Share ur site manifesto!

[Melooon]

Site Manifestos!

Also known as - Site philosophies, "Why I make my site" pages, "what I like about the web" pages, or just about pages; site manifestos are one of the more unique web revival ideas!

A site manifesto is a page that explains why you made your site! For some people that means listing all the evils of social media, for others it simply means saying they enjoy collecting blinkies, for me it was a chance to share some random philosophies 

A site manifesto can be long or short, it can be images, or words. It can be a poem, or a list or a story. It's simply a way of expressing why you made your site and what you love about web crafting (many people, actually do this on their about page, and that's a totally valid form of manifesto)

They are a great way of inspiring others and encouraging people to get into web crafting! I hope you’ll share your manifesto here; and if you haven't made one yet, give it a try, it can be a great way to find meaning in your site and your web experience!

If you don't have one and you're unsure where to start maybe ask yourself some of these questions:

• Why did I make my site?
• What does the web mean to me?
• What excites me about web revival-style sites and/or web crafting?
• What's my hope for the future of technology?
• If I lived in the perfect digital world what would it look like?
• What scares me about the web and technology?
• What's the ideal web crafting playlist?
• How does participating in the web revival scene (MelonLand, iMood, Status Cafe, Neocities etc) affect your life?
• If your site was a nice soup, what would be its ingredients??
• If your great-grandkids find your site in 100 years, what do you wanna show them about this moment in time?
• What is the World Wide Web?

[Anonicus]

I don't have a Manifesto mainly due to that word feeling bad and radicalized. But instead I guess you can say I have my Opinions.



1. I believe in the Freedom of Expression, Agree or Disagree. That means Freedom to Disagree with those I see.
2. I believe that if there's a service that I don't like using, That I will use an alternative that is hopefully better. If not, I do it myself.
3. However you use the Internet should not be forced upon how Others use the Internet.
4. But also, I am strongly against the Internet being accessible all this time. And yet, Look at how the place turned out to be.


That's all I really have in the end. I also think that plenty of Manifestos out there likes to throw out buzzwords while not making sense as to why the word was placed there to begin with. *Cough*Decentralization*Cough*

Anyways, That's what I gotta say.

[Melooon]

don't have a Manifesto mainly due to that word feeling bad and radicalized. But instead I guess you can say I have my Opinions.

I was wondering if that's why people were shying away from this topic 

I don't know the root of your feeling; I do understand it though, but I will say that you have a right to own your own mind; you don't just have to have opinions, you can have beliefs that you hold true today even when you know they will change tomorrow.

Of course, we can use any word that suits, however, I don't believe in letting other people define the world around me; I chose the word manifesto because of its history and meaning within web communities that go's back all the way to the start of the internet and the start of the web, even if I don't always agree with that history or how people later use/abuse it - I don't think its right to let words have the power to scare us. Things can be radical without being sinister, and I think you have to break limits to make art. So thats why Iv stuck with the word so far 

[Gans]

My ideas are quite different from the most website makers here. I admire lots of your artful interfaces and graphics. But I know my own priorities and skills for my very own web project.

Technical goal: Make sites load veeeery fast.
Reason? My Windows 98 machine is old and underpowered. I can only be a happy internet user, when sites are optimised for efficency. To be honest the modern mobile devices would profit from efficency too. Even if the network speeds have improved, sites on mobile often load poorly from what I can see here.
How to achieve efficency: Be stupid and put some solid roadblocks in your way. Use only HTML4, an already well developed, simple standard. No CSS, no Javascript. Has to look good in a text browser. As a result, the website looks good in any browser on Windows 98.

Pictures are allowed, highly encouraged, as they improve the understandability of the contents. However those images have to be optimised for file size. Colours have to be reduced to a necessary minimum.

Content goal: Archiving and sharing information and data (mainly for myself). Looking seriously nerdy professional. Everyone can make a Word document. But having a website makes you the real web boss!
No blinking GIFs. They disrupt the calmness and steer away from the information.

[Melooon]

@Gans one of the really fascinating things about your design philosophy has gotta be how you've linked your site on this forum: "Web page of the angry goose (but you have to decipher the link first)" http://g[]a{)n(sa()n)g(}r()i[)f+f{).}d-e

I don't think Iv seen anyone else do this game/speed break on linking before - you've encrypted your own destination! I'd love to hear more about how you came up with that idea 

[shevek]

I am also really curious, since the deciphered link never worked for me either

[Gans]

I've noticed people obscuring their e-mail adresses with similar stuff: jean(minus)jacques(att)lespoules(dot)fr

That's a moderate form of spam bot protection. What comes to mind is also putting the e-mail adress on an image in some obscure font.
It's not bulletproof, but lots of spam bot crawlers won't be able to read it that way. Plain text on the other hand is easily machine readable.

