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why i started a blog on neocities (and you should too!)

April 18, 2025.  Essay.  14 minutes. Draft.

i originally wrote this on my personal blog because i wanted to share a bit about why i started that blog in the first place. i’m deciding to share it here too because the backstory, process, and conclusions helped me understand in what ways i want programming to be a part of my life. it’s also just a very enjoyable and satisfying personal project that i believe devs should try (if you know HTML/CSS, you have no excuse).

note: this is quite long, silly, and different in style from my more technical posts, but i hope it sparks some thought.

my origins on the internet + web 2.0

the first time i was exposed to the world wide web was when i was around three years old. i got my first webkinz toy, a black and white cat named anya, and with my sister’s help, we made an account for her. webkinz was a home for kids to bring their stuffed animals to life, literally. we could take care of them, dress them up, take them to the park where we could socialize with other animals, and generally be a part of a virtual world of kids our age.

as i got a bit older, i got my first computer and flip phone. the flip phone was strictly for calling my parents to pick me up from school and to play sims 1 on the smallest screen ever created. the computer was for giving dolls makeovers on girlsgogames.com, playing papa’s freezeria, showing my dad annoying orange and fred music videos, and making friends on one of the many kid and tween dedicated spaces on the web (club penguin, imvu, moviestar planet, et cetera).

around the age of seven, i came across scratch, which is a platform to help teach kids how to code by simplifying the process into drag-and-drop blocks and intuitive interfaces. when existing sites didn’t have what i wanted (or i couldn’t pay for them), i could find what other people created just by putting these blocks together. replica five nights at freddy’s and minecraft games, animated shows and short films, interactive chatbots of my favorite characters - anything i could imagine was possible on there.

along with making friends with some of these incredibly talented programmers, most of which were still in elementary school, i started learning how to make projects of my own. they were by no means impressive, but they were a creative and social outlet for me, and i had fun!

my personal favorites:

i made my own website a year later while taking an HTML and CSS class. it was like designing my own room. i made the wallpaper my favorite shade of green and put up pictures i liked to look at. i had so much fun in the process. i’m pretty terrible at art on paper, because i overthink everything and the permanence of paint makes me too nervous to start. online, though, you can just backspace and start brand new. at risk of sounding corny, i really fell in love with programming (yes, i will count HTML as a programming language here) and knew that is what i wanted to do with my life.



social media brainrot

making the site was great, but actually interacting with others was a bit tough. eventually, i abandoned my website in favor of getting on social media. it was 2014 and no one really made their own website anymore… myspace and the era of customizable personal pages were gone. but i still loved talking to people online, and i made a profile on basically everything - instagram, twitter, tumblr, pinterest, musical.ly, dubsmash, vine. i could connect with friends from school, but also be part of communities with likeminded interests. as a fangirl by nature, i got into a lot of heated arguments about whichever girl group i was obsessed with at the time. but with the way social media algorithms are engineered, conflict and controversy is what got others’ attention, and that’s the content i was recommended.

i’ve become far too familiar with different communities on basically every social media platform which exists today, probably when i was too young to be a part of them. though i’m grateful that my unrestricted internet access gave me so much freedom to explore what i like and make friends online, i came across some of the worst parts of the internet too easily (especially before the <a href=”https://youtube.fandom.com/wiki/YouTube_Adpocalypse”adpocalypse and better content moderation). but even beyond the problem of scarring stuff kids can come across online, which is honestly never fully avoidable, traditional social media affected my psyche negatively. obviously it’s not just me. the perils of social media and what it’s doing to the kids is a topic which has been ran into the ground, and writing about it is really trite at this point, but off the top of my head, the focus on popularity statistics (like/follower/view counts), unrealistic standards, negativity and harassment, etc, have all redefined how young people approach socialization… i don’t think it’s reductive to say that a good majority of gen z has felt these effects. regardless, it’s kind of a requirement at this point to be in some way present online. while i respect those who go off the grid entirely, sometimes i just need to watch some instagram reels on my phone while my shows are playing on my ipad, #screenager.



starting something new!

my freshman year of college was tough. it was a sort of massive turning point of my life, and i was quickly trying to find my place in a very new, unfamiliar world. being on social media only made my experience worse because it made it so easy to compare myself and feel like i’m missing out on life. i deleted instagram and tiktok constantly to get my mind off of all of it, but reinstalled them days later out of sheer impulse. #screenager once again.

