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 four topics: Essays & Analysis, Web-Based Resources, Web Building Resources, and a special section just for Blogging specifically.
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.
- 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
- 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
Web-Based Resources
- Brisray's Webring List: A collected list of active and defunct webrings, with history and information on webrings and useful notes.
- Curlie.org: A human-edited web directory that strives to be the largest on the web. Fun to browse and run by volunteers if you want to help the project.
- PeeloPaalu Link Directory: A link directory of interesting links in no particular order with many sites of retro/historical interest
Web Building Resources
- 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!
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.
- 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.