claiming note pad is better. Same mentality, I think. And even
though I would argue logically for Dreamweaver, I would still sort of feel the
notepad advocates had a point. Yeah, typing feels more "real", even more
exciting.

I then think is it a generational thing? But only yesterday was I sat there on
that genetic car racing site watching live as people tried to hack the chat
box. Command line again. I assume these were kids. Yet there they were in 2013
excitedly hacking away using the keyboard.

To tangent even more.... That was great to watch. Kids (I assume) excitedly
trying to hack the chat box, by typing stuff, while the admins updated and
updated them away. A wonderful race and frankly a joy to watch. YES hacking
and defacing is bad, it even pissed me off to start with, but then I realised
that there was something so energetic, or alive, about it. It was like sort of
watching life or something. It reminded me of one of those movies where we see
the "geek hero" furiously typing away at a terminal trying to stop a nuke
launch or some such. Dunno how to describe it really. Anyway, the admins won
easily and quickly, and that's as it should be.

Edit: All that waffle and I forgot the point...

Basically, those kids reminded me of back in the day. I guess the spirit me
and the OP were talking about. So, IMHO, it is still alive. Heh, unless such
kids end up in US jails....

~~~
creamyhorror
This is why I loved (the idea of) MUDs/MOOs so much in the mid/late '90s. They
were mysterious worlds to explore, and it was exciting to know that the admins
("wizards") were adding more areas purely through the magic of their
keyboards. People would do crazy things sometimes to try to mess around with
the world or other players. As a newish player, you didn't know what you might
encounter.

I still see a bit of that in the pirate Minecraft servers that my little
brother sometimes plays on. Micro-communities with their own rules, custom
mods and settings, and kids horsing around and building their own flights of
fancy. That's the kind of organic exploration and worldbuilding I'd really
like to be involved in eventually.

I think I'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people could
set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of
neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well. Simple,
hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be text-based
Second Life. Maybe with some unusual features like a resource/power grid that
varies according to the average amount of players in each room (to incentivize
building interesting, entertaining scenes and scenarios). Or maybe the initial
set of rooms could be all these NeoCities pages converted to ASCII graphics
and randomly connected. Who knows.

Let me know if anyone's building a fun interconnected playground along these
lines and is looking for contributions. I'm probably not good or energetic
enough to do it alone.

~~~
barbs
> _I think I 'd like to build a connectable MOO-like world in which people
> could set up their own areas/rooms and connect them to a limited number of
> neighbors. Give them item creation and scripting capabilities as well.
> Simple, hackable, and almost completely user-created. Woops, that'd just be
> text-based Second Life. _

This sounds a lot like LambdaMoo
([http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LambdaMOO)).

An interesting write-up of one's experience in the game:
[http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/mytinylife.html](http://www.juliandibbell.com/texts/mytinylife.html).

~~~
creamyhorror
I actually read and enjoyed a book in '97 that introduced MUDs, including
LambdaMOO, so having you bring LambdaMOO up is no surprise. I read bits of
that book you linked, and these parts near the end resonate:

\---------------

..."It's not your fault," he said. "But after you came looking for pelts, and
traded trinkets with us, the covered wagons of conventional reality followed
along the trails we'd blazed. The trails were cut by animals, the animals have
been driven out by suburban sprawl. . . . How could it be otherwise?"

Not surprisingly perhaps, Horton's fellow anarch and rabble-rouser Finn is
also unimpressed with Lambda's current state of affairs, though his
complaints, typically, are a little more down-to-earth. "There's nothing you
can sink your teeth into these days," he says, pointing to a general absence
of the sort of MOO-engulfing controversies he once thrived on. "Politics I
guess is dead. People have settled into the arbitration disputes; they get a
kick out of that for a while, but they're mostly frivolous disputes and people
just wanting to get attention." Real life, meanwhile, has taken on more
interest for Finn. He finally moved out of his parents' basement a couple
years ago, setting out for Rochester, New York, to found an _Internet software
business with some other MUDders he knew_ , and once he got there, he also
ended up in a serious RL relationship with a woman he had previously known
only as Aurea on LambdaMOO. Two years down the road, both ventures appear to
be going swimmingly. His company isn't the next Netscape or anything, but it's
landed some respectable gigs, including a contract to run the official _Sally
Jessy Raphael_ chat room; Finn and Aurea remain happily involved. His days as
an online Casanova and all-around firebrand are pretty well over, but if he
misses them much he doesn't show it. He still MOOs daily, but he mostly just
sits idling in Lambda House's smoking room while he goes about his business at
work. "I've still got friends on Lambda, and it's still fun," he says. "But
it's not as much of a stage where you can play out your political ambitions
and real arguments. It's no longer really a metaphor for real life. It's just
not as passionate, I suppose."

...

He'd left his lousy secretarial job as well, his RL in general was gradually
getting happier, and the happier it got the less he felt like spending time in
virtual reality. "In retrospect," he says, "it's evident to me just how much
_the misery of my real life_ (and not my intellectual curiosity, or my gender-
role issues, or whatever) was the thing that made VR seem so dazzling back
inna the day.

"Then there was also the fact that VR had started to seem tacky," he adds. "By
'96 it seemed like _every yutz in the world was on the Internet_ , 'living the
fantasy.' Whatever _elitist pioneer spirit_ had seemed to me to permeate
Lambda back in '91 or '92 was completely gone. I missed that, and Interzone
was marginal compensation at best."

And so he just stopped going, basically. He let his spares die out, reaped one
by one as he let them lie, and he now logs on to Lambda once a month, at most,
to check his MOO-mail. It's enough for him. "I'm teaching prep-school English
and living in Austin with a woman I really like," he tells me. "My life is
pretty simple now. _I feel like I 've grown up a lot._"

...

Weary though she may be, however, she doesn't regret her involvement in the
political debates that ultimately exhausted her. "I'm way beyond sick of
theorizing about cyberspace," she says, "and have become completely anti-
utopian about VR, but all in all _the experience has been good for me_. It's
made me a much better writer . . . encouraged me to go out and get myself
published. It's also given me a social presence IRL in a way I never used to
think I had. After all the practice I got taking stands, making points,
influencing audiences who were sometimes incredibly hostile, grad student
seminars, for instance, came to seem comparatively amazingly easy places to
formulate and express arguments."

\-------------

Here we see the end of involvement (or infatuation) with a virtual world
playing out: with finding real life more interesting and enriching. Maybe
that's the lesson of virtual worlds - whether MUDs or EVE Online - you
eventually tire of them and leave, but they change you and set you on new
paths (to another career, or a business).

I guess I need to take the nostalgia goggles off and realize things won't be
the same the second time round.

------
ChuckMcM
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
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.)

