Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

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Neocities, Nekoweb, bringing back the weird personal websites

4 December 2025

Neocities, kind of born out of the ashes of once popular personal website hosting service Geocities, and Nekoweb, are on a mission to restore weird personal websites.

With over one-point-three-million sites on their servers, Neocities, which was established in 2013, has made a substantial contribution. Nekoweb was founded last year, but has a growing membership.

Their goals are similar however, says Stevie Bonifield, writing for The Verge:

Across both, you’ll see a strange mix of old and new, like anti-AI webrings, a personal website in the style of the ’90s but themed around a Hobonichi Techo planner, or one website that’s an interactive re-creation of Windows 98. Even the demographics of the indie web are evidence of this — the community seems to skew young, largely under 30, so many of the people making these pages probably missed out on the original GeoCities (myself included).

Esoteric, speciality, niche blogs closing down, not being replaced

22 November 2025

John Gruber, writing at Daring Fireball:

Uni Watch, to me, epitomized a certain mindset from the early web. To wit, that there ought to be a blog (or two or three) dedicated to every esoteric interest under the sun. You want to obsess about sports team uniform designs? Uni Watch was there. For a good long stretch, there seemingly was a blog (or two or three) dedicated to just about everything. That’s starting to wane. New sites aren’t rising to take the place of retiring ones.

Uni Watch, which has been online in one form or another since 1999, announced its closure a few weeks ago. At first it seemed the entire website, including archived content, was to be removed within days, but in a later post, founder Paul Lukas said the site’s future remained unclear. There’s a suggestion Uni Watch might continue publishing, though that is still far from certain.

The survival of niche interest websites and blogs, such as Uni Watch, are, in my opinion, vital for the future of the web, as I wrote the other day.

It is of course unreasonable to think every owner operated website, or those with a small team of writers, that began publishing decades ago, will keep going forever. What’s unfortunate is the format, niche/speciality blogging, seems to increasingly be regarded as passé.

Niche blogs are just too weird, their presence cannot be tolerated

22 November 2025

Megan Greenwell writing for Talking Points Memo, AKA TPM:

When Vice News stopped publishing in February 2024 — nearly eight years after Gawker’s demise, five after OG Deadspin’s — it marked the final nail in the coffin of the era in which any media outlet was thought of as cool. On one level, that’s for the best; I can think of exactly one Deadspin employee in the site’s history who could accurately be categorized that way. But it also makes clear just how much private equity has taken from us: not just local newspapers providing invaluable information about communities, but also blogs willing to get weird, to try things no one else would.

Ah yes, make one publication profitable by shutting down competing outlets. But this is nothing new.

There were a number of blogs I followed back in the day, fifteen to twenty years ago, pretty much on account of their owners’ — how do I say? — colourful personalities. Many of them ended up being sold, and not long afterwards, ceasing publication.

Surely buyers cannot have gone into the transaction with their eyes closed.

The success of these blogs was, to a large degree, because of their quirkiness. Was the buyer certain they could replicate this ? It made a few people wonder. Back then of course a few blogs going offline was not a problem, plenty more were always coming along. Not so much today though.

Personal blogs are back, should niche blogs be next?

20 November 2025

When it comes to blogging there are few rules. Write content that is somehow meaningful might be one of them though. I think it’s down to the individual to determine what constitutes meaningful.

In the hey-day, the so-called golden age of blogging, there were plenty of people prepared to offer definitions of meaningful, and how to write accordingly. It was natural. The web was once awash with all sorts of blogs. Likewise people who wanted to show others how to blog “successfully”.

Again, the definition of successful resided with the individual, but it was obvious this involved monetary return for some people. And why not. If you’re going to invest time and energy in creating a resource that is useful to other people, why shouldn’t you earn money, make a living even, from it?

One of these people blogging about blogging was Melbourne based Australian writer and author Darren Rowse, who launched his blogging resource Problogger in 2004. Without going into detail, because you can look it up for yourself, Rowse, as one of the earlier bloggers about blogging, did, and still does presumably, rather well for himself.

Rowse’s writing, and that of his contributors, attracted numerous readers keen to learn what they could about blogging, and the potential to make money from it.

Problogger is what’s called a niche blog. As a blog about blogging, it has a reasonably singular focus. Some people considered this niche principle to be a core tenet of blogging. There was this idea, in the earlier days of blogging, which possibly still persists, that blogs would do better if they had a speciality. Not only were search engines said to be in favour the approach, but the author of a speciality, or niche blog, would generally be considered to be an expert, of some sort, in their field.

A master of one trade, rather than the proverbial jack of all trades.

