Appatic

For most WWW veterans, myself included. The very first website they parked in the world wide web was thanks to GeoCities.  And when I mean Geocities, I meant the one from late 1995. In all its still Mid-Nineties glory. In my case, back then, part of my internet time routine meant firing up Mosaic and Netscape Navigator 1.0. Starting NetMeeting and then loading up Geocities. Not without also launching a text file where I had written down my most important or newest website addresses to check. Ah, simpler and slower, a lot slower times. Where any browsing routine worth having was forcedly measured in afternoons or nights given the very limiting speed of your connection and the limited amount of power might in your computer. I mean, no better context to it than saying that you thought carefully for 5 seconds before visiting a website. Specially if you had found it in a directory and it had the warnings “image heavy” and “long page track” in a write up description. And if you did decided to load it. you could click in and go to the fridge, serve a glass of Pepsi and return before it had finished fully loading the page.

But that was the past and now everything is as fast as you can have it. And so it is NeoCities.

Also, even if Geocities actually still exist, just that only in its Japanese version and Angelfire is still chugging along. They are not  as free as Neocities is.

NeoCities is a simple and easy to use basic web host. One that gives you 10mb of webpage hosting with no strings attached. You own it, you decide what to do with it. And with the promise of keeping it uncensored and as anonymous as possible.

You sign up in a very simplified way very reminiscent of the original GeoCities and the you find yourself in a very barebones dashboard that reminds me of the original Blogger.

It is all very Neo-Retro when it comes to NeoCites. And I like It a lot. I get it, I embrace it. I think it really unites the forced simplicity of the innovated past of the original GeoCities with the chosen simplicity of the present. Meaning, that it is simply out of not just nostalgia, but out of principle, design vision and economic viability.

That stays clear with the index.html basic editor with it is very Web 1.0 kind of editor. Even if the dashboard already carries out the promise of introducing a visual editor.

Finally, you can also enjoy of some old fashioned web directory style browsing in the browse page of Neocities. Which also has the visitor counters for all the displayed addresses.

I of course grabbed the http://AvatarX.NeoCities.og address and out principle. I plan to put something in it.

NeoCities is a very neat web project and wherever you feel nostalgic of the web 1.0 days or you just want a free web host to experiment and run wild for a bit. This is then a site you need to check out.

Also, if you want to keep it free and good. See if you can donate to it. As of this writing there were still 59K site slots available up for grabs. They accept Paypal. But more importantly you can also donate in Bitcoin.

Linkage

NeoCities.org

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