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bottlesforbeasts · 6 months

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The Old Web pt. 2: what's in a personal website?

The internet is full of possibilities.

This sticks out to you much more than usual when you start exploring the community of personal websites, many of which are hosted by neocities. With most social media, you have very limited customization of what your page looks like, what format of content you can post, and how users may interact with your posts. Personal websites change all of that and allow you to create something completely outside the box. You get to control every minute detail of how your website is viewed, from the fonts to the way the user's cursor looks.

For the sake of this post, a "personal website" is a website that someone created for their own personal use, not to promote a brand or sell a product. These websites are often made almost entirely from scratch using HTML and other coding languages. You can find many examples of these websites at this link. Warning: most of these websites are not meant to be viewed on mobile and might malfunction.

https://href.li/?https://neocities.org/browse

Personal websites are often a mishmash of different things the webmaster (the person who made the site) likes or finds important. Sometimes they focus on a single topic, a topic or fandom the webmaster is really into, or something they want to teach others about. While I browsed these websites I noticed a few tabs that often appear in the sidebars of these websites.

⋆｡°✩₊ °✦ ‧ ‧ ₊ ˚✧₊ °✦Blinkies!⋆｡°✩₊ °✦ ‧ ‧ ₊ ˚✧₊ °✦

Blinkies are little flashing images, usually with text, that are displayed on a website. There's a popular blinkie generator website called blinkies.cafe where you can make your own. Many personal websites have an entire page dedicated to listing all of the blinkies they've collected. It's hard to trace the origins of many because they can easily be downloaded and used without permission. Here are a few links to see some examples.

●○●○●○●○●○●○●○Webrings●○●○●○●○●○●○●○●

Webrings are described by webmaster neonaut as "curated link chains, or tiny community-shared directories where links are shared one at a time by clicking through to the next website." So rather than using google to find old web websites (impossible) many will link to other similar websites, so you can discover new websites by clicking on links, kind of like if you've ever fallen into a wikipedia rabbit hole.

Webrings are like little virtual clubs, and can have any theme from queer people who code to the art of being funky. Websites will link back to a centralized page, like the one shared above, or the websites will link directly to each other, having a buttons page with every other webring member's button.

●～●～●～●～●～Buttons●～●～●～●～●～●～

88x31 buttons are how a person gets from website to website on the old web. They look a lot like blinkies, something I eventually realized after frustratedly spam-clicking blinkies expecting them to link me somewhere. These are just as decorative, except they serve as a sort of advertisement to get someone interested in their website. They may have tiny images, colors, or fonts that match the aesthetic of their website. Buttons can have their own devoted section, or be a fixture on the side or bottom of a site.

✧･ﾟ: ✧･ﾟ: Shrines / Collections :･ﾟ✧:･ﾟ✧

A shrine is something you dedicate to something you love, perhaps a deity or ancestor you want to honor. A web shrine is a page or collection of pages dedicated to someone's interest, obsession, hyperfixation, or hobby. It tends to have lots of information about the topic, relevant pictures or videos, and the webmaster's own personal ties to the topic. A fandom blog could in a way be considered a shrine. There are tons of interesting, niche, and obscure shrines out there, such as this one about an old product called WebTV. There are also fairly common shrine topics like pokemon and hello kitty. Many shrines are combined with a collections page, where a webmaster shows off their collection of items. This can be a group of pictures of the actual items, or just pictures of ones that a person wishes they had.

⟡⋆⭒˚｡⋆✧˖°⁺˚Pets, dollz, and toyboxes˖°.✧˖°.⟡⋆⭒˚｡

Pets are little png images you put on your site because you like the way they look. They can be commissioned, pre-drawn and put up for paid "adoption" by artists, or just right-click-saved from directories like this one. A toybox is a page dedicated to storing all these pngs, many of which link back to where the webmaster found them. Dollz are sort of different. Dollz are kind of like a DIY dressup game, where artists create a base, clothing, hair, and other accessories, and you can mix and match in order to create your own unique look. This website goes into a bit more detail about the history of dollz.

📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎📎

This is just a quick summary of all the things I've most commonly seen on personal websites, you can learn more by browsing the websites I've linked or browsing through all the different websites neocities has to offer. One of my favorite websites on neocities is called Lizzie Smithson, a webcomic detailing the adventures of a stylish cat thief who lives in the city.

Neocities is great because it offers a more intimate glimpse into someone's mind than you could ever find on mainstream social media. People who create personal websites do so just because they want to. They're not looking for likes and followers and validation. Maybe part of the reason personal websites have been on decline so much is that making content for the hell of it isn't all that common anymore. Capitalism tells us that we should try to monetize everything we do for enjoyment, it's not enough to just create something because we feel like it. And if you can't monetize it, you should seek some sort of validation through interactions, numbers created to hack our brains into churning out content that people want to see, regardless of if it's something WE want to make. This system, this Web 2.0, is what spawned the Old Web Movement, which is dedicated to creating an online space free from monetization, free from algorithms, where people can be truly creative and make great things. The Old Web movement and manifesto is what part 3 will be all about.

#old web #the old web #webcore #blinkies #personal website #cybercore #old internet #internet history #internet culture #neocities

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bottlesforbeasts · 6 months

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i am BEGGING yall to give neocities a try 😭 don't even make an intricate website, i haven't!

but it's a form of entertainment so un-corporate, so "playground friends", so "bunch of kids in the woods trip sharing silly little interests and thoughts"

where else are you gonna get the experience of seeing someone's ceramics, then playing a game of finding doggies in a jpeg of a house, then scroll to see their diary entry on "why gandalf never married" while listening to their very chill spotify playlist. LIKE 😭

i have never felt more stimulated. i have never felt more curious. i have never felt so connected to an individual in such a personal level!

it feels real and human. god-

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bottlesforbeasts · 6 months

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id die for the internet archive over my country

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bottlesforbeasts · 6 months

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bottles-for-beasts post masterlist

Intro

.・。✭・.・✫・The Old Web.・。.・゜✭・.・✫

Neocities and geocities

What's in a personal website?