My site has to be kept under the radar as good as possible. Those mentioned (https://forum.melonland.net/index.php?topic=1585) local website laws might get problematic. But the internet is too practical as a medium, so let's try and circumvent these rules or ignore them altogether, I thought. My "paranoia approach" is to minimise attack surfaces wherever possible (to have room for leaving attack surfaces open in other areas). It sounds broken, but I can claim to live plenty of contradictions. My "privacy over everything"-self is slowly moving to the background. And little steps towards showing things to the world are happening. Obscuring the link is a way to balance these two ideas.

Now to decipher the link on an old browser like Netscape Navigator, just click on the link it will try to load the gibberish text. Unsurprisingly, it will fail. So you then have to delete all characters, that don't belong into an URL, like brackets of all kind. The "minus" must go too, because else the top-level domain ".de" wouldn't be stated correctly.
New browsers behave differently however. They don't get, that this gibberish is a link. So you have to go to the source code of this Melonland site (right click on a free spot, view page source), search for the info text "Web page of the angry goose". Then you'll find the gibberish link somewhere before or after.

Ehm, please don't tell anybody, shhhhh... (paranoia striking through again)

[kurohaato]

I finally got around to making mine! Flash warning up front because I used some rainbow text. https://whiteheartrainbowsoul.neocities.org/manifesto.html I knew I wanted to make it short and sweet, so I did. I feel like a lot of web manifestos become these massive 20 page essays that talk about all the ways the modern internet sucks and good for you if yours is like that but it's just not my style.

[CytricAcid]

You inspired me to write a little (a lot) on my website why I decided to take up making my own neocities site!
https://internationalfeel.neocities.org/manifesto.html is my link. I basically rambled on about why I felt drawn to the web revival movement and what made me love the old internet, as well as why I'm here now. Its a bit heavy but not heavily so, but as a career artist who grew up on the old web, I hope my perspective of my desires for interpersonal communications vs my need to promote myself on the internet provide an interesting view.

[Bede]

Mine can be found here! Go to 'articles'. I did my best to keep it short, but it can be boiled down to a few the following:

The corporate-led web is in on a racket, and doesn't care about its users; only the profits users can get them. It encourages us to get us to make ourselves into "brands", and smooth out anything painful to look at. One can try to fight this by:

• Spreading out their online presence
• Creating their own site
• Prioritizing privacy and safety by running VPNs, adblockers, junk data generators, etc
• Being unabashedly weird, baby!

[starbreaker]

I might have to write a new manifesto, but in the meantime I have this one: "Party Like It's 1989". I use profanity on my site so if that bothers you don't click through.

I’m not going to try to explain it, but whenever I look at a website that is nothing but text — with maybe a few lines of CSS as a treat — I have this feeling of rightness, like this is how the web ought to be. It’s like Tim Berners-Lee and his crew got this mostly right back in 1989 and we’ve been f---ing it up ever since.

[starbreaker]

Got a newer manifesto for y'all: "This is Not My Side Hustle".

[di]

Got a newer manifesto for y'all: "This is Not My Side Hustle".

I enjoyed reading this, it's really funny and also really well-put. Love the discussion on push vs. pull and (not) monetizing your writing.

[starbreaker]

I enjoyed reading this, it's really funny and also really well-put. Love the discussion on push vs. pull and (not) monetizing your writing.

Thanks! I don't know if I'll change my mind about trying to sell books; I'd have to write some more first. But I think the Web lost something when it became generally accepted that it was OK to try to make money here. When all of the major sites are about people shouting over each other so that their sales pitch is the one you hear, the Web turns into QVC with a comments section.

Can't we do better? Don't we deserve better?

[Guest]

I finally made one for myself! The link is here, however if you can't view it for whatever reason, I'll copy and paste the info below too!

I'm here for a fun time. That's it. I'm not online for anything other than fun, and whenever something stops being fun to me I easily and readily leave it behind. My enjoyment is my top priority, and I encourage you to do the same. Be selfish, it's important.

It's cool to be kind. Caring selfishly for myself doesn't suddenly eradicate my willingness and practice in being kind, and I make a point each day to remain kind in my interactions online. It's true what they say: You never know what someone is going through behind the screen. It's important to treat fellow net users with care.

The net is yours. Do whatever you want with it. Care not for crafting something "important" or "unique". As earnestly as possible— make something you and only you is happy with. Because ultimately, nothing else matters, and nobody can tell you otherwise. Not even me!!! Because the net is yours!

MOST IMPORTANTLY TO ME: THE NET IS FOR SHARING. By this I mean I love to put content out for free for use by anyone!!! Sharing without any attachment, no credit, no requirements, no nothing! Just sharing because that's what the net is for. Everything and anything, from daily thoughts all the way up to software or the likes. We have unlimited connection at our fingertips and I think it should be used for sharing. Because, what else? Take it, break it, edit it, love it.