Regardless, the world was once full of blogs on every topic imaginable. It was a great time to be alive. If you wanted to learn about something in particular, there was a blog for you. Some publications featured quality content, others required a little fact checking, while some were definitely to be taken with a pinch of salt.

But niche blogging was never a format that suited everyone. There are people who did, still do, well, writing about a range, sometimes a wide range, of topics. Kottke is one of the better known blogs that does not have a specific speciality. Here, the publication itself is the speciality. To repeat what I wrote in the first sentence of this article: the rules of blogging are few.

But the facets of blogging covered at Problogger, and numerous other similar websites, usually only applied to blogs of a commercial nature. That’s not to say one or two personal bloggers might have looked at the tips posted there for increasing their audience, or improving their writing though. But in my view, personal bloggers were not, are not, part of Problogger’s target audience.

It’s been a long time since I last wrote about Problogger, let alone visited the website, maybe fifteen plus years, but a recent mention of it by Kev Quick, via ldstephens, caught my eye. But I don’t believe Rowse is being critical, in any way, of personal bloggers because they do not adhere to a niche or speciality publishing format. That’s not what Problogger, or Rowse, is about.

But this started me thinking, and writing another of my long posts.

In an age where social media, and influencers, have usurped blogs and their A-List authors, in the jostle for supremacy, it has to be wondered what role websites like Problogger still have. Only a handful of blogs generate liveable incomes today. Despite the doom and gloom though, the form has not completely died off. A backlash against social media, and a growing IndieWeb/SmallWeb community, has precipitated a revival in personal websites.

This is a largely non-commercial movement. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with personal websites. Many of us started out with them in the early days of the web. But the web was not only intended for personal journals. It was a vehicle for sharing all manner of information. The web could also empower individuals, and partnerships, to not only set up shop online, be that blogs, or quite literally shops, but potentially make a living at the same time.

But with the revival of personal blogs well underway, I think it’s time to bring niche blogs back into the fold. I’m talking about well written, quality, topic focused resources. This is material fast vanishing from the web, leaving ever diminishing options to source useful and accurate information. What are the alternatives? The misinformation morass that is social media? Being served AI generated summaries in response to search engine queries? A web choke full of AI slop?

At the same time, I’m not advocating for a return of niche blogs plastered with adverts, and popup boxes urging visitors to subscribe to say a newsletter, before they’ve even had a chance to blink at what they came to read.

I’m talking about work produced by independent writers, with an interest in their subject matter, who are not backed by large media organisations, or private equity. This is bringing back reliable sources of information, that also recompenses the content writers in some way. Hopefully we’ve learned a few lessons about monetisation since the earlier wave of niche blogging. We know it is possible to generate revenue without compromising the reader experience.

A resurgence in personal blogging is the first step in rebuilding a vibrant, thriving, web, or if you like, blogosphere. Now the focus needs to be on restoring the flow of accessible and trusted information.

alive internet theory, bringing the dead internet back to life

11 November 2025

alive internet theory, all lower case, by Spencer Chang:

alive internet theory is a séance with this living internet. Resurrecting tens of millions of digital artifacts from the Internet Archive, visitors are immersed in a relentless barrage of human expression as they travel through the life of the web as we created it — every image, video, song, and text uploaded by a real person on the web.

This is the sort of séance I can get into.

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history, technology, web design

ISP customer hompages lists, the first web directories of the early web

10 October 2025

Via Jelloeater on Bluesky, Jeppe Larsen’s early memories of the web, from the late 1990’s:

I remember the ISP was called get2net and it came with both email and web hosting. The last bit was particularly exciting as get2net had a listing of all homepages made by its customers on their website, which was an absolute fantastic way to discover other HTML enthusiasts and of course contribute with my own handcrafted HTML manually uploaded via FTP. The web was a lot more personal, filled with handcrafted websites where people mostly just wrote about themselves and their hobbies.

My ISP in the late nineties also had a list of customer’s homepages (Internet Archive link). One of the earliest iterations of a web directory perhaps. I frequently perused the list, visiting each site regularly for a time. Some pages were not dissimilar to what you’d see on Geocities. Avril & Andrew’s home page (Internet Archive link), is one I clearly recall, on account of the easy to remember URL.

But it wasn’t just customers checking out each other’s websites.

At one point the splash page (remember those?) of my website featured a violin. I have no idea why now. I’d put a purple tint on it, with Photoshop, and liked the way it gleamed on the white background of my site. Anyway, there was some problem with the site and I’d had to call, on the phone, a landline no less, the ISP.

You didn’t get through to a call centre back then, you spoke to the people who owned the company. I forget their names, but I usually spoke to one of two somewhat sarcastic guys.

