Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly.<p>Neocities was actually launched <i>and</i> bootstrapped on HN about 3 years ago, and donations from HN users bankrolled the first year of operating it. Things have been going really well, the site is growing and still sustains it's own existence through donations and supporter accounts.<p>I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github webhook deploys, etc.). We just finished migrating to SSL (for everything, including hosted sites).<p>I've had to do some pretty crazy stuff to make the site work, some of which is not documented well and I think the HN crowd would find pretty interesting. For example, we figured out how to run our own global anycast network for "cheap". I would love to share how to do that with people, there is approximately zero information online or in books on operating anycast networks.<p>My new years resolution was to get better at writing about some of the crazy tech I've had to do for the site. If you're interested, there's an RSS feed you can subscribe to for our blog where it will be posted in the future: <a href="https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml" rel="nofollow">https://blog.neocities.org/feed.xml</a><p>Again, thanks go to HN. Site literally wouldn't exist without it, you were basically our seed investor. Feel free to ask me questions, I'll try to answer. That's something you're supposed to do with your investors, right?
Original discussion from Neocities' launch: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724</a><p>Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am <i>enormously happy</i> that it exists. Geocities and Angelfire and all of those weird web sandboxes are where I first wrote code, and what led me to pursue software engineering as a career.
Kyle, thanks so much for all your hard work setting up Neocities! I think it's a wonderful thing you are doing.<p>Also, since we're talking about neocities, here, does anyone have any cool neocities sites they know of and want to share? Just post a reply to this comment, so folks who want to have other neocities discussions can easily collapse all the links at once.
I really love Neocities. I have used it to host <a href="https://www.makersatwork.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.makersatwork.com/</a> for some time and have donated to Neocities and participated in their Kickstarter campaign.
Ah, the name brings back some memories. A long time ago, about 15 years in total, when hosting a PHP site was too expensive for a 15-year-old and free hosting usually came with ads there was a community on neopages.net which offered no cost ad-free PHP hosting. The only thing you had to do to get it was submit an entry on neopages forums containing a link to your current site along with a description of why you deserve a subdomain on neopages. You'd then get judged by hosted members and either get an account or try again. Neopages was the community of teenage geeks that got me hooked on PHP after I outgrew GeoCities. Curious if any of you guys know what i'm talking about or had a site hosted there? :) Some of you are likely in your early to mid 30s now.
I used Geocities. I think it still exists in Japan.
Back then, HTML templates/generators were very mainstream.<p>Nowadays that use case was largely replaced by what we now call blogs. Many of those websites were in fact proto-blogs.<p>Later, as bandwidth increased, digital cameras became mainstream and processing power increased, photo sharing was added as common use case. Try downloading a 2 megapixel+ PNG with a dial-up connection... very slow. Now we take it was granted.<p>Now in addition to blogs, you also have Google Sites, wikia, and countless others... including Wikipedia.
Neocities is a brilliant name on 3 levels:<p>Obvious: rhymes with Geocities, and is one letter different from Geocities<p>Less obvious: the prefix neo makes it a "new" Geocities<p>Subtle, and my favorite: seemingly everyone on the web today is jacked into a Matrix of "walled gardens" where they are tended and farmed, and Neo is the name of a guy who undoes that shit.
I've used Neocities for something like two years now to host my game development portfolio and other miscellaneous docs. I've been super happy with the ease of creating and uploading content, and I recommend it whenever somebody technical is looking for a cheap static hosting option.
I showed my 9yo this and now he has a site about minecraft. I showed my 14yo and now she is building a gallery for her manga. My other kid is away but he is the one who is really going to love it. I really like this site.
I've always thought geocities could have been facebook. People just wanted a page to post pictures and share with their friends. Geocities could have automated something like that....