I wonder what the Yahoo! dismantling will do to all of the Geocities content. Hopefully they lay dormant in archive somewhere, clearly labelled.
Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
61–70 of 103 posts
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#62Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy 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.
Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming. I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.
Oh geez I forgot all about tripod doing that. That's one of the places I originally cut my teeth with perl. That and Matt's script archive (though I was quickly fixing or rewriting those as I learned)
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've been thinking about flipping it around - instead of whitelisting certain files, simply blacklisting the problem formats. Thanks for reminding me.
I think a whitelist is better, there can be a ton of file formats that have vulnerabilities in their readers.
True. The main issue is that people love to create new web formats. For example, there was some 3D model formats we didn't support initially. It's pretty hard to keep up.
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm sure you've heard this a million times by now, but I first got into web development because of Geocities in the mid-90s as a very young kid. Looking back, it was almost certainly the gateway drug that led me down the path to where I am today. So it's nice to know that something like this still exists and might inspire the next generation of programmers.
Same here. HTML was my first language. I missed the creativity of the old web. Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress. I do work very intentionally on not living in the past, though. The epiphany that led me to Neocities was that creating your own weird static HTML site was not an anachronistic activity, but rather something that was simply too early for it's time. I thin…
> Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress.
Why do you have to only use 140 chars? Frankly the "old web" is still there. You're just as free to create whatever you like using HTML and CSS and host it anywhere that works for you. In fact it's gotten easier: browsers are more consistent, CSS is getting more powerful, and there are a myriad static hosting options these days.
So go build something creative! ..and then share the hyperlink in some 140 char social network.
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#65Earlier 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.…
Are you confident about the current donation model? (I understand/appreciate that it's not a business) I just want to make sure sites can stay up before I start recommending this to friends' kids.
I'm very confident in the donation/supporter model. Once we stop needing to upgrade our infrastructure, it should grow faster than expenses.
I can be high and mighty about this, but legally Neocities is a public benefit LLC, so it is infact a private business operating on a freemium model.
I've pondered arranging Neocities as a nonprofit, but unfortunately that would add a ton of paperwork, costs, and bureaucracy. All I would really get in return is the option to roll the dice a couple times on some temp grants. Not sure it's worth it.
As for VC, I have good friends in VC, but I'm not really interested and nobody's ever offered. IMHO there's insufficient demand to justify 10x growth companies here. There's some people doing business/developer focused static hosting VC startups, but again, lots of competition and insufficient demand. Most of them have ended up as talent acquisitions, and the sites they hosted shut down. We've outlived most of them with the supporter/donation model.
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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:…
Thanks!
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#67I wonder what the Yahoo! dismantling will do to all of the Geocities content. Hopefully they lay dormant in archive somewhere, clearly labelled.
As I understand it, it's gone. They possess no archive, except for what was backed up by web archivers. I could be mistaken.
I spent years trying to acquire what remains of Geocities, which is the domain itself, geocities.com. I got closer than you would expect, but was told it was being "used internally" so they couldn't divest of it. I was also told I wasn't the first person that inquired.
As I understand it, geocities.com will go to Verizon (unless that falls apart), who will do god knows what with it. Right now it redirects to Aabaco Small Business, which I think is a spinoff that's not part of the deal. Aabaco curiously has an office in Beaverton, OR, a suburb of Portland, where I live. I've been meaning to drop by their office randomly with a jello mold or something and say hi.
I really want to relaunch geocities.com. I'd love it if someone gave me the domain so I could do that, but I'm not holding my breath.
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#68Hi! 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…
You should write up that piece on "cheap" global anycast.
Let me make a wrong guess to give you motivation: you had to physcially visit IXP's across the globe to set IP's on network interfaces of computers you rented there?
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#69Original discussion from Neocities' launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5918724 Personally, I don't have any reason to use Neocities but I am enormously happy 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.
Back in the stone ages, Tripod offered Perl hosting with its free accounts, and that, along with javascript, was my introduction to programming. I wrote what may have been the worst ever attempt at a messageboard, and I think only one other person ever even used it. Every post was a single line in a URL-encoded textfile. Good times.
I built a service specifically to be a CORS sql database and user management api backend for neocities last year. The example app was forum single page app. I pimped it here but it didn't get any traction. It was my "wouldn't it be cool if" from building geocities sites back in the day. I guess there are a lot of other avenues for learning to code nowadays.
Re: Neocities: Free, modern Geocities reboot
#70Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here. HTML was my first language. I missed the creativity of the old web. Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress. I do work very intentionally on not living in the past, though. The epiphany that led me to Neocities was that creating your own weird static HTML site was not an anachronistic activity, but rather something that was simply too early for it's time. I thin…
> Going from wide open blank slates to 140 characters is not my definition of progress. Why do you have to only use 140 chars? Frankly the "old web" is still there. You're just as free to create whatever you like using HTML and CSS and host it anywhere that works for you. In fact it's gotten easier: browsers are more consistent, CSS is getting more powerful, and there are a myriad static hosting options these days. S…
> Why do you have to only use 140 chars?
Sounds like a reference to Twitter.
> Frankly the "old web" is still there.
Frankly, a lot of it isn't. Culturally at least, even if some things like Tripod and Angelfire seem to still be around. Around the mid-90s, Geocities, Angelfire, Tripod, and similar hosts were the web to a lot of people, the way that Facebook and Twitter are the web to a lot of people now.