Yahoo! PageBuilder / SiteBuilder and it's equivalents.

[Inkerlink]

After discovering Neocities and it's community, and deciding to publish a website on it, the next step was to naturally start building a website! Neocities offers a free introduction to HTML and there are plenty of other resources on the web for learning HTML and CSS for free. One of the first questions I had when starting to learn HTML though was "Was there anything similar to the old Geocities PageBuilder that works for quickly throwing together a website without any prior programming knowledge?".

While learning HTML is fairly easy to start learning, it does take a not insignificant amount of time to learn enough to get more than a rudimentary website up and running. And for some people, it's much easier and faster to use a tool like the old Yahoo PageBuilder / SiteBuilder that allows you to build an HTML site using a GUI and click-and-drag elements and items, with no extra coding knowledge required.
While I am very grateful for Neocities' existence and the freedom it offers, even compared to Geocities, one thing I feel is sorely lacking is having a dedicated page building tool like the PageBuilder or SiteBuilder they offered. Getting a site up and running was much easier, much quicker, and it was very attractive to me as a kid since I could just click-and-drag pictures and text onto a page and make something. I could experiment and play with it as if it were a toybox of sorts. One other thing I noticed while browsing Neocities sites, is there are quite a lot more 'bare bones' sites that have nothing done to them. I imagine a lot of people register on the site, expecting a Geocities-like experience, but get turned off when they learn they have to know HTML in order to make a site. Don't get me wrong, I'm NOT saying HTML is super hard to learn or anything, in-fact it's easier to learn than ever, but it's still harder than just toying around with a page building tool in my humble opinion.

I did a little bit of research and as far as I can tell, the actual PageBuilder for Yahoo still exists, but is basically non-functional according to this blog post I found. The SitBuilder is still downloadable as well, but I actually have no idea if it still functions, works on modern operating systems, or even if it was like the PageBuilder in the first place, since that was all I used back when Geocities was still around.

I've also done a bit of research into looking for alternatives, but the overwhelming majority of them nowadays, such as Squarespace etc, just give you a basic template that you 'fill out' sort of like a questionnaire to put content into the pre-defined spaces they offer. They don't really give you the same 'hands-on' tools that the old page-builders of old gave you. Not only that, but pretty much all of the pre-defined themes and templates they offer are all minimalistic and modern, and have barely any personality whatsoever. They just don't stack up, in my opinion.

With all of that being said, I made this topic mostly to discuss any experiences you may have had with the PageBuilder / SiteBuilder, but I'd also like to hear your thoughts on a site like Neocities possibly making their own site building tool and offering it in order to reach a much broader audience? And finally, are any of you aware of any alternatives that I may have missed that you'd like to tell us about? I'm very open to hearing about any alternatives you can think of! I'd love to see a way for everyday people to have access to making websites again and feel like it was a big part of what made Geocities so successful, and special.

[TheFrugalGamer]

I never did use this tool, but when I get back on to my Windows PC, I think I'm going to have to try out that download. I'm curious to see if there's anything I could do to get it working.

Since I'm not on Neocities myself, I have no idea if they'd be willing to take on the responsibility for something like this. If you're interested in putting something like this together, I think you should throw it up on your site and run with it! Then folks can link to it as part of a "Welcome to Neocities" package, or even the welcome posts that Meloooon posts here, and it could gain traction that way. If it ended up being successful enough, you could always offer the code over to Neocities, if you're into that sort of thing.

[Inkerlink]

If you're interested in putting something like this together, I think you should throw it up on your site and run with it!

Oh, I apologize if I didn't explain myself very well, I'm not even remotely close to being a programmer or anything of the sort lol. I would be about as useful as a wet towel in a rain storm doing something like that.
Also I'm not sure if this is what you meant, but the idea I had was Neocities would develop their own software, not revive Geocities software. I'm sure if they did, that would have some kind of legal repercussion possibly lol.
Again, if I misunderstood you though, I apologize! 

[TheFrugalGamer]

Oh, no worries! I misunderstood you as meaning that you wanted to start looking into making something like it, probably because reading about it I find myself kind of tempted to do that myself. Lol, I was probably too focused on my own thoughts to stop and read more closely!

And yeah, even if it were totally legal to revive the old Geocities code, it would probably run terribly in modern browsers. But copying the functionality, on the other hand...well I have fewer qualms about that because there are only so many ways to do things using html and the like.

At any rate, I'm sure if Neocities did implement something like it there would be people who would use it. Back in the day there were a lot of nerds who hated on site builders, but hopefully that sort of elitism isn't as popular any more.

[debleb]

a page builder could certainly help make neocities a little more accessible! although we all know html and css are pretty easy to learn it can seem very daunting for people who aren’t already into it especially with how arcane the web seems nowadays. it’d be useful for making quick mockups of new page ideas too.

[TheFrugalGamer]

Ok, so I was really intrigued by this, and I've done some searching around and it turns out you actually can get this running on Windows 10 without too many issues. It relies on an older version of Java, which Oracle is really, really picky about keeping around, so I had to go to the Internet Archive to find it. Once you've got that, the whole thing runs without too many problems.

The main issue is that publishing your finished site is complicated. The "Publish" button doesn't do anything since it's meant to specifically go to Yahoo!'s servers. You can copy the files out of the user directly and upload them to your host, but none of the images or links work. I'm messing with it now to see if there's an easy way around it for folks who still want to play with it.

Here's the test page I worked up in it and uploaded by accessing the files directly:
https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/SiteBuilder%20Test/

[Inkerlink]

Ok, so I was really intrigued by this, and I've done some searching around and it turns out you actually can get this running on Windows 10 without too many issues. It relies on an older version of Java, which Oracle is really, really picky about keeping around, so I had to go to the Internet Archive to find it. Once you've got that, the whole thing runs without too many problems.

The main issue is that publishing your finished site is complicated. The "Publish" button doesn't do anything since it's meant to specifically go to Yahoo!'s servers. You can copy the files out of the user directly and upload them to your host, but none of the images or links work. I'm messing with it now to see if there's an easy way around it for folks who still want to play with it.

Here's the test page I worked up in it and uploaded by accessing the files directly:
https://www.thefrugalgamer.net/SiteBuilder%20Test/

Hey that's really cool! I'll definitely give this a shot when I get home from work today, I'd love to build a page using this and see what I can pull off. Like I said above, I've never used the SiteBuilder, only the PageBuilder, so I'm curious to see if it's any different from the latter.
Are the images stored somewhere else? And do the links just miss their tags or something?

This is my character :3

Uh, wrong thread perhaps? 

[Memory]

Uh, wrong thread perhaps?

Oh s@!&%, you're right. Lmao

[TheFrugalGamer]

Hey that's really cool! I'll definitely give this a shot when I get home from work today, I'd love to build a page using this and see what I can pull off. Like I said above, I've never used the SiteBuilder, only the PageBuilder, so I'm curious to see if it's any different from the latter.
Are the images stored somewhere else? And do the links just miss their tags or something?

Uh, wrong thread perhaps? 

It looks like there's a

Code

<base>

tag that tells the browser the page should be looking on the C: drive instead of the relative link path. I've deleted those and it fixes the image issue, but the links to other pages are still wonkey. It looks like it's hard-coded all the links to go to the preview directory, so I could write instructions on editing those out. I just wouldn't want it to get too complicated for non-savy folks. Probably a "search and replace" function could do it.