smallweb | Smallweb Chatter Post

Got notice from the friend who'd hosted my old site for more than two decades that it would be going offline shortly. What a mix of emotions! I should have backups of everything, so it's not a big deal in that regard, and I haven't had edit-access in almost a decade, but just... wow. It's a little weird to think of it not being there.

(Time to get back to my archiving, I suppose!)

It's cool that your friend can warn you about downtime! While if Cloudflare goes down... there goes 80% of the internet without warning :P

I just finished writing a short comparison of Nekoweb and Neocities features, since I saw someone on blorbo.social asking which to choose today :D

https://wiki.scumsuck.com/notes:webhosting

I don't use either, but I love to compare features and TOS haha. These two were kinda funny to compare cuz Nekoweb advertises itself as better :P

Edited 2025-06-29 02:36 (UTC)

I’ve mostly just been cleaning up/organizing files and such for the personal website, so it’s easier to navigate both on the back and front end (hopefully). I did add other CSS stylesheets (they’re just color swaps depending on the topic of the page, but I think it’s a cute touch, at least) plus a robots.txt file, though.

I’m thinking of changing the footer to something else (at least a link to a sitemap that I’m making), but I know that’s going to be tedious, having to update every page... In due time.

Yeah, I wouldn't have minded a smidge more warning so I could make some newer backups, but it is what it is. o7 my old website, gone to the wayback machine in the sky. Friend hosted it for far longer than they ever needed to.

Sounds like you've already done it, but info for anyone else that needs it:

you can preserve sites on the wayback machine. There's a "save page" section on the front page, you can enter a url and it will save a copy. You need to do it for every page of your site though. And you can repeat it every time you change your site so it can act as a history of your site.

https://web.archive.org
https://help.archive.org/help/save-pages-in-the-wayback-machine/

I wish! I've just been dragging the same files around for nearly three decades. (But there does seem to be an incomplete backup on the Wayback Machine, which is enough. Mostly what I need is story titles so I can match them with files, and the listings I need are there.)

I haven't done a lot with my neocities site lately, mostly just fiddly little things like cleaning some code up or adding some images. I have a lot of ideas for things I want to add to my site, just lacking the brain space to do it I guess lol

I did swap out my guestbook though. Found out atabook is going to be adding ads (and a premium service to remove them) at some point in the near future (they have started testing it). Not that I am opposed to paying for a service I am using. But I guess I feel like if I'm going to be spending money just to not see ads on my guestbook/site, that money could instead go towards proper hosting that has a database I can use for things like a guestbook.

random resources:

"shows how you can protect a webpage from visitors using a password that can't be found inside the source code on Neocities"
https://xobyte.org/demos/protected/

"IndieSeas is a search engine made exclusively for the indieweb. It scrapes based on 88x31 buttons, while respecting privacy and robots.txt policies."
https://indieseas.net - has a random button at the bottom too

css tutorials and code by topic:
https://moderncss.dev/topics/

Oh, interesting! As someone who's been using both Neocities and Nekoweb for a while now, I'm definitely curious to see what your thoughts are on comparing the two. Bookmarking to read later :)

Finally started working on my first shrine! I started yesterday so I haven't gotten that far yet, but I've done a little. Got the layout down at least, now I gotta fill it with stuff. I still need to collect all the images I want, and I don't really know a lot of things to write yet, but I figure I'll get there eventually.

I've been thinking about password protection on neocities recently, thank you for the link!

How/where are you going to host your guestbook going forward?

Not a ton from me lately, though I did open a new fanlisting. Thinking about building another one soon, we'll see.

My goals for this year were to revamp my domain + fanlisting collective, and to open at least one new fansite. I've not made much progress on this... 😩 I have a pretty good idea of how I want the new fanlisting collective layout to look, so I'm hoping to work on that soon. Unfortunately I'm recovering from a knee injury that makes it hard to sit at my desk for too long, so I'll need to work on it a little bit at a time.

I also have another site that's mostly ready in terms of content, but I'm been COMPLETELY blocked on the layout, which sucks. I should really just throw some spaghetti at the wall (read: screw around in Photoshop until I make something tolerable) but it's hard when the inspiration isn't there.

