The Web
Gosh! The Web! what a varied topic. Did you know that you are reading this text on a website right now? many people on Neocities are passionate about the "old web", a nostalgic view of the internet between about 1995-2010, with some older and newer nostalgia between. Neocities itself is a play off of Yahoo's old Geocities, a service that allowed individuals to create their own static homepages. I had my own geocities website as a kid and it did not look half as good as the websites built on this old web nostalgia... though I remember being very fond of the sites that did look like those.
Anyway. As this is such a huge topic I've decided to divide it into three topics: Essays & Analysis, Web Building Resources, and a special section just for Blogging specifically. If you're instead looking for directories and lists of cool stuff on the web, try my linklists page.
Essays & Analysis
- You Should Have A Website: a manifesto on why you should have a website and not just social media, and how to go about this as simply as possible, by Nora Reed.
- The New Yahoo (Wayback Cohost Link): You should start curating your own linklist. Don't wait for a project! Just do it! by @lori@hackers.town
- In Praise Of Links: a whole page of links to various essays about how links are what make the web great and why various commercial interests keep trying to prevent them from happening, by Coyote
- Intro To Web Revival #1: What Is The Web Revival?: Beginning of a series of posts of the 'web revival' movement, which includes small web, indie web, retro web, etc. movements, by Melonking.
- Own Your Web: a mailing list about creating and maintaining your own web presence through your own website by Matthias Ott.
- Stop Talking to Each Other and Start Buying Things: Three Decades of Survival in the Desert of Social Media: an essay about social media and online spaces and how they keep being sold to corporate interests and used for political purposes as soon as they become real forums for human-to-human communication. Written in 2022 by Catherynne M. Valente
- This Page Is Under Construction: A love letter to the personal website by Sophie Koonin
- Analytics On Personal Sites: An argument for the usefulness of analytics -- if a website is getting traffic and where it is coming from -- on personal websites. We all desire some validation that our work is meaningful. Written in 2020 by Martin Tournoij
- Literally Hifumi's World Wide Web Theory Page: A list of essays and articles compiled by Neocities user LiterallyHifumi.
Web Building Resources
- You Can Make A Website: article by Coyote on where to begin on building your own website, including resources on learning how to do so and ideas on what you should include on your website.
- Neocities.org: a service for hosting static websites made with html and css, based off of the old GeoCities service. This website is hosted on neocities!
- Nekoweb.org: another service for hosting static websites. It's newer than Neocities and has some advantages for more advanced users.
- Atabook: A simple, free guestbook service. Before mainstream social networking, personal websites often had guestbooks where visitors could leave comments. As many old services like 123Guestbook are becoming defunct, Nekoweb.org set up a new service to fill this niche. This website has an Atabook guestbook!
- Goat Counter: open-source web analytics that does not track personal data. Free to use for personal sites. This website uses Goat Counter!
- Slashpages.Net: A guide to common pages you can add to your website
- xobyte.org Demos: Demos of interesting things you can put on your site if you care to take them apart to see how they work. Includes one on setting up basic password protection on a Neocities site.
Blogging
- Dreamwidth.org: A long-form blogging website based off of a LiveJournal fork with no advertisements and a permissive content policy. If you really can't be arsed to build your own website but want a home-base more stable than typical social media, I would recommend starting here.
- The Newcomers community is a useful Dreamwidth community to help understand Dreamwidth features and culture, especially if you are coming to it from a fast-paced, image-heavy social media like Tumblr.
- Bear Blog: A bare-essentials blogging platform that, according to the website, is built to 'last forever'.
- Zonelets: A free blogging engine if you want to host your blog on your own site, like, say, neocities. Requires some HTML but is super easy.
- Status.Cafe: A microblogging site described as 'a place to share your current status.' Think Bluesky or Mastodon but small web. Lots of Neocities users post updates there.