I wish everyone would learn HTML and build their own website.

_creative
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There was something glorious back in the day when alot of friends would make their own websites. Put their art, or music or whatever onto them. Hoping people would drop by. Hosting a server was for the pros!

Geocities and other hosting sites made it easy for people to rent server space, a hotel, and put their own creations there. But it was hard. Sure there were programs that would help out with the creation of HTML pages, but learning to code this stuff wasn’t for everyone. So there was a market for what I call centralization and homogenization.

MySpace was cool. It took alot of effort to get it to look exactly how you wanted but it was possible. It had alot of personalization and the results were often extremely personal sites where you felt like you entered someone’s mind.

Blogspot was OK. People could costumize it to some extent. Graphically especially. Making backgrounds fit exactly how you wanted was hard. Blogspot had a very standardised look so it felt very centralised.

WordPress was OK. It was quite customizable, but for some reason felt extremely centralised and homogeneous. I can’t really put my finger on why. Maybe because they so aggressively pushed to take over the market for an extended period in the 2000s

I remember deliberately going to specific people’s websites…. Ie. Goodbrush to see if there was something new and exciting to look at for a minute or two. Pretty cool.

Often you have something like statcounter on there to see how many had the energy to drop by. It was very exciting.

Now we just post on “someone else’s” site. Like Instagram, artstation, Facebook, Twitter, bluesky… and it’s fine. Just a tad boring. But it’s totally fine. I post here and there as well.

There was just something genuine about these highly personalised places. Places that showed who you are. And what you can do.

Anyone can do it. Anyone can make a website. And I mean that! Anyone can figure out how to show 10 images in one row. Centered on the screen. And have a link to an email. I would write a letter to that email! I would!

Ramblings. I’ll delete this post. I’m just excited when someone says :”Internet is dead, but it doesn’t have to be, come to underscorexyz bla bla bla yadda yadda” :joy::sweat_smile::squinting_face_with_tongue:

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I think about this all the time
(the link is to a zine about making personal websites)

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Yes! Good! Keep em coming. Which sites, places did we have to play around with?

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For our podcast website we used neocities, which I guess is sort of a mordern geocities? My good brother helped put it together with the html and I think it turned out pretty sweet! Link to it is in my sig:

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Orrrrhhh that’s super cool! Good vibes. N64 and all. Gooooddd good vibes.

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I learned HTML on neopets, lmao. It was really cool opening up the source of webpages and just stealing how they were made as a kid.

Recently I did some css tuneups on my blog and I have this one page I made for Redline.

I don’t think it’s realistic to have everyone learn HTML, but I definitely think computers and phones do too much to hide how they really work nowadays, which is harming tech literacy.

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I really want to agree with you but then my own website that I’ve started years ago, and once in half a year get back to, change 2 lines of code and forget again, looks at me with a disappointment on its face.

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Eventually I’ll get some sort of HTML knowledge under my belt, but for now I’ve stuck to using Blogger.

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I want to learn HTML to start my own Neocities so bad but my memory SUCKS so I always forget the basics. Maybe I’ll finally watch one of theose HTML in 30 Minutes videos to actually jumpstart Neocities users.

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Do it. I believe in you.

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i want to do this SO BAD but i do so poorly w learning and especially self learning when it comes to coding x,)

But i have a sketch of ideas and everything.. one day..

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Well, the good part is you can download VS Code or sublime for free and just write the files all in the same folder. Then open them up in Firefox. No need to run things through a compiler or whatever.

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Agreed about HTML. There’s something SOOOOO satisfying about putting together the coding and then hitting refresh on your page and seeing it all come together.

I’ve been giving myself a crash course in HTML and dabble with it a little bit on our website: https://superghost.site/

I used CSS to add the marquee and the background gradient and made the About page entirely by hand with HTML :flexed_biceps:

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Yeah, no I see. Of course not everyone can do it or even want to. But I think there is alot of people who wanted to but it’s just less hassle to choose a less personal approach by choosing just uploading their art to a centralised station.

Love seeing the redline site! :clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap::clap:

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Everytime I dive back in, which I do every 1 or 2 years, I have to read up on everything……but HTML and css is so lightweight that you’ll get back into it easily and you can just “see sources” of simple websites and see how things down. Documentation and help for HTML and css is extensive! Love how some of the Web tutorial sites has numerous examples of how to use one code!

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I keep looking at neocities and wanting to give it a go, recreate the same kind of thing my first site was (with my free domain with it that then lapsed :frowning: )

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I’ve actually started learning HTML so that I can make my own website!! geocities rocks, and its been really interesting figuring out how HTML works. granted I do suck at coding (of the computer variety, at least… ask me about medical coding and that’s a different story!)

but it’s been really fun! getting to see the fruits of your coding labor, messing around with colors- man. its fun.

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I should really put my education to use and do something with websites ;;
Then again I have some excuse, my school offered four semesters of Java but only one of HTML. Never really had a use for either, the closest I got was using Ruby before college because rpgmaker uses (or used to use) it.
Always sick to see some good websites done by hand, a couple of friends have been making their own lately and one of those is real 90s-00s energy. If anything I enjoy the style i missed out on ;; people gotta keep up that energy. So tired of that soulless corporate aesthetic of today

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Everyone to build a personal website. Everyone.

Make it about whatever you want. That’s the whole point.

The idea of “learning to code” can be scary, but you will find that HTML and simple CSS are much easier than you think. Seriously - do you want to write articles? <p>This is a paragraph</p> Congratulations, you know some HTML now. Do you want the text to be white on a black background? body { background-color: black; color: white; } Congratulations, you know some CSS now.

Yeah, it gets a lot more complex than that, but you can learn as you go and copy what you need. I learned to build websites by copy/pasting from a cheat sheet on Angelfire.

And if you really do not want to bother with code, I will never discourage anyone from using a page builder. Try Neocities, try Wix, try Squarespace - find a tool you like and build cool websites.

Here’s a free website builder a lot of folks don’t know about: Tilda.cc

I’m also a big WordPress fan (the open source free version). If you’re hosting a personal website on your own and need a content management system don’t let haters turn you away from trying it. WordPress is far from perfect (every platform has drama), but it became the most popular for good reasons. It’s a good foundation for building whatever you want.

The World Wide Web was never meant to be so centralized. Claim your corner of the Web to obsess over whatever makes you happy. :heart:

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Oh yes! Well put yumil

So true. Claim your corner. Make it yours.

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