Craft your own website

"My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously."

Laure Schwulst, 2018

MORNING

Intro

Who we are? Gossip round about websites.

Lucas and Balint graduated from ArtEZ Graphic Design. This is where we learned about coding website from scratch. We believe that sharing knowledge about technology empowers people who use these technologies. Knowing how to build a website can be a starting point to understand the internet as systems of infrastructures.

We keen on to know why did you sign up and what do you know about websites? Where do you learnd about it?

Neocities.org

History
The spirit of neocities.org comes from the 90's/2000's Geocities, which was a platform where people could craft their own website and share it with eachother. We can think of it neighbourhoods of websites link together in a loose manner, very much community oriented organisation.

Geocities was the third most visited website back then -> