The HTML Hobbyist on Neocities

Welcome to the World Wide Web…

I’m N.E. Lilly. You can call me Nathan. I’ve been developing websites for a long, long time. I’ve used Mosaic and watched the rise of Netscape Navigator. I learned JavaScript when all it could do was stupid browser tricks and DHTML was cutting-edge. I’m a veteran of the Browser Wars. I was recently hit with a mighty powerful wave of nostalgia: I miss ye olde World Wide Web. I miss the unadulterated optimism that we had for Cyberspace. I miss the seriousness about silliness and the silliness about seriousness that we found on the ’Net. I miss the infinite variety that we found in our pre-mobile Matrix analog. I miss the 1,000 different fanzines. I want it all back.

I and admire Neocities’ goals:

I am tired of living in an online world where people are isolated from each other in boring, spied-on gated communities, and are given generic templates which define what people are supposed to know about each other. It’s time we took back our personalities from these sterilized, lifeless, monetized, monitored entities and let our creativity flourish again.

About Neocities, in 2013

I built this particular website to see just what Neocities is capable of, so that I can provide guidance and advice via The HTML Hobbyist to people who want to make websites. Kudos to the creators.

The HTML Hobbyist Mission

  1. Show you how quick, easy, and affordable it has become to get a website up and running.
  2. Show you how enjoyable building a simple hand-coded artisanal HTML website can be.
  3. Provide you with instructions and guidance on how to build and upload your own hobbyist website to share with your community.

Web What Was

I had (and still have) a dream that the web could be less of a television channel and more of an interactive sea of shared knowledge. I imagine it immersing us as a warm, friendly environment made of the things we and our friends have seen, heard, believe or have figured out. I would like it to bring our friends and colleagues closer, in that by working on this knowledge together we can come to better understandings. If misunderstandings are the cause of many of the world’s woes, then can we not work them out in cyberspace. And, having worked them out, we leave for those who follow a trail of our reasoning and assumptions for them to adopt, or correct.

Hypertext and Our Collective Destiny, by Tim Berners-Lee