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Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

pypi.org

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Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#3

Post by mnky9800n »

This is the way.

I made my home page like MySpace:

https://johnspace.xyz

Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city.com. Sorry for the self promotion but I really want people to create more stuff like this. Just fun things to find on the internet.

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#4

Post by AnthonyR »

mnky9800n wrote: post #3

This is the way. I made my home page like MySpace: https://johnspace.xyz Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city…

This is great!

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#5

Post by firmretention »

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp, iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#7

Post by eitally »

firmretention wrote: post #5

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp , iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....

Re: Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

#9

Post by graypegg »

firmretention wrote: post #5

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp , iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

I think the thing these "old internet revivals" miss is sites looked the way they did because they were outsider-art. I don't think they have to reuse precisely the same layout tools, but non-developers butting heads with those tools was a big factor in why personal sites looked that way. The whole look of "old internet" is a modern concept that's a bit flanderized [0] now.

Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization

[1] https://neocities.org/

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