neocities, and why i love it

11/03/2025

Being born in 2003, my earliest exposure to the internet as a whole was somewhere in the late 2000s, and the extent of it was flash game websites like GirlsGoGames, and Club Penguin. I never really got to experience what a lot of people consider the "best" times of the internet. I didn't grow up exploring Geocities, or other static hosted websites, but I did grow up watching Dan and Phil on Youtube, and I remember being extremely inspired by Dan's "12 Year Old Dan's Website" video. For those unaware, it's just a video of him exploring a website he coded when he was, you guessed it, 12. I think this might have been my first ever experience with the idea that you could just make your own website, and I found myself fascinated by it.

From there, I grew minorly obsessed with making my own website. At this age, my parents were pretty strict with what I did online, so I couldn't sign up for regular website builders like Wix or Wordpress, so instead I found a service called SimpleSite, where I'd make silly little temporary websites about things like my family, my cat, etc. As I grew older, I ended up learning very minor BBCode through forums like Warrior Cats RPG (later renamed to Feralfront and even later discontinued), where decorating your posts was referred to as "fancyposts". I learned to decorate my deviantArt profile before they discontinued that option, and I learned the very basics of HTML and CSS as part of my computer science classes at school before I had to drop them. But alas, coding actual sites seemed much too scary and hard to learn, and I was but a child who abandoned anything that I wasn't instantly good at, so I didn't actually get around to learning to code seriously until I was 19 and in university.

My first introduction to Neocities was actually ReignBot's video on Wired Sounds for Wired People - I knew nothing about Serial Experiments Lain at the time, but I'd already decided I loved anything I considered an online mystery or art project, so soon I was delving not just into that site, but whatever was on the front page of Neocities and then some. I think something about this discovery that there were still weird and quirky sites made by individuals healed an inner child in me that I wasn't even aware of - with social media in general becoming a more and more hostile place, I decided on a complete whim that I wanted to make my own space ungoverned by companies that just wanted to make as much money off of me as they could, and little else.

So I decided to start my website in 2022! It was... extremely fucking hard at first. Like I said, coding does not come easy to me necessarily, even something as intuitive and generally simple as HTML and CSS. But despite my tried and true track record of quitting when something isn't as easy as breathing (blame the ADHD and gifted child syndrome, LOL), I kept going. And I am so glad I did.

A fun fact about me - when I first learned HTML and CSS, I fully could not figure out how to link the CSS sheet to the HTML, so in the first iterations of my site (which are still accessible), the majority of the styling was done inline, which I'm sure made experienced coders poking about sigh in disappointment. But! I very slowly have been learning, and I try and make every "major" addition to this little site include something new that I've learned. In this blog's case, Iframes. They are the bane of my fucking existence, but I managed to get them (somewhat!) working, and that accomplishment, as simple as it may be to more experienced webmasters, is making me regain my love of learning that school so effectively stamped out of me. It's genuinely rewarding when I spend hours stuck on something, only to figure it out and see it finally work!

And that doesn't even begin to describe the community. While I'm particularly shy and wouldn't call myself active by any means, the amount of genuinely kind comments I've received from people who just happen to have stumbled across my site is heartwarming, and I try to do the same. My appreciation for others is scattered across guestbooks and chatboxes, and I wouldn't have it any other way.

In short, there's a lot of reasons I love Neocities. Some are to do with the creative outlet that comes with coding, and the inspiration that comes with exploring others' sites. Some are to do with the freedom from the slog of modern social media platforms, and constant advertising. Some are to do with the community - with finding a site that someone has put their heart and soul into, and feeling like you're getting to know them just by browsing through their pages. And, of course, some are just to do with me healing my inner child, and finding something productive and fun to do on the internet that raised me.