Having explained the issue, and being put on “hold” while whoever had taken call went to investigate, I heard him say to his colleague, “yeah, I’ve got violin guy on the phone…”. The colleague responded, saying something like, “oh, purple violin guy?” You wouldn’t see that sort of… familiarity today.

Despite the snarky attitude, I was pleased no end to be actually speaking to non-acquaintances who looked at my website. Occasionally the “webmaster”, the person who looked after the servers, would also reply — usually in the middle of the night — to some of my support emails.

Something else that would never happen today.

The ISP was taken over several times during the time I was with them, growing with each buy-out. The customer homepage list vanished, along with the two original staffers, whom I never spoke to again. I sometimes wonder what became of them, the ex-ISP startup founders, the then nocturnal webmaster, along with Avril and Andrew, and where they are now.

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history, technology, trends, web design

War of the Worlds 2025, with Ice Cube, scores ZERO on Rotten Tomatoes

8 August 2025

Jesse Hassenger, writing for The Guardian:

The real question is how audiences have made it through an unconvincing cheapie like War of the Worlds — a sci-fi epic that seems to take place in real time yet features a vast and coordinated worldwide mobilization of multiple armed forces — without shutting it off in disgust (it boasts a rare 0% rating on Rotten Tomatoes).

Check out the trailer. The 2025 adaptation of the H. G. Wells novel — published as a book in 1898 — directed by American filmmaker Rich Lee, had been sitting in the store room since production wrapped five years ago.

War of the Worlds’ zero percent score on review-aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes, is in sharp contrast to the one-hundred percent score achieved by 2022’s The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent. At least for a time.

I only learned a few years ago Wells’ novel has an Australian connection, being written as a protest against the treatment of Indigenous/First Nations people in Tasmania, at the hands of British colonisers. In a bid to sway public opinion, Wells portrayed a terrifying invasion of England by powerful extra-terrestrials, to help people comprehend the atrocities taking place in Australia.

Had a website since the 90’s? You’re an internet person

4 August 2025

Kris Howard writing at Web Goddess:

I’m not sure if this is a generational thing, or just different cultures and social norms. Rodd’s theory is that we are Internet People — those who grew up with the dawn of the modern Internet and have strong feelings about keeping information free and decentralised — and that not everyone working in tech is an Internet Person.

The excerpt is from a post Kris wrote marking her tenth anniversary using WordPress, although she’s been online far longer. But I like the positive context in which the term internet person is used.

Because usage is not always complimentary. But people who have had a website since the turn of the century, or prior, can adopt this term, own it.

An internet person’s values are of course similar to indie web principles. While in some senses I am considered part of the indie web, I don’t always feel that way, given I somewhat predate the movement. Internet person it is then.

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blogs, history, IndieWeb, trends

Classic Web, a Mastodon page that explores the web of old

16 July 2025

Specifically, the time frame encompassing the dot-com boom (late 1990’s), Web 2.0 (early twenty-first century), and the 2010’s. The 2010’s don’t seem that long ago, but then again it’s been nearly six years since. Six years is close to thirty internet years (LinkedIn page), if you subscribe to the idea.

Classic Web features screenshots of websites from this period, and is curated by Richard MacManus, creator of Cybercultural, which documents the history and cultural impact of the internet, and founder of defunct tech blog, ReadWriteWeb.

I feels a certain ambivalence looking back at some of these old websites, particularly those of the dot-com and Web 2.0 eras. The web had a bit more character back then — certainly from a visual perspective — but there were downsides. Lack of accessibility, and even a sense of aesthetics, among them. But while we might have more accessibility today, visually the web appears more generic.

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design, history, web design

Tables, nested tables, tables to the centre of the Earth, website interface design before CSS

8 July 2025

United Kingdom based web frontend architect Den Odell:

HTML tables gave us something no other element did at the time: control. You could create rows and columns. You could define cell widths and heights. You could nest tables inside tables to carve up the page into zones. That control was intoxicating. It wasn’t elegant. It definitely wasn’t semantic. But it worked.

It worked, but you could spend hours, days even, building a table structure, then slicing up an interface mockup, so the often numerous components would fit together perfectly.

The process was tedious, to say the least. It required placing sometimes minuscule images, both GIFs and JPEGs — being two of the main web image compression formats of the time — side by side, depending on the best optimisation method for each part of the interface.

See here an image of a page constructed thusly from disassociated circa 2001, when this was more website, and less blog. It felt wrong working this way — both on personal and commercial projects — but in the early years of the twenty-first century browser support for CSS was woeful.

Eventually, reasonable support for CSS arrived, but then the next challenge emerged: encouraging tables-layout-accustomed web designers to work with CSS for layout instead of HTML. But that’s a story for another day.

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design, history, technology, web design

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