Coming next: The Old Web Manifesto

Some things I'd love to see in my askbox:

websites I should explore

topics you want me to write a post about

your favourite youtubers or online celebrities

fanfictions I should read and review

your favorite social media accounts, especially on tumblr

youtube videos or playlists I should watch

your own personal internet experiences

#internet history #internet culture #the old web

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bottlesforbeasts · 8 months

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The Old Web part 1: Neocities and Geocities

Today I discovered the Old Web movement.

As a 2003 kiddo I was not an internet user in the late 90s and early 2000s when the "old internet" was at its height. But I recently discovered that there lies a place beyond our Twitters and Instagrams of the present. Deeper into the internet there is a thriving community of personal, amateur-coded, not-for-profit websites, many of which are hosted on Neocities.

But before we can really get into neocities, we must talk about it's ancestor geocities. Geocities was created in 1994 by David Bohnett and John Reznor to be a website-hosting service and a way to discover people's personal websites. In 1999 it was bought out by yahoo! (the destroyer) at a time when it was the third most popular website on the whole internet. Yahoo! changed a bunch of shit, forgoing the "cities" aspect of grouping together websites of a certain theme so that people can discover websites related to their interests. Yahoo! instead wanted to focus on using the person's yahoo! usernames in the URLs. This is one of the first of MANY times that corporations will ruin things on the internet for the sake of profit.

Yahoo! eventually decided geocities wasn't profitable enough, even after the website had added advertisements, paid premium benefits (which screwed over people who didn't pay), and a geocities watermark on every website it hosted that you couldn't remove. Geocities was killed by yahoo! in 2009.

Shortly after the website was announced to be shutting down Internet Archive (bless them) and a few other groups made it their mission to archive the geocities websites that would otherwise be wiped from the internet forever. These campaigns were widely successful.

After geocities was gone, there was now a niche to fill. Neocities sprung up four years later, taking its place. In 2023 it boasts over 600,000 websites being hosted on its platforms. It has links to people's personal websites, a webcomic where a cat teaches you HTML, and many guides to making your own website.

The community of custom website owners is alive and well, equipped with HTML knowledge, friendship, a healthy dose of nostalgia, and their own manifesto. They believe in the idea that the internet was better before everything was dictated by profit, algorithms, and efficiency. I'll get more into the community aspect in part 2.

#neocities #geocities #old web #webcore #internet #internet history #internet culture #textpost #90s internet #00s internet #old internet

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bottlesforbeasts · 8 months

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I really really really love/hate the internet.

It never ceases to amaze me when I remember it was created by human beings. It seems like a bunch of images/concepts/shouts into the void, and yet behind every single element there's a person. And that's so terrifying and amazing because it's like nearly everything that we've created as a species ends up here in some form or another. And if it somehow hasn't yet, there are groups working hard to make sure it does.

I am unique from many in my generation (born 2003) because I spent a large portion of my formative years with very little internet access. As a kid I was all over those kids MMOs and virtual pet games, and as a teen I was really into tiktok, instagram, and youtube. But in between those times, after I had developed the curiosity to venture outside of neopets dot com, but before social media took over everyone's life and the internet was more than like 6 websites, I wasn't able to explore and really see what's out there. I never ran the gauntlet, stumbled upon bestgore, saw porn at age 10, was groomed on kik, or any of those experiences that so many of gen z seem to identify with. So when I gained access to the internet, all I really wanted to do was use social media and message my friends like every other kid my age was doing at the time.

Then I discovered something called elsagate. I was thrown into this rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, deleted youtube videos, and insane reddit posts about this bit of youtube that nobody except children knew about - until a few parents realized what the fuck their kids were watching and alerted the press about it.

Around the same time, I got into iceberg videos, I researched youtube drama, I talked to randos on omegle, I spent time lurking on the incel forums, I read about subreddits that had been banned, I listened to podcast episodes about real-life crime that got it's start on obscure fetish forums, I read wikipedia pages for fun, and I found some of the weirdest porn that the internet has to offer.

The truth is, I'm obsessed with the internet. And yet, there aren't a ton of books about the cultural aspect of things. Not much freely accessible research on the various fandoms, subcultures, fetish groups, micro-religions, and communities that are unique to the internet. That sucks for someone like me who wants to learn more without having to find everything from primary sources, but it's also great because that means I have a niche to fill and a hobby besides living vicariously through my sims.

I wanted this blog to be a neocities website but alas, I am a dumbass with no desire to learn basic HTML, or at least no drive to do it at the moment. I might figure it out and move everything over there but for now I'm just gonna keep things here where it's user-friendly and doesn't make me type these things <<<>>> all the time.

I'm going to write a bunch about a subject I think is interesting, do lots of research, and include my sources at the bottom. I will be using wikipedia and youtube as sources because A) aforementioned lack of secondary sources about shit like otherkins and femcels, and B) it's a tumblr account, not a college essay. I dropped out of college for a reason, I'm not about to subject myself to MLA APA format hell because I wanna write about the cultural impact of coolmathgames.

Posts will be coming whenever I am motivated to write, but hopefully I'll have something every other week or so. If you want to suggest a topic/nag me to post more/ask for more info my ask box is open. I'll also try to keep a masterlist of posts + links pinned for easy access ✭

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