Maybe try and learn how to configure a firewall... like then, you're the big boss! Now you can decide, who is allowed on your network, and who doesn't deserve to waste a single byte at your place. For example, throw these entries in the so called "Hosts file" on your computer: 127.0.0.1 www.google.com 127.0.0.1 google.com Try to access google.com then. It doesn't exist anymore all of a sudden! Wait... the hosts file is undermined since Windows XP by default... so maybe try that with a lesser known website, that you want to see null and void in your own network.
Well, for controlling the wider internet, try to be elected president/dictator of your country maybe!
A text browser is actually the fastest internet expierience you can get. Try w3m on Linux or "Links" (got a current update this year) on DOS. Loading times of less than a millisecond can only be achieved through throwing all images and formatting out of the window. In the attachments there is how it looks in Lynx. I always add the file size to the alt-text to tell the old browser users how big that file would be, if they try to load it. Looking like: "Photo, 34KB: Image description". Also, that underlines how bloddy efficent converting images to a lower number of colours can be.
Wasn't it the old Internet Explorer that displayed the alt-text when hovering over the image for some seconds?
Emulator sites are unstable indeed, sites appear and disappear all the time and BEWARE: There is a lot of scammy trash in this domain that contains a virus if you don't know, what you're doing. And Nintendo is sueing them constantly...
-Free Software games, which usually have no big team behind them to make the super flashy 3D models. And you as a player can make suggestions to the developers, that might find a way to the game. One example would be Armagetron (http://www.armagetronad.org/), nerdy Snake with competitive online multiplayer. Runs on everything, even on low-spec Linux machines (not made for gaming at all).
Plenty of beautiful commercial games still run servers for multiplayer matches... The racing games Flatout 2 and TrackMania Nations Forever for example with lots of players. <b>:grin:omg:ta 1 (Warcraft 3), always known for the welcoming community. All those run on a 2007 Windows XP computer. And shooters like Star Trek Elite Force and Counterstrike 1.6 even run on Windows 98 with active servers!
Of course big social media sites took away users from the message boards in general. But some message boards are still there and have interesting discussions. So they survived as a technology, luckily! Because being able to host a forum is at least possible as opposed to hosting your own Facebook. Which wouldn't scale anyways, because these companies need big numbers for their business. So they have addiction mechanics in place to keep the big heap of users interested. Message boards can be small on the other hand and don't require psychological tricks to manipulate the users.
I'd like to point to a particular beautiful forum software: Acmlmboard. It actually looks very similar to Melonland, but with more, maybe even too many, options. One example that uses Acmlmboard would the ROM hacking message board kuribo64.net (https://kuribo64.net/board/).
My first message board experience was with a site called TCGS, where Yu-Gi-Oh cards could be traded with other users. How practical. The most interesting boards however were those, that had groups of computer enthusiasts on them...did you know, that there is a browser war going on for Windows XP? That old operating system from 2001 still has active developers! Can only be found on message boards.
Long live the message boards, source of knowledge, source of inspiration, source of the niche, source of freedom, also the freedom to flame and being flamed (might get extinguished, might not). Message boards are an important technology to have around.
Maybe some other source of talks, more from the serious business side: Computer History Museum. Old chaps and ladies talking about the computer industry of the 70s, 80s, 90s... Wozniak might tell you something about Games and Apples. And Sir Tim Berners-Lee probably has a word on HTML specs... definetly lots of interesting personalities there. Invidious-Link: https://invidious.snopyta.org/channel/UCHDr4RtxwA1KqKGwxgdK4Vg Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/user/ComputerHistory
Wikipedia. Fantastic for tables of Formula One race results or facts of an animal species in great detail. But politics... hair-raising admin fights over the so called "truth". For me, Wikipedia is a topic-dependant pig in a poke really.
Evil companies have infiltrated wikipedia, too. Akamai Technologies was the first example, I've whitnessed. And the company guy even introduced himself in the comments section as "Hello, I'm the PR Consultant for this company and would like to give you more happy in-depth information about us." Swooosh, the critique section was gone.
With some topic awareness in mind, yes, Wikipedia is a fantastic tool and such a great example for what a world-wide community can achieve. And the best thing is, you don't even need an account to start writing or improving a typo here and there.
Interesting. The power of words sound never be forgotten. The evil companies really have too many good PR consultants to frame their products. And well, nice message boards had always been there and will always be there as a counter-weight to the big social media, fortuneatly. Hopefully the message board owners will not make the mistake and fork, fork, fork their projects and communites for every single little detail that bothers them, because message boards only run well with a certain amout of participants.
Other podcasts: Ehm... well if you know some German...
From the Chaos Computer Club, it's Chaosradio , especially the old episodes before 2002/2003, really covered computer stuff in extreme depth in 3 hour sessions on public (!) radio.
If you want to make your site look good on smartphones, maybe simplify the layout to a single column, scrolling from the top to the bottom. The navigation bar would be horizontal then (on the top and optionally on the bottom). And you don't have to think too much about a complex layout. Limits the creativity of course, but might be a good start for you (and you make the smartphone users happy).
Stealing code and ideas from other sites would be perfectly fine for me. Maybe try to modify it slightly (delete spaces and line breaks, put the tags in a different order, add nonsense comments in the code) so that you can declare it as being "inspired" from somewhere else.
I wouldn't start making a webpage through messing around with the plain HTML tags. Use a WYSIWIG editor if you're unsure at the beginning. Then you can twist and turn around your content on the web page like a puzzle until it fits for your eye. My choice for an HTML editor is Nvu, that is nowadays being called Kompozer.
These two gangsters were hunting for my finger. However not without reason. If you twist your finger around (cramp and strech it), the mini dinos will mistake it for a worm.
I think RSS feeds are best used for sites which rarely have new posts. Like Kugee (razorback95.com), that old-style Windows entusiast. Definetly has an eye for the visuals of the early times and even produces videos with old equipment. https://www.razorback95.com/rss.xml
Having low-colour images without optimising the file size. To be honest, most pages on Neocities fall short on this. Call themselves "retro", "old style", from the "yesterday's web", but completly forget about optimising file sizes for the machine's of yesterday! The actual HTML code is irrelevant in this case, it's about the images, that take a lot of space and can take time to load. Without much/any quality loss, you could transform a low-colour 180 KB PNG to 60 KB. Just convert the image to 256 colours. Or even 128, or even 64... (with GraphicsGale for example). And that's the difference between loading immediately or loading scrappy on a bad mobile connection or on an old computer.
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