Neocities: A platform that lets you create your own website/follow other's sites | Hacker News Reader

Neocities: A platform that lets you create your own website/follow other's sites

neocities.org

119 pointsalexb_22 comments

Some technical details about the project you may find interesting:

- They were hosted on Digital Ocean but received a (probably invalid) DMCA takedown and all their servers were shut down by DO

- In response they bought an IPv4 block and built an Anycast CDN so complaints go to Neocities instead of the hosting provider

- People sometimes host spam or phishing sites on the domain which can cause google to flag it as malicious[0]

- There's a geocities gallery by the same author kyle[1]

I interviewed kyle if you want to hear more about the project[2].

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25803343

[1]: https://geocities.restorativland.org/

[2]: https://www.softwaresessions.com/episodes/bringing-geocities...

Last week my fourth grader came home and said him and his friends wanted to build a web site for trading a certain type of collectible card. They had been doing some Scratch in school so he had that background. I pointed him at neocities, he signed up and worked though their html tutorial on his own. After that he asked ok now how do I do other stuff? I started talking about apis and databases and when his eyes glazed over after a couple of minutes I stopped. Seems like a lot of work doesn't it? I asked. Yeah he said. I advised him to work on small parts at a time, learn a little at a time. Like a page that shows his most valuable cards. I'm waiting to see if he goes back to it before I push it anymore.

I personally think geo/neocities are awesome, I used geocities to learn some frontend stuff back then. I really miss the days when self publishing was more common.

You don't need to use APIs and databases, I don't think. A language that deploys like PHP and that lets you use a script per URL path would be ideal. Maybe Cloudflare functions? Maybe just a Flask server.

This is how I got my start, around the same age too! I learned PHP next because it was very intuitive to me how it worked with HTML. It also has, for better or worse, a ton of functions in the global scope so I didn’t have to worry about packages or imports.

From there, quite a time later, I made the jump to Laravel, databases, and other languages.

I feel like at this point neocities has been around almost as long as geocities was before it

Almost there, 6 more years to go.

I love Neocities. When I killed my corporate social media accounts, I bought my domain and pointed it to my neocities page. When people ask me, how do I find you? I tell them, "Instead of typing facebook.com in the bar on the top of the browser, type myname.com."

Nobody types URLs any more. Even when they do, Google returns them with a space in browser's autocompletion bar, so they trigger a Google search instead of actually going to the URL. Perhaps unsurprisingly, that Google search rarely has the requested URL as the first result.

Seems like a waste of electricity. Maybe it needs to be legislated awaI thought Google cared about the environment.

I love Neocities. Over the summer I transitioned my personal website from Wordpress to a static HTML/CSS site. I used Neocities to relearn HTML and learn CSS, as well as figure out how I was going to implement the CSS so that my site that looked okay-ish on desktop and mobile. https://chuck.is

I want to make some kind of pun about the Neo Geo, and how a fan site for it gave us Newgrounds. But we now live in an age where flash is practically as obsolete as the old console...

Neocities doesn't support subdomains, not even www., and it's totally a minor issue, but making my URLs break is what kept me from migrating two static web sites there. Yes, they redirect www, so they wouldn't really break, it's just that it feels wrong to me.

http://no-www.org/

Neocities has been around longer than Geocities ever was. I feel like the target hacker news demographic can probably figure out how to make their static sites using something like jekyll or hugo...

I've done a quick Google and I'm not readily finding a nutshell answer. Can someone more in the know than me indulge me with a brief explanation of the difference/history re geocities, reocities and neocities?

Geocities was a site more or less exactly like neocities back in the early internet. It eventually went under.

I know nothing about reocities.

Neocities is a revival of the geo concept, just a place where you can get a free front end only site, and with a cultural emphasis on individual creativity of the sort that dominated the early web.

I like Neocities, but if I'm going to make a site, I'd rather do it with a host I know to be permissive and have proper procedures in place for handling false reports.

What's wrong with https://neocities.org/terms and how Neocities enforce them? Which hosts would you say do better?

The terms of service are fine. Most places do not have appropriate measures in place to handle massed botted reports. I don't know if Neocities does. I do know that hosts like BuyVM do.

I've had serious problems in the past with domain registrars, where people will use bots to report a domain en-masse with the intention of buying it out when it's put back to sale. It has made me very wary of who to trust to keep data up.

+1 for the name :)

Is that different than netlify?

Neocities hosts only static HTML, just like the original Geocities before it.

It doesn't have the corporate feel to it.

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