GeoCities – the digital equivalent of letting a toddler loose with a crayon on the wall, offered the commoner a kingdom. Here’s your plot of cyberspace, it said, go, build something, anything.
And we did. We built pages about our cats, we built shrines to Sonic the Hedgehog. Pages throbbed with tiled backgrounds, spinning skulls, cursor trails, faulty hit counters, blinking under-construction signs, and colour palettes that seem to have lost a bet.
It was awful, it was beautiful, and then Yahoo! bought it, painted the walls magnolia and made us tuck in our shirts.
But look close at the ashes and you’ll see a small flame, dancing in defiance. It’s called NeoCities – no ads, no tracking, and no algorithm drunk on engagement metrics. Just pure, unfiltered creation – HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and you.
“I keep changing my mind” he said.
“Maybe that’s your mind’s way of staying the same” she said.
What’s fascinating about NeoCities isn’t just the return of rainbows and fire bleeding through tiled horror as cats dance in 3 fps, – it’s how web design has evolved within that aesthetic. It’s a strange marriage of the unrefined and the sophisticated – a paradox, like graffiti done with a ruler.
Today’s NeoCities creators – some nostalgic veterans, others fresh-faced teens born long after GeoCities was euthanised – are merging old web charm with modern web techniques. Sites are still filled with excessive GIFs, chaotic colour schemes, MIDI soundtracks, and guestbooks, but in modern responsive layouts that actually work really well.
Because NeoCities is not retro, it is rebellion. A middle finger wrapped in glitter, poetry smeared in Comic Sans, across a 88×31 button, and battle cry through WinAmp. Because NeoCities stands out as a pocket of genuine expression. And in an era where digital presence means surrendering every quirk to the gods of engagement, the act of building a weird little website about your cat’s astrological sign is the most radical thing you can do. So, maybe the internet isn’t dead, just yet.
Some of it has once again decided it prefers living in the basement – where it can be itself, among friends, blinking and beautiful.
:: REFERENCES ::
- NeoCities – Your free web page is waiting… once again.
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