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

I’m really glad to see a Publii shout-out. I discovered it last year and still haven’t actually deployed anything on it yet. :sweat_smile:

I’m currently rebuilding ZeldaArchive.org to use Publii (instead of WordPress - which is overkill for the project).

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I have websites!

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Netlify is great! My own website is also hosted on there! Very simple if you’re willing to glance at the docs!

@wolscott I’d also just recommend to get a VPS from Hetzner or another company to host your database (managed database solutions can get a bit expensive), and then use something like Netlify functions as your “backend”. I’ve only used them for one project, but as a developer, it seemed straight forward enough.

If you need something more complex, then you can also run your backend on the same VPS as your database. It should be plenty to handle the traffic. The only concern is AI scraping bots, but I think the cheapest VPS should be able to to handle that.

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Love this sentiment and energy. I have a ton of web experience, my first sites with angelfire and geocities way back in the day, grabbing books from the library to learn html in the ages before useful search engines or even knowing what to search for. I remember being completely intimidated by it but piecing it together, often viewing source on existing sites to reverse engineer and learn how folks were accomplishing different things. Used front page for a while (and sometimes tempted to crack it back out just for the nostalgia of nested tag clusterfuckery) but mostly worked in notepad for many years. It became a career and burnout killed some of the magic, but I’m starting to recover some of that creative energy and get so much out of seeing many of the retro web projects popping up around corners of the net.

If folks are looking for free hosting for static sites, I’m happy to provide it and help with setup (tips / pay-what-you-want also welcome). We can jump on a chat or call and walk through the setup - ideally create a github repo and setup some actions so it can push automatically on new commits (or similar free tooling). I hate M$ but azure/github have a lot of free services. I’m also available for html/js or other coding help or Q&A. Part of my recovery has been to step away from the industry and this would be a way to reconnect with my original love of the tech and creative web pursuits without it being for the profit of exploitative capitalists.

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I have a site that I have been building for a little bit) I’m using neocities to host it, but I’m hoping to get better with html and give the pages unique features. Something to strengthen it, so I gotta get back into this.

I think that everyone should learn html, its a very useful skill and im tired of seeing ads like “let ai build ur website!!!”

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I’ve been sitting on the domain sodap.one for the last year or so—I’ve been meaning to make a personal website, but so far all I’ve done with it is make a couple email addresses, and make it my Bluesky handle. I used to know how to make websites from my high school and early college classes, but I’ve since moved away from directly computer-related classes and I’ve forgotten most of the basics. Thanks for making this thread so that everyone’s knowledge is now in a single thread for my reading convenience!

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This topic actually made me interested in making my own website again! So far I’ve hosted my zines at itch.io, which I quite enjoy for its straightforwardness and intuitiveness. But I may try to somehow transfer it to a neocites-like oldschool webpage. I miss those :)

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So quick update: I’ve made a mockup for how I’d like the site to look, in both light and dark mode.



The idea is that it’s basically a Carrd first, so my socials are up front since they’re the most important part. On top of that I think a blog, gallery, and page where I can show my original characters would be nice additions.
As for how to implement this, I asked my friend who’s a comsci student at UBC, and he suggested Astro to build it with. Does anyone have experience with that framework who can tell me if that’s a good idea?

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I made a little fansite for the manga Hirayasumi! It is VERY much a work-in-progress (I am working on getting those placeholder pages up aaaa) but it’s been fun to work and hyperfocus on:

I need to make a blog post listing all of the resources etc I used to make this because I need more people to make fan sites!! They are very fun ahaha. If you ever make a fan site please send me the link, I need them, neeeeeed

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I’m currently rebuilding my personal website with Publii, which seems to fit my purposes well, and adding a little blog to it. Also wanna have a nice 88x31 page for friends, and in fact I want to do the same here but I haven’t figured out how to set it up yet. I think Discourse has a way to make a private thread that’s formatted publicly as a page, but I haven’t found time to look into it yet.

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Yesssssss community 88x31 button wall would be super sweet imho :eyes:

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I love 88×31 buttons sooooo so much, go for it

I’ve made some 88x31 buttons!! They are very fun to make.

the words dungeon crawl stone soup with cauldren logo

the cauldren logo with "DCSS" vertically. one word shown at a time, the acronym is expanded in a looping animation: Dungeon Crawl Stone Soup

"bitsy game maker" with one word shown at a time, vertically staggered a bit to show which is first in the loop. next to it, the Bitsy cat mascot

The word "Bitsy" with the Bitsy game maker cat mascot

the modern (sunset) lesbian flag with alternating words they and them. the middle (usually white) stripe is retro light gray so it blends well with traditional 88x31 buttons

craftinatorics in a pixelated stitched-looking font. occasionally, a highlight travels from letter to letter as if it were catching the light

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you should come to https://deep-hell.com

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this is the site I have been building

https://landminechan.neocities.org/

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I could have sworn I’d posted in this thread but it must have been a different one. I have a Neocities page for my sprite comic Fish Fear Me (featuring Fishest Gup) for the maximum early 2000’s browsing experience.

I’ve been wanting to for months now start a gaming blog, but I’ve been undecided where I want to set it up. I could do another Neocities but my HTML skills arent actually that great and I haven’t found a blog template I really like. I registered on Wordpress recently so that might end up becoming it. Not doing Substack, for (hopefully) obvious reasons.

If anyone has recommendations I’d love to hear them.

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In the spirit of offering help, if anyone wants any general SEO/page speed/accessibility advice for anyone’s sites, I’m happy to help (this isn’t self promo btw although I am a professional and not anything spammy because I hate that stuff and get enough of it in my inbox lol)

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After looking at everyone’s sites or Neocities I have to constantly remind myself that something like motherfuckingwebsite.com or thebestmotherfucking.website are totally ok. I just want to leave this here for anyone else with perfectionist tenancies to remind them that its alright to start basic as hell for every Y2K kid’s dream page is like 300 txt docs that they used to practice or a book they ripped from.

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