i was pretty lucky to (randomly) get a wonderful roommate who helped me so much throughout this time period. i have this terrible habit of changing myself based on what i think others would like to see. she is the complete opposite in that sense and i always admired how naturally creative and self-assured she is. both of us grew up on the internet and deep in online communities, and she already knew about the old web revival movement on platforms like neocities. she told me to get off of tiktok and introduced me to neocities because i would really like it. and i did!! we had so much fun exploring other people’s sites and designing our own.

the great thing about personal websites is because of how customizable they are and how small and interconnected the old web community is, they feel a lot more intimate, and like you’re actually making a friend online when you see someone’s site. the amount of creative freedom you get means you can put your whole heart into the site without word limits or format restrictions, and without any quantitative engagement metrics (i mean, you can view your website views, but i choose not to). i won’t rave too much about how much i love the independent web here though, because i recommend people explore it for themselves.

designing my own website and surfing others’ sites made me feel like i was right back in third grade, exploring the corners of the internet for the first time. i wanted it to feel like an extension of myself and act as a little diary. i love to write and talk in long-form and i didn’t have a place to do that until i had made my blog. it also let me express some of my more niche interests that my friends don’t really want to hear about on traditional social media platforms. most importantly, it reminded me that i really love to code, because i’m making exactly what i want come to life, just like i used to do on scratch when i was little. it’s not like i’m designing anything groundbreaking; in fact, i think i was better at web design when i was seven (it took me way too long to center a div). but the design process without any expectations or rigid standards is very freeing.

yes, sighs reluctantly, i still use social media. i have a deep parasocial bond with the tiktok algorithm. i also just enjoy keeping up with my friends from across the world at any time. it’s unrealistic for me to assume everyone is just going to get up and leave these platforms.

however, i’ve taken a lot of what i tried and failed to do on different social media platforms and made it possible on my website. making the site helped me a lot with defining who i am outside the scope of rigid aesthetics defined by commodity consumption (am i a clean girl? a coquette? a downtown girl? none of the above. i’m a webmaster). it’s also just made me a lot happier as a person, because i am in my own little positive world and i decide what i interact with. i’m not being hyperbolic when i say it’s one of the best decisions i’ve ever made — for my mental health, my self-discovery, my social life, and even for my future career (coding is fun!)

you should make your own website! encouragement!

how many distinct websites do you visit per day? how many of those are the same sites you visited yesterday, and the day before that?

for many of my gen z friends, we barely remember, if at all, when the peak of the web was Geocities personal sites with guestbooks / custom CSS Myspaces / niche hobby forums. we didn’t experience the internet that was hyper-niche and personalized and, yeah, full of gaudy neon comic sans sometimes. that’s why, even though we might think, “being online used to feel different when i was younger”, i don’t think many of us pick up on what exactly is lacking in our current structure.

the great thing about social media platforms is that they centralize socialization and make it dead-simple to start finding your friends. click sign-up, fill out information into boxes, and perform a simple search to get the profile of anyone on the planet. but the old web was quite different. from what i understand, it more closely resembled how communities have formed in real life.

it’s hard to explain how exactly people made friends on web1.0 because quite simply — the ‘world wide web’ wasn’t actually a full web yet, but more like scattered islands separated by big oceans. the key point here between web1.0 and web2.0 is this: someone finds your profile because they made an effort to. whether it was through webrings, forum threads, a friend’s link page, or simple word-of-mouth, there was something measurable tethering people’s encounters online. of course, ‘web surfing’ existed; maybe you come across a friend-of-a-friend’s site or search up a keyword on Google and come across someone you don’t know, but at its core, your time online required intention and agency.

even making your own site required intention — a great deal of it. after choosing a host and maybe a smaller subdirectory of sites you shared space with, you’d need to open Notepad or SimpleText and scaffold with raw HTML (and CSS/JS by the late 2000s). you’d make every layout and design decision from column structures to the text effects in your header to a custom sparkling cursor, so no two sites looked the same. people would interact with sites primarily through guestbooks: pages for users to ‘sign’ with their name, site, or other link. in other words, while sites were not often independently hosted, they functioned as hyper-customizable independent ‘homes’ belonging to one particular user. that also meant each site was beholden only to this [webmaster]‘s rules, excluding maybe some top-down regulations from the server host.

forums and early social networks functioned in that similar ‘neighborhood’ structure. these groups were often revolved around a shared interest or hobby. each forum had its own culture which was enforced almost communally within the platform. there were rules within certain forums, yes, but more than that — you probably weren’t coming across random niche groups you didn’t care for (you’d have to search for them manually). and even if you did, what would be the point of lurking, or leaving a mean comment? the forum was small enough to manage such a breach with admins and moderators. maybe you’d get blocked, or get a snarky comment in response three days later. not set up with much incentive for [ragebaiting].