Not sure if you're aware of ZIM files but depending on the nature of the site it might be worth it to make a ZIM of it with something like zimit..

Another tip, when saving webpages with it, I recomment having an Internet Archive account!
With it, on the Save page you can check "Save outlinks", which as the name suggests, also saves any page that is linkedino the one you're archiving.

So for example, if you archive an index, it will save the pages linked in sidebar too. Or for a blog, when archiving page 4 it will save pages 3 and 5 as well.
I like to archive old fan websites and it has been a time and lifesaver.

Thanks for the Indie Web link!
I was aware of multiple search engines that prioritize smaller and older websites, but I really love how that one is focused on indieweb since these sites tend to be currently active. I have had fun looking thru it!

Oh gosh, is that the end of Yaoiville?

Yep. And gah, there was a ton of FFX stuff on there, wasn't there? (Now I'm trying to think of who else I still know who had subdomains or other projects on there. It was not a huge number of us, but enough. But who is still around... But there were a lot of different projects hosted on there over the years...)

for now I am using ayano's comment widget - I was using it before atabook but switched because it relies on google forms and sheets, and I wasn't a fan of that, but it does the job really well otherwise (it only works on older free neocities accounts tho, newer neocities accounts need supporter status due to the content security policy)
https://virtualobserver.moe/ayano/comment-widget

Oh COOL, thank you for the write up b/c I was curious about this!!

Closed quite a few accounts and it’s always interesting to see the comparison of how many sites I used to use VS how many I use now. Abandoning a lot of places like FB and Twitter have done wonders for my mental, and also made me realize how addicted I was to the Neverending Doomscroll. xD

Outside of Discord, I only use Pillowfort and Dreamwidth and it’s honestly refreshing to not be tied to so many sites.

Still debating on what I want to do with my site, and still mourning the loss of Status Cafe (the site is still alive, but I discovered a weird JS worm crawling through the site and abandoned my account there out of concern). I wanted a site to mostly host fic and journal entries, and I feel like Dreamwidth does that just fine. A part of that could be the laziness talking, but who knows. xD

Edited 2025-06-30 04:16 (UTC)

I've been seriously sidetracked from the rest of my life but I still have been able to add a few links to my linklist page. I appreciate being at the point where I can mostly just add links at my leisure because the main category pages already just exist.

I'm thinking of a few new things I want to add, though. Like maybe an article feed of stuff I've read recently that I think are interesting but maybe don't want to sort into the categories. I am also thinking about some of the subreddits I like that seem to have very ephemeral content, like r/liminalspace and r/bonehurtingjuice, of kind of making gallery pages of the best ones. And of course I need to make a button... I said I would make one several months again and it still hasn't happened.

Edited 2025-06-30 05:31 (UTC)

Yeah, I don't think there are many archives still up, but it was always so nice to see FFX_yaoi still there after so many years :( RIP.

My initial thought is that Nekoweb is a upgrade in almost every technical aspect - only lacking the social media functions of Neocities (which is a huge part of why people use it!). Do you have any opinions having used both sites? :D

💖 Hope it's useful! I would honestly make sites on both sites to take advantage of each of their features! (experimentation with nekoweb, and something I want comments on with neocities)

I've been using Neocities for about two years now and Nekoweb for just over a year. Honestly if I had to choose between them I'd pick Neocities without any hesitation. For me, it doesn't have anything to do with the social media side of the site, as I rarely ever venture over to that side of things. I just genuinely prefer how Neocities functions, its website editor, the more polished feel of it, and the features you get for the price you're paying. (I bought paid tier accounts on both, but kept the Neocities one and dropped back to free tier for Nekoweb.) Also, when I do need to turn to the community for questions/advice, I've found in my own experience that the Neocities community is much easier for me to talk to than the Nekoweb group, but that's just a personal preference.

Oooh very interesting! It seemed to me from the outside that the Nekoweb paid features were a whole lot more than Neocities (for half the price) :P Like the extra storage space, the FTP stuff, the SSG stuff.... Or the web editor having syntax highlighting?

But I can see how Neocities would be more polished since it's been around for so much longer. And yeah Nekoweb seems to already have its base clique of users who are all friends with each other already - while Neocities seems more open for random conversation!

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