~~~
ChuckMcM
I concede the point that I am thinking like a technologist, I cannot help it.
But it doesn't work to argue that _this_ site which alleges that the 'fun' of
the web was in a large part created by _" the ability for people (both old and
new to the web) to easily create web sites"_ applies to your 'vast majority.'

    
    
      > 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.
    

Yes, Google is more sophisticated about how they derank web sites (I like to
think that our small search engine, blekko.com, helped them see how poor their
results had become on highly contested searches), but the spammers and the
crooks have also upped their game such that many innocent sites get caught in
the crossfire. (Google "panda killed my web site" for example). Not to mention
the new trend of 'negative SEO' where someone might script a neocities site
creator that triggered one of Google's anti-rank defenses and to destroy the
organic rank of an otherwise pleasant web site.

    
    
      > 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?
    

Actually I'm not making that assumption at all. Facebook pages have a NaN
pagerank because facebook has a robots.txt that says "don't crawl us" and
legit search engines respect that. Facebook rightly presumes that you will see
your friends content because of mechanisms they have in place to put it in
front of your eyes. And I also think that people making a page about their pet
cat, or their belief in UFOs or whatever is fine and neocities is great for
that. I'm just saying that the bad actors won't leave it alone for those
people to play in it.

    
    
      > 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.)
    

Actually the same people who put their pet pictures up will probably not put
meta tags in their HTML. The Neocities folks could put a robots.txt file that
excluded search engines (like Facebook does) as well. But think through what
you are saying.

The person you want to make this "fun" for is a non-technologist putting up a
page about their cat, and for people who are looking for random pages about
cats. Or perhaps relatives of that person who say "Hey, Mindy put up a web
site for her cat!", "Oh really? What's the address?", "I don't know, just
Google 'Mindys Many Cats'", "Thats weird it doesn't find it", "Are you sure
you spelled Mindy right?"

You see that non-technical crowd has been trained that Google finds
everything, and if it doesn't find neocities websites then the neocities guys
have to explain to Mindy why that is, which is going to be a complicated
discussion because we've assumed for this discussion that Mindy is non-
technical. Of course they could offer that as a pay service but that wouldn't
work to well either since Mindy isn't going to put up a website for her cats
and pay $1/month to do it.

So the neocities folks could curate the sites, and try to delete sites that
are bad (they already do some of that) but that takes people and time. People
+ time == money, and for a free service money is hard to find. And then they
say "Hmm, I wonder if Yahoo shut down Geocities not because they were clueless
but instead because they actually started to see what they had gotten into and
now they were scared they couldn't keep it going."

There is a whole bunch of "web" below the fun part. That the fun part is
lacking is not because Geocities was shuttered.

~~~
whiddershins
You could enforce nofollow tags for unpaid sites, as wikipedia does for all
its links. This would mean the free sites couldn't contribute any link
popularity to seo recipient sites.

------
grey-area
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
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.

------
ChrisNorstrom
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
Deep seated

------
resu_nimda
_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
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.

~~~
resu_nimda
I guess I need to learn how to talk about things in-depth without looking like
I really really care about them. Because I don't. I just thought about it a
bit.

But, ostensibly, the creator cares, because that was a big part of his post.
He decried Facebook and similar platforms for fostering a "uniformity and
blandness rival[ing] something out of a Soviet bloc residential apartments
corridor," then went on to promote Bootstrap, which is subject to the same
pitfalls. I just wanted to explore that trade-off between sophistication and
originality in today's websites. I still think it's a great idea, and judging
from what I saw on the browse page, people are carrying the
experimentation/sandbox torch pretty well.