this sounds great and all. but we’re missing something, one key problem web 1.0 had that set the stage for the rise of social media: $$$.

free hosting services made their money by adding banner ads to user sites — unmoveable unless users paid. during the dot-com boom, investors threw money at everything ‘internet’ (sound familiar?). potentially millions of visitors on a site means millions of eyeballs on a brand’s ad.

when the bubble burst, [CPM][cost per thousand impressions] collapsed. advertisers realized that even if ad viewership was high, click-through rates were close to zero. suddenly, free-hosting companies with millions of users had huge server costs but almost no revenue to cover them.

alright, so CPMs are low. that’s a problem. but what would actually raise CPM?

one way is to raise total impressions; in other words, get more people on the web. keep in mind the kind of people who actually participated in web1.0. you’d need an internet connection, for one — something that 43% of US households still didn’t have in 2000. once you had an internet connection, you’d need to learn how to build a site (requiring a steep HTML learning curve) or even how to browse others’ sites (requiring baseline computer literacy and accessibility that the early web was just not designed for). making it easier to connect and communicate online, beyond being the right thing to do, had a profit incentive. if companies wanted to advertise to elders, or people with disabilities, or people who did not speak English, or anyone else who couldn’t navigate web1.0, they’d need to make it easy to get online.

another way to raise CPM is increasing the number of clicks. having millions of eyes on your ad is great and all, but it’s largely pointless if not one of the million eyes is actually interested in your product. the information they needed was who the eyes belonged to. they needed users’ [age/sex/location], if you will.

web 2.0

in 2004, Tim O’Reilly and Dale Dougherty popularized the term web2.0 to represent the idea of web-as-platform. while web1.0 mostly meant passively viewing static pages created by a relatively small set of site owners, web2.0 emphasized dynamic, user-generated content that anyone could contribute to and interact with in real time.

to be clear, this division was less a hard-break and more a gradual shift influenced by the dot-com crash, technical improvements, and a broader cultural reframing that compounded as platforms became more populated. a majority of internet users did not move to 2.0 platforms (MySpace, Facebook, YouTube, etc.) until ~2007.

these platforms took off for good reason, though, and once they did, internet users stayed on them. social media platforms made it purposely easy to sign up and connect with others. many started small to gain a clear initial network (you’re more likely to join if alllll your friends are already on). for example, Facebook started as Harvard-only, then Ivy League only, then any .edu, et cetera — until it opened to anyone with an internet connection.

now, you might be asking at this point: isn’t a social media profile also a self-contained ‘home’ for one user? don’t we find each other on social media through recommendation algorithms designed to show us exactly who might be relevant due to shared communities or interests?

it’s complicated. while the intention may be the same (connect to people with something in commmon), the execution is what differentiates our experiences online. discovery in web2.0 is algorithmic, and as a result, the user is mostly passive on the platform. on Twitter or TikTok, you can search for a specific post or profile, but the main way in which you interact with others is by consuming what that platform’s algorithm deems relevant. but we can only measure relevance if we quantify what might contribute to it. likes, follows, retweets, favorites, shares, et cetera: ways of telling the platform ‘i saw this, and this is relevant to me’.

this is where we need to mention the story behind all of this — $$$.

the reason why almost every modern social media platform uses some sort of numerical metric to measure engagement is because it works, really, really well… at least if you’re maximizing for engagement. there are two factors that make our experience on social media engaging (a far cry from hand-coded websites of web1.0): a massive, international user base, and recommendation algorithms.

but a lot of what made the personal site era non-egalitarian—the learning curve with web design—doesn’t exist anymore in the age of LLMs. we are living in a time where it is the easiest it’s ever been to go from idea to live site, without any technical experience. but then why are we all using that reality to automate the webdev process into purple gradient React pages? now that we don’t need to spend hours digging on StackOverflow to fix z-index errors, why don’t we

when you start digging, you’ll find there is so much more available online to you! you can literally do whatever you want. on my blog, i’m making a dedicated page for stranger things because that’s what i want to see when i open my computer. make your page neon green if that’s your favorite color and blast your favorite song when someone opens it. it’s okay if it’s ugly. UI ‘good practices’ don’t have to apply to your own personal creative outlet. if you’re tired of people online saying they’re not reading all that, put it on your page. no one has to read it but you.

having a website is really fun, and the more people make websites and connect their pages to others, the closer we get to making the internet more enjoyable for everyone. the internet is giant and all-encompassing, and you don’t need to visit the same 5 websites every day. you can define exactly how you choose to interact with it. don’t forget that!

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