Neocities
Today I want to talk about Neocities.org, maybe you heard already or maybe not. It is a place where you can build your own website, like in the old days of internet. It’s like 1999 called and said, "Hey come back, we have blinking GIFs!". You don’t need to be expert, just some little HTML (and maybe CSS) and you are good to go. So everyone on Hive should know how to use it as we use basic html on almost every post. I am preparing procrastinating over this post for 2 weeks and coincidentally @crimsonclad talked about neocities in a recent talk in the Hive discord server. That was a sign for me to stop doing other stuff and finally publishing this one ;)
The "Indie Web"
Neocities is part of what many call the "indie web". That means it’s not part of big tech like Instagram etc. People use Neocities because they want to have their own place online, not just another profile on corporate website. It's like making your own room, not renting space in someone else's apartment. Not quiet the same as on Hive but technically pretty similar. The phrase "indie web" makes some waves on the internet - e.g Here are the search results on youtube for that term and many of the results showcase neocities as the new/old hot shit on the web.
In early internet, people used geocities.org (if you know that, you are at least as old as I am). There you have been able to create small websites for free and it was quiet popular back in the days. Yahoo bought Geocities in 1999 and killed it in 2009. But in the 2010s someone created Neocities to bring the spirit back. From then on it was again possible to create small personal websites for free and with your own unique url: username.neocities.org. It is quiet fun to surf in the explorer on neocities - some pages look like old games, some are normal blogs, and some are just full of cats, bad fonts, blinking gifs - just to show you how the internet was back in the days. It's beautiful.
Why people join the "Indie Web"?
For many reasons people are tired of centralized social media. Every time you post, some algorithm decide who is going to see it. Also you don’t own your content at all. You can get banned just because someone report you for nothing. And don’t forget the crazy amount of ads everywhere. You scroll and scroll and see more shampoo than post by your friends. That’s why indie web is such a big thing and keeps growing. More people go back to "own" their websites, RSS feeds, forums, and writing just for fun, not for likes. It's slower and less polished but that makies it even nicer, more human, not just viral video number 7000. Maybe you break your layout a few times while editing your raw html files but that’s part of the fun.
Now why is this important for the Hive blockchain?
Hive in my eyes is indie web but on steroids. We are a nieche on our own but we are the future while the common "indie web" is the renesaince from the past early internet years. If people from Hive start using Neocities to show their art, music, blogs or whatever, it's a good match visual and technical vise. More people will potentailly see you content and could be attracted to Hive if your websites are done right (not like my example below). Cross-Platform advertisement is key in getting viral and authentic engagement on Hive and what's better than connecting with content creators who are over the traditional social media searching for an outlet of their blogs and creativity?
And now the cool part: You do not need to do much to create your neocities website and automatically publishing your content over there. Cool Hive creators can make small websites on Neocities and next to their their Hive posts, they can also add additional explainers about Hive, the many dapps and their favorite comunities. It's like old web meets future web and they go to drink a alcohol-free beer together. And who knows: Maybe your site becomes the next weird corner of the internet that people love and you can show them how they can go deeper into the real indie web aka the semi-nerdy territory of the Hive blockchain.
Now what if you want to join this?!
... but you dont want to fiddle around with raw html or copy&pasting your Hive posts? Use this super simple step-by-step method to get started:
1. Basic setup on neocities account:
Now the last step of the signup is to confirm your email address. (For me, the email went to the spam folder so check there too if you don’t see the message from Neocities.) It would be like heaven if joining Hive was that easy, lol.
In this tutorial, we won’t work much with HTML, so you can just click "Go to the dashboard". But if you’re completely new to HTML, feel free to check out their tutorial. I can also highly recommend https://www.w3schools.com/html/ - it’s a great place to learn the basics.
On the dashboard, you’ll see all the basic pages and the style.css file of your new Neocities website. For now, we’ll only edit the index.html but this structure can become much deeper, with folders, menus, submenus, images... whatever you can imagine! There are some limits when it comes to using external JavaScript libraries and other features, mostly for security reasons. But don’t worry: I found a super simple way to add your Hive blog here. Just keep following the tutorial!
If you hover with your mouse over the index.html you can click "edit":
Now keep the newly opened editor, open a new tab and go to rss.app.
2. Adding your blog
On HiveRSS, you can find many different RSS feeds with Hive-related content. For this tutorial, we’ll use the username/blog feed, which shows all posts that appear on the blog of that specific user.
There are many more rss feeds like:
- Posts with a specific tag by a specific user: hiverss.com/@username?tagFilter=tagToCheck
- posts within a specific community: @communityaccount/created
Of course, it depends on what you want to show on your new website. Just choose the right URL and paste it into the field before clicking "Generate". Reading the feed and creating the RSS widget will take a few seconds.
Now that RSS.app has generated your feed, you can customize many things! Take your time and explore the (really) many settings. We won’t go into detail here, but there are lots of ways to get creative. When you’re finished, click “Add to Website”:
Now a window will appear where you can choose "iframe" (which Neocities supports). Then just click the small copy button:
Now baaaaack to the neocities editor of our index.html file. Delete all the unneccesary stuff and paste your iframe code somewhere within the body part:
Hit "Save" and then "View" and get ready to check out the final result:
I mean that was super simple as promised, right?
Further customization
Of course, this was very basic, and I think you understand what I tried to show here. Now it’s your turn to be creative. Add a menu to your website, put more Hive-related RSS frames on your page, and most important: tell the visitors more about Hive. This is not only for promoting your own content - it is also for promoting Hive and helping the Hive community grow. People who join Hive because of your cool Neocities site will always remember you! The better your page explains how to join Hive, the simple ideas behind it, and the more you show what you personally like about Hive (some communities or apps), the more chance people will stay after joining.
And what if nobody will ever visit your neocities blog?
If you post your website in the comments of this post, at least one person will visit it: me! :D And even if I am the only visitor for all eternity, at least you learned something "new" today! Setting everything up really takes just 5 minutes so why not give it a try?