World Wide

W

eird

My Story

After much badgering to my parents in the early 00's we finally got our first proper family computer - a shiny new eMachines Windows XP machine. Rationed to 30 minute stints, time spent in front of this marvellous machine was precious, hence most of it was spent browsing Cartoon Network and drawing abstract art in paint!

Once I'd exhausted all what MS Paint had to offer I moved on to Piczo (now defunct) - a basic webpage builder that took a slightly different approach from Geocities. You didn't need to know HTML to build webpages, however I quickly found myself using the 'HTML snippet' element to create 90% of my website.

Piczo turned out to be a great entry point into the world of web development, and I took that knowledge to college and university which helped me breeze through the web development modules with ease. Following this I've now been working 8 years as a full stack web developer and still have a great enthusiasm for the web.

With way too much time spent indoors during the global pandemic lockdown, I began seeking to re-capture the memories of the web I knew from my childhood. Thanks to the Geocities archives that was easily possible and I was hungry for more glittery text and animated GIFs.

When stumbling upon Neocities, and seeing how it combines the age-old desire to carve out a little nook in which we can portray our personality, with the updated set of tools (e.g. CSS3) we have available to us in 2020, I couldn’t help but get my hands dirty!

The state of the internet in 2020

"The internet become a soulless place where all websites are clones of another"

I disagree with this statement, in the very early days of the internet, websites with colourful backgrounds and text may have been more prominent but it was never going to last. As soon as larger websites come along that had hundreds if not thousands of pages, navigation and layout would require the design to be toned down to be useable. Now the majority of web browsing is done on mobile and tablet devices.

The one area you can argue this statement holds some truth is in the social media space with sites like Facebook and Twitter were the customisation options for your profile are very limited. So if they offered less flexibility.