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Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

neocities.org

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Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#21

Post by kyledrake »

craigcannon wrote: post #20
kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Unrelated note. If anyone knows the Geocities founders I'd love to interview their first employee for our Employee 1 series. Craig@YCombinator.com

David Bohnett was the founder and probably knows who that is. I'll send you an email with how to contact him.

These days he is a VC based in LA and does a lot of philanthropy: http://www.bohnettfoundation.org

He has one of the original enigma machines: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/culture/la-et-cm-i...

And here's a very good hour-long interview with him about Geocities, can't recommend this enough: http://www.internethistorypodcast.com/2015/05/david-bohnett-...

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#22

Post by otoburb »

kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

>>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.

Will subscribe to your RSS feed, but wanted to specifically say that I for one would love reading about your cheap anycast network setup & operations framework. Thanks again for the original Geocities rescue and great work on the direction that Neocities is heading!

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#23

Post by pryelluw »

kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Shoot me an email (profile) and I'll help you figure out the content. No bs or strings. Just giving back as a former user of your product.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#24

Post by djsumdog »

shams93 wrote: post #12
kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Geocities was my first job out of school, at that time it took a small army of apache module c coders. Its awesome you're bringing back the concept, when Yahoo bought us out and then killed it they took out a huge part of the history of the early web.

Wow, that's got to be an amazing piece of history on your resume. Yahoo killed a lot of things to take their devs (Astrid tasks is another great example).

I think Archive.org has a lot of the old Geocities sites.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#25

Post by kyledrake »

shams93 wrote: post #12
kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Geocities was my first job out of school, at that time it took a small army of apache module c coders. Its awesome you're bringing back the concept, when Yahoo bought us out and then killed it they took out a huge part of the history of the early web.

Thanks! Next time I'm in LA* let's meet up. I've met a few GeoCities veterans randomly and it's always a great conversation.

* GeoCities started in LA, I'm just assuming you still live there.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#26

Post by kyledrake »

vr46 wrote: post #14
kyledrake wrote: post #4

Hi! I started Neocities. I read HN regularly. Neocities was actually launched and 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. I still work on the site heavily. We're launching some big features soon (more space, Github…

Are you going to put a watermark in the bottom corner of user pages? :D That was the biggest controversy I remember back then!

N E V E R.

And no advertising on sites, ever. This is our golden rule.

My goal is to never make any changes to other people's sites. The only exception I'm giving myself is for an extreme emergency, such as a major security problem. It's never come up, I doubt it ever will. During the SSL transition there were a few sites I helped convert to SSL, but that was with permission from the site owner.

I remember the watermarks. They sucked.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#27

Post by mrskeltal »

kyledrake wrote: post #10
kyledrake wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just servers, about $550/mo once we launch the new infrastructure. That doesn't include the $10k I had to sink in to buy the equipment and IP addresses. Then pad the bill a lot of misc other nonsense: social media liability insurance (yes this is a thing), ARIN fees, LLC registration, a literal fax machine (for DMCA compliance), monitoring, etc. Grand total will hover around $1000. Architecture is a core + CDN model.…

> How much traffic do you get per day usually? The sites average about 25 million unique views (IP address per hour) and 50 million hits per month. This increases about 20% per month, sometimes slowing down a bit, then shooting right back up again. Every once in a while a big site somewhere hotlinks an asset on Neocities and this skyrockets, but we just ask them to host the asset(s) directly and things go back to nor…

Awesome, thanks!

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#28

Post by bisby »

kyledrake wrote: post #17
lawpoop wrote: post #11

let's create a crowd-sourced effort to migrate archived geocities sites to neocities.

Easter egg time: https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ Works for any Geocities neighborhoods. Jason Scott (@textfiles) gave me the idea when I was at the Internet Archive.

I love easter eggs in open source code. I was able to easily find this in the code and learned a bit about neocities and geocities URL formats in the process.

I was expecting that neocities sites would have similar URLs to geocities (in the neocities.org/server/user/page format). This is a fun way of learning about stuff.

Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot

#29

Post by teddyh »

kyledrake wrote: post #17
lawpoop wrote: post #11

let's create a crowd-sourced effort to migrate archived geocities sites to neocities.

Easter egg time: https://neocities.org/SiliconValley/Peaks/2790/ Works for any Geocities neighborhoods. Jason Scott (@textfiles) gave me the idea when I was at the Internet Archive.

Why not link to reocities.com instead?
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