if you're like me, you got a little taste of geocities as a kid before yahoo pulled the plug on it in 2009. if you're like me, you heard someone started a revival effort called neocities, and thought "aww, that’s nice" without looking into it any further. you maybe visited the neocites homepage once and figured it would take too much time/effort to learn html to make a decent website for yourself, and why would you do that when you already have social media? what is there to gain? it sounds hard, and you have better things to do with your time...
but do you really? does making a personal site need a cost-benefit analysis? what the past me (and maybe you too, sorry i'll stop speaking for you,) didn't realize was, NEOCITIES IS REALLY FUN???? i think there's just a small barrier to entry that stops people from reaching the fun part--and i don't mean learning to build a site!!! because i don't think that's universally fun!!!!!! but the amount of self-expression happening on neocities makes it SUCH A JOY to browse. i think here in 2024 it's harder to realize you can just wander the internet without a specific goal, and without an algorithm to throw it all at you. (i mean, you're here on cohost so i'm sure you get it!!)
the old web you may or may not have nostalgia for is still alive in a new form and you don't have to keep sitting here lamenting the current state of the internet (bad). you can just go on neocities and see a thousand little handmade websites of people sharing things they care about. it's amazing. i'm legitimately so sad that i skipped out this place for so long, because i wrongly thought there was nothing for me in there!!!
so i have written a beginner's guide to enjoying neocities. i'm still completely new to it (i only started building my site 2 weeks ago) so i don't even know that much, but i really really wanted to share how to have fun browsing sites at least because YOU CAN JUST DO THAT!! I THINK IT'S HARD TO REMEMBER YOU CAN JUST CLICK ON THINGS AND GO ANYWHERE!!!!! please let me tell you how because this has been my new favorite hobby and i want everyone to experience the fun!!!!!!!!!!!
Neocities is one of the few places that allow you complete control over the code on your site outside of you setting up your own web server. Most sites these days either force you to use their awful website builder, then acquire Google domains for themselves cough squarespace cough or let you add js code or some css but for a massive premium. Neocities is free, neocities has a paid plan but it is cheap and gives you a LOT more than you could ever ask for. Storage, you'll have to figure something out for that if you plan to add a ton of massive files, but having a data server with Node Express and SQLite set up somewhere else is not a big deal. Just don't use aws, we don't do that, ever.
It's also nice seeing someone make a proper tutorial and I thought I'd share some links to really good documentation for the different languages used in case anyone needs help customizing things, note that both options are very good,
W3 schools
MDN Web Docs
If you are an artist and want to promote your new art on your own website, or use your site as a blog, and want to notify users of any new posts, don't forget to set up an RSS feed on your site (or go with Atom feeds, if you want to publish in more than 1 language or use non-ASCII characters)
You don't need much javascript on your pages, there is a <noscript> tag for a reason, this was and still is used pretty commonly. While most sites nowadays just add a blank page stating you need to enable javascript, you can always make a noscript page that is essentially a stripped down version of your main website. Create a new noscript.html file and link to it. This might be useful if you have something like a little game or entire blocks embedded on your main page, but still want to serve a page to any viewers that do not have javascript enabled without leaving empty boxes all over the place, which may make it uncomfortable to read or view the site in general, if it isn't blocked outright.
I should probably write a basic tutorial on how to create a website linking to a ton of resources that may be of use. It's sad to see cohost go down now, but if everyone makes their own page, links to one another and provides RSS/Atom feeds, I do think the internet still has potential. Social media should only be used to advertise pages, not to upload content anymore. Centralized platforms suck.
