Blaugust 2022 – Neocities – The Social Backend to Website Design
Posted on August 21, 2022 by Aywren
In my previous post, I talked a bit about what Neocities is and how it fills a space for the creative web design community who miss the old web days. While Neocities is primarily a free web host solution meant to offer a platform for these designers to explore HTML and CSS, even it has some more modern sensibilities built into it.
Neocities has been running since 2013 – it’s almost 10 years old! Imagine that. But while the heart of creation reaches back to the old web, the backend was designed with a social community in mind.
After all, folks who want to dive into website creation also want to share their work. While Neocities sites do get indexed by Google, it’s not as likely for small sites like this to get strong traffic that way. So building a social backend into Neocities allows people to connect, see what’s been updated, and follow sites that they like.
How Does It Work?
When you view a Neocities profile – here’s mine for example – you can see a stream of things like updates, comments and interactions. This is basically a Neocities feed for that individual.
If you have a Neocities account and are logged in, you’ll have the option to Follow that site. This means that all of this activity will now appear on your personal site-wide feed. Kinda like following someone on Twitter or Tumblr.
When you get a new follower, you’ll have an alert that looks something like this:
Clicking that alert takes you to your account feed where you can see who followed you. I usually hop over to their profile, send them a thanks, and follow them back (as long as their site doesn’t have content I wouldn’t normally support).
Now, whenever that person leaves comments, follows other people, or updates their site, I can see it on my main activity feed. This encourages people to check out the pages that were recently updated, leave likes on comments and updates, and even check out the accounts that other people are following.
The best thing about all of this is that it’s completely optional. If you don’t want to participate and just want to be there to code cool stuff, there’s an option to turn profiles and follows off.
It’s a great way to meet new people, check out sites you’d never normally see and build traffic from within Neocities itself!