The personal web as an archive - a late night friend experience

[shevek]

Let me tell you about an experience some friends and me just had!

We were talking in voice chat about something historical, when one of us used Google to research that specific thing. What showed up was someone's personal website - maintained since 2001, until now, November 2023, in the typical old web aesthetic.

Quickly, we didn't just read that particular subpage of it, but clicked through the entire site. It turns out that this personal site chronicled almost everything that happened in that person's city since its conception, as well as personal adventures, things going on with the friends and acquaintances of the poster, and all kinds of things! Lots of images and information.

We all wanted to go to bed close before we discovered that (around 11pm) but we ended up staying up until past 2am, adventuring throughout the site, sending each other links, reading texts of the website to each other and being amazed and laughing.
So we not only ended up learning about our initial query, but we learned so much about this person, that city, and its local festivities. We now unironically think about visiting that city for fun

I wanted to share this experience because I wanna show how your personal sites can have an impact! You can sit on this for decades, providing an important historical resource, showing the best side of your club, city or hobby, and make people smile. It's an amazing piece of work to look back on and clearly, a lot of effort and dedication went into it. Maybe that will be you and your site

I don't wanna keep the site away from you -  it was ernst-huber.de. Our favorite entry was the one dedicated to the Bullenschiss - a little fun game the city offers where a piece of land will get fenced in and separated into squares. The participants then bet a little amount of money on a square. They release an ox on the pasture for 1,5h and the square it poops on wins Never heard of this before.

[MrsMoe]

I strongly believe that there's no better pastime than getting absorbed by internet rabbit holes, and I can't tell you how many times I've ruined my sleep schedule because I found a cool neato website to dig into.

Honestly, I think my favorite thing about Neocities is how it's made this easier than ever. I love browsing through someone's personal site and finding out about every personal detail they share about themselves. Their interests, their hobbies, their personalities, their creations.....I love learning about people so much 

[wygolvillage]

Personal websites are so relaxing to browse through like this! It's so fun getting to see snippets of someone's life, in a way I've never really experienced on social media. I guess people are more honest on personal blogs compared to the hyper-curated and "posed" nature of, say, instagram posts.

Then when you're done you can find the links page and start the process over again on another site 

[shevek]

Honestly, I think my favorite thing about Neocities is how it's made this easier than ever.

So true! I remember going through the Activity page a ton, and it motivated me to sign up and make a website in the first place. It made making one look so approachable and doable. Not just the coding itself ("if others can do it, I can do too") but also the design-aspect (it is allowed to not look like a polished sales website - encouraged, even!) and diversity (people without a coding background, women, people aged 14 or 60, etc.).
With other sites, the lack of this can hold people back. It looks complicated, it looks like only people into programming do it, or people who have a product to offer or sell themselves as knowledge workers. It is not shown to be for fun, for nothing, about nothing. There's an air of having to do something "real" and "productive" with it. But not on Neocities, and that's great.