Hi! I'm e, and as someone in their 40's, I may skew as one of the older users of Neocities. Finding Neocities opened a floodgate of fun memories for me, and I wanted to jump right in and participate. I forgot how much I enjoyed coding.

So pull up a chair, and let grandma tell you a story about web 1.0.

I think I was 13 when my family got a computer for Christmas. It would've been 1996. The first thing I did was look up websites for my favorite bands, as a music-obsessed teen would. It soon wasn't enough, I had a create a website, too.

My older cousin that worked in IT hooked me up with a copy of a web editor called HotDog (which I still think is weird and hilarious. How was that not a fever dream?), pretty much left me to it, and I taught myself HTML. I also taught myself how to use FTP and how to uplaod my own AOL website. I had quite a few, including a Radiohead fan site that was linked by CDNow. At the time, that was kind of a big deal. I was 14 or 15 at the time.

I'm reflecting upon all of this, and I'll fully admit it... I've never been considered a "cool" person. "Cool" people do not spend their time coding websites for fun, even music fan pages. I had friends that did, though, and I liked that. They were interested in the same things as me, and building websites just proved that they wanted to know how things work. When we weren't working on sites, we were at punk shows, and that's kind of cool in its own way.

When I was in college, in 2003, I had built a fun Geocities site for my friends. It linked to our respective LiveJournals, had shrines for the building we lived in and >Duckie, and we even made a quiz. However, it wasn't long before MySpace became common enough that our website became kind of useless. What we now know as Web 2.0 came on slowly, and I never realized that the last time I built a website from scratch was the really the last time I'd build a website from scratch. Maybe I would've savored it more. I had a "friend" that forced me to "teach" them HTML, which really just meant working on my site in front of them, and I resented it.

It was a relief to find Neocities. I thought Web 1.0 was dead. I loved the personality I could peep on everyone's pages, and it made me feel optimistic to see this amount of creativity still alive and well on the internet.