The Joy Of Static Web

The Joy Of Static Web (And Control)

The Fediverse, 2025-08-15

Looking For A Place

This is – in this phase of my onlife (online life) that I guess you can call my Fediverse era – my third version of a site.

I started with one at Wordpress.com, though I'm not all that keen on the platform. Later I found Paper.wf, which uses the Write.as platform. It's really a great markdown-based tool and free, but quite limited to pure blogging, and images need to be hosted elsewhere.
Still, I enjoyed it.

Then, suddenly my posts got a lot of hits. I mean a lot of hits. From around 10 to 900. Of course it's bots and with paper.wf there is not an option of uploading a robots.txt file.

So, back to Wordpress for a while, this time with all pages passwords protected. The password, 'cargo train', was posted on the front page and you only have to supply it once, for all pages to 'lock up'. And hits went back to around 10 on that site.

But, as I mentioned, not too fond of WP, especially when trying to work on my tablet. (I have a physical keyboard in the tablet cover, so I can write and code on it).

Yesterday, I was reading one of Cory Doctorow's Plurastic posts, when for some reason I was reminded that I hadn't ticked off checking the neocities.org site yet.

In the mid 90s, I had loads and loads of fun with creating web pages on Geocities. If I remember correctly, it went through the process of enshittification, especially after Yahoo bought it. But many fond memories of fun times.

(ec)static web!

Since I joined Neocities around 2 in the afternoon yesterday, I have had so much fun again.

I have played around with writing HTML, creating a stylesheet and an RSS-feed and it is really bare bones, everything. So.. so.. clean! When I used Wordpress or Paper.wf and checked the actual posted code (use Ctrl+U for that), my text was less than 25% of the code, the rest being autogenerated stuff by the site/platform that I had little to no control over.

Here, it had exactly what I had coded, nothing more, nothing less. And so, got to have a name, so Bared Bones was the simplest solution.

And yes, the general pages, stylesheet and (for now) the RSS feed are manually written in Notepad++. These posts are most likely to be written in Markdown, and then exported to HTML. This is a hobby project, there are no deadlines, a very small site and I enjoy writing code by hand.

Bared Bones