it’s time to return to web 1.0, baby
it is no secret i am a sporadic updater of this website. writing is hard, and itt’s also difficult for me to get a portion of the site to look or behave the way i want.
after i saw a few posts[1]on blusky, natch about neocities the other day, i decided fuck it, why not sign up. i have been off instagram several years, and with zuck racistly shooting himself in the foot, all desire to go back has been killed. having a simple site might be kinda fun!
HTML, i missed u
it IS fun, friend. first of all, it is very barebones. you get an index.html page to edit, with a few basic HTML codes to get started with. i href’d, added some emojis and bam, in a few minutes i already had a nice little landing page with links to blusky, patreon, etc.
HTML is great because i can wrap my brain around it. i have tried many times to delve into more complex coding and it never takes. but HTML makes sense to me! it’s neat to discover all the cool things you can do with the most basic of web knowledge.
i had a comic idea i’d abandoned because it would be too difficult to implement on monyatoma.com. it would be a comic panel on the page with clickable areas, like a click-thru adventure comic. maybe i could do it with neocities!
at first, i played around with image maps, a simple way to mark a section of an image to point to a different URL. of course, we are in an era of mobile devices and this framework isn’t set up to scale well on phones or tables. the solution to this is making .SVG files which can do the same thing.
i downloaded an open source image editor software (shoutout inkscape) and worked through an SVG tutorial. this comic idea that I’ve had since 2022 can finally happen!
check out the beginning of my click-thru comic adventure, the untitled library project.
discover gems
neocities isn’t just a platform, it encourages you to check out what others are doing in the space. once you sign up for neocities [2]and you should i recommend hitting “browse”. you have different options to sort, including a “special sauce” also, but i always enjoy going for “random”.
neocities has, shockingly, been around since 2013 so it doesn’t have that tumbleweed empty feel new social media adjacent places might. what i love most is the breadth of creativity. there are a lot of art portfolios and personal blog type sites, with eye-catching and fun designs.
and of course, there are folks making games, not dissimilar to what i am doing (some are way more complex and i bow to their skills and imagination). shades of superbad.com, for sure. neocities seems like the best way I’ve found to make a digital zine website [3]sure you could do this on tumblr too, but who the hell is still on tumblr the discoverable element also allows you to comment on pages and follow others and see when they update their site.
some of my current favorites:
like i’ve mentioned before, the internet sucks now. getting out in the physical world, touching grass and being with others, is awesome. but sometimes you want to be on the computer, making little shrine pages dedicated to your favorite stuff, websites that sparkle and animate and link to other pages.
it harkens back to a simpler time on the web. the low barrier to setting up a fansite, blog, or game can quickly fire up the imagination. expressing your creativity within an online community is about the best of the web you can get. join me, won’t you?