What introduced you to Neocities?

[Neonriser]

I feel I've told this story before, but I discovered Neocities in a web search when I got bored (as usual) and thought making a web page would be cool. I checked out the website and explored many of its sites, such as Exopet and Fauxx.

And then I thought "Wow, that's a cool place, I'm going to put a website on there just for fun" and the rest was history.

[Memory]

I couldn't find a topic asking this question, so I decided to create one!

In case you are in the dark about what Neocities is, I suggest you read this. I would have explained it myself, though I reckoned the official info page would certainly be more accurate!

Here's my story with Neocities:

Back in 2020, I found a piece of fan art on DeviantArt which would catch my attention. I searched up the media it was referencing and I soon stumbled across the "Randal's Friends" (Ranfren) project by captainhowdie through the official website. If you have browsed Neocities for a while, you must have seen it somewhere.

Believe it or not, up until this point I had no interaction with static websites and this came as a total surprise! I used to use specific social media sites I liked the most and browsed the web for mainly art-related guides. In short, I was completely unaware of what I had stepped on.

As I engaged with the project, I gradually became a fan myself. I commented on captainhowdie's DeviantArt profile expressing my enthusiasm for the comics, including a side note asking how the website was made. I was lucky enough to receive a reply which went something along the lines of: «I used HTML and Neocities has some great tutorials for beginners». You can pretty much guess what happened afterwards.

This singular random comment had such an important impact on my life. Not only was the discovery of Neocities a fresh change, but also a provision for brand new skills that would help me to grow as an artist. I would have missed out on so many great things if it wasn't for all of this.

How were you introduced to Neocities? Did it made an impact on your experience with the web or life in any way?

My neocities is a huge wip so I haven't shared it yet. But a while back I was looking through the pronouns page of someone who was part of a small online community I was in. They had their neocities in their links, genesisonpawz.neocities.org and thought the concept was pretty cool. I made a profile a few weeks later and I've been learning html and css ever since.

[Oceansandy02]

I saw a youtube video from Luvvstarkei about the dead internet theory and why I should make a website. I then looked in the comments section and people were recommending neocities. I already had some experience with html from school and other resources like codecademy, so that got me convinced to make one on there.

[SleepyCalaban]

One day I randomly discovered cohost and decided to join it because main stream social media wasnt cutting it for me. I then made a few mutuals one of which has their own website on neocities. I then fell into a deep dive of their site and discovered the MelonLand project. I followed that guide and slowly built my site and have been continuing to do so. It has changed drastically since then but I'm happy with the progress I've made and I'm happy I discovered the MelonLand Project and Neocities through that.

[GarbCat]

 I don't recall exactly when I learned about Neocities... It was definitely pre-COVID and I first saw it used as an alternative to Carrd, basically (remember Carrd? lol) so it must've been like 2018. What's really funny is that I've been fighting for my life in the wastelands of tumblr for almost 8 years and never saw *that* post so many people in this thread are referencing. I just saw personal sites in some peoples profiles and were generally being used as like, a more complex, more customizable Carrd. I made a Neocities account around then too as well as a site but it took me years until I got over the initial "ugggh too hard" hurdle that comes from learning html for the first time.

I just never really considered it as a viable place for me, I guess. It wasn't until You've Got Kat's "indie web" youtube video and the discovery of distantskies.neocities.org (a very cool fansite for Crystalis, an NES arpg I was playing at the time) that I started seriously considering Neocities as an option... Then it took me 2 more years to start learning html. oops

[invader_gvim]

While browsing reddit on my computer  and feeling depressed over how negative of a place that is, someone told me that if I wanted to whine about how mean everyone was that I should go to Melonland. For some reason he didn't like this place, but I have found it to be just the haven of nice-ness I have been longing for.   

From there, I learned about Neocities from Melonland posts and tried to make my own website using html I write in vim cus I think its cool.

In general the discovery of both neocities and melonland has been wonderful for me. Did you know that I have seen zero arguements since I got here? Its amazing. It feels good to share stuff and smile on the internet. Its a great big place for us all to make cool things. 

[PurpleHello98]

Apologies but this is going to be a long post---my Neocities site has been a long time coming!

I don't know exactly why, but I've always been slightly interested in HTML. I remember borrowing "HTML for Dummies" from the public library when I was around 8 years old and trying to work along with that book on the family laptop, but I don't think I ever got much beyond the very basic explanations of text styling and headings that they offered---it was probably too boring for kid me. 

A few years later, I was trying to be a YouTube animation personality/famous Wattpad author/making "OSes" on Scratch (does anyone else remember that site??) I wanted to make a Web site to be the hub of my on-line branding or whatever, so I turned to Weebly and made my best effort, although of course these days I'm not a fan of Weebly, Wix and the like. I was also the webmistress for my middle school newspaper, though that paper and everything that went with it is long gone now. I think it was a year or two after that when I had my first interaction with Neocities---I loved Pokemon at the time and found Garyland's "James is Gay" page, which was one of my favourite bookmarks for ages, but I didn't give Neocities a second thought.

Another year or two later, I happened back on the "Toasty Tech" Web site that I'd seen a lot throughout the years and is still one of my favourite Web sites (disclaimer here that I don't necessarily agree with everything the webmaster there says---honestly, from time to time some of his older writings read a bit edgelord-esque---but on the whole, I still like his site a lot!). There's a YouTube channel called OSFirstTimer that I've loved for ages now, and in one episode (maybe on a side channel?) the host went through some programs he had made during his high school days, including one called "HTMLive", which had one half of the program for writing HTML code and one half for visualizing the page live as you wrote it. It was pretty basic, but that's where I started building my first personal site in late 2018/early 2019!

At the time I still had no clue what Neocities was, so I hosted it on some random, kinda backwater free host called Awardspace at the URL http://purplehello98.dx.am. You can see I was still learning basic HTML---good Heavens, the line breaks!!! Maybe I was still just too used to the blank space on social media sites. But I still find it kind of charming, in a weird way---especially the fact that I used a marquee as a header, professional Web design be damned, just because I thought it looked cool, even if now with all the white space it looks a bit odd.

Soon enough I feel away from that site as well, but around the same time as I was working on that site, I discovered Geocities archives and it was really fun to surf around those! I discovered, to my chagrin, that Geocities was no more, but eventually I found Neocities, and almost five years ago, set up my account! Although at the time I was still on my Awardspace site and had no use for my Neocities account.

And finally, the moment you've all been waiting for! Winter break of 2020-21 I wasn't really in quarantine anymore (I went to a small school for high school so we were able to reopen with social distancing in fall of 2020) but still kind of stircrazy so I decided why not go back to making a site? I think my Neocities had had something a bit more than the basic placeholder---maybe I had put a coming soon banner or something, I don't know and sadly I didn't archive it. But on January 3, 2021, I started working on my current site and the rest is history! And this post was basically a history dissertation, but this topic is interesting enough that once I started, I couldn't stop! It's weird to realize that (since I count when the account was started as my site's birthday---although if you think of it, it's more like a conception in my case, but I digress) my site's almost five years old---I feel like I should do something to celebrate! Maybe a cool fifth anniversary page for January... who knows! But here's to another 5+ years :)