------
lmm
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
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
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?

~~~
satellitecat
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.

------
joshuahedlund
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.

------
jiggy2011
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">

~~~
nrivadeneira
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
How did you have stuff which relies on a server backend (like guestbooks)
without having the server inject HTML somehow?

~~~
Lexarius
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.

~~~
krapp
Tripod let people write their own (limited) perl scripts for their site...
when I found that out the first thing i did was try to get something from
Matt's Script Archive to work, but it didn't. Then I wrote my own guestbook
and what had to be the lamest forum ever.

------
rickdale
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
I remember the first website I "hacked" (read inspected the html code), I was
sure I was onto something...

------
pbhjpbhj
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
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.

------
aridiculous
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
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.

------
agentultra
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.

------
sergiosgc
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).

~~~
l1ghtm4n
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
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)

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

~~~
criswell
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.

------
alexsilver
Has anyone heard of Google Sites?
[http://sites.google.com/](http://sites.google.com/)

~~~
mistermann
Informed people won't build on it for fear google will arbitrarily shut it
down some day.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
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
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
Nor to think that of [voluntary contribution supported] neocities?

------
vanderZwan
[http://☁.neocities.org/](http://☁.neocities.org/)

Hah! (where have I seen that demo before?)

------
MarkHarmon
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
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
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.

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

------
thomasfl
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.

------
jaakl
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.

------
d23
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
If it were me, nothing. Users should back up. If the admins back up too, well,
that is a bonus.

~~~
d23
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.

------
lettergram
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
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?

------
goshx
Thank you, I really missed websites like this:
[http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/](http://maxprafferty.neocities.org/)

:D

~~~
frankcaron
Needs more <marquee>marquee</marquee>.

------
frankcaron
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.

------
sktrdie
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
We can use Java applets for interactivity.

------
erickhill
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)

------
sasteven
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.

------
lloeki
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.

------
boneheadmed
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.

------
lolsecurity
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!

------
pearjuice
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
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 )

------
yaix
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?

------
tomw1808
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.

------
phantomb
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?

------
8ig8
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.

------
SkyMarshal
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!

------
adaml_623
Might want to put in a little thought towards a (N)SFW mode...

------
kodeater
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!

------
rocky1138
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-
unli...](http://www.johnrockefeller.net/you-know-what-i-miss-the-unlimited-
internet/)

Thanks so much!

------
leke
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.

------
sinak
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.

------
IanCal
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?

------
d23
> When Yahoo shut down GeoCities, they did much more than delete a bunch of
> ... Limp Bizkit MIDI files.

Ugh, guilty as charged.

------
yannisp
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
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))

------
tommymarshall
"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?

------
haddr
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) :(

------
networked
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).

------
ronilan
Why [http://neocities.org/blog](http://neocities.org/blog) and not
[http://blog.neocoties.org](http://blog.neocoties.org) ?

~~~
delluminatus
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/)

------
renoirb
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>

------
exuser
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
Go get a debian vm for $15/yr at buyvm.net (happy customer, no other
relations) and build your fancy site there.

~~~
exuser
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
I agree. that's lame. Also, I wonder how one goes about having one's own
neocities site deleted.

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

------
jlgaddis
Would you like to sign my guestbook?

[http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html](http://qsl.net/n9wwv/gbook/guestbook.html)

------
SloughFeg
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
How about a web ring?

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

~~~
onaclov2000
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
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)

------
allnamestaken
Maybe you should ban this asshole:
[http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png](http://i.imgur.com/ODfNHVr.png)

------
sras
[http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/](http://shitrecruitmentagentssay.neocities.org/)

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

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

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

~~~
leke
It will probably get blacklisted by Google like with the .co.cc domains.

~~~
chebucto
Easily solved with webrings and pages of links.

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

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

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

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

------
mayanks
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.

------
scottohara
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.

------
erik14th
That brought me sweet memories. Great idea <3

------
Tichy
I miss neighborhoods, the sense of belonging...

------
muuck
The 3D spinning globe favicon is a nice touch.

------
flyblackbox
I can't wait for the visual editor!

------
robodale
Yes, for the love of god do this.

------
skotzko
A poetic manifesto. Well done.

------
hmart
The opposite path of Medium

------
michaelochurch
_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.

------
amerika
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.

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

------
WayneDB
See also (kind of): YTMND.com

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

------
wyck
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.

------
ebbv
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.

~~~
minikites
You can use a lot of that same logic to justify any elitism.

If anybody can come to this restaurant, it won't be a great restaurant, so we
have to exclude _those people_.

How many future web designers cut their teeth making terrible Geocities
websites? Just because something is terrible doesn't mean you didn't learn
something.

The forest would be pretty quiet if only the best birds sang.

~~~
macspoofing
But it was a vast wasteland of garbage.

~~~
chris_mahan
Since Worse is Better, Garbage is Awesome?

