Neocities Website

What is Neocities, you ask?

To answer that, we have to go back in time.

When I was a young’in, I was hanging out in the Funky Friends chatroom when someone showed me their Matmice website. I thought it was the best thing ever.

Matmice was a site that let kids learn basic HTML and host their own little websites using its bandwidth. Okay, technically they were more like webpages than full sites, but still. I felt like the smartest person in the room at school.

Once you got the hang of Matmice, most people moved on to Freewebs, and of course I did the same.

Matmice kind of held your hand. Everything was laid out for you and it was pretty hard to break anything. Freewebs, though? You were on your own. When joining up I was greeted with a completely blank screen and expected to write my own code. I had absolutely no clue what I was doing, and seeing how amazing other people’s websites were was… a bit overwhelming.

But I’m not one to give up, and I persevered. Eventually I figured out how to make layouts, mostly by borrowing other people’s code. Which, let’s be honest, is basically what coding is: stealing something and making it your own.

Eventually you could “graduate” from Freewebs and get hosted by someone with a .com domain (basically someone who had the cash to pay for their own website). I actually managed it, which meant learning FTP. That was a whole other challenge, but the girl hosting me was a great teacher.

When I started applying for college, I kind of grew out of it and the coummity also started to fizzle out. Around the same time, Matmice and Freewebs both shut down.

Which brings me to Neocities.

It’s basically the same idea as Freewebs. I discovered it a couple of years ago and have since spent a frankly ridiculous amount of time reliving my childhood.

Writing is still my favourite thing to do, but I’ve always really enjoyed coding too. And with AI around now, it’s made a lot of the trickier bits much easier to understand.

Here’s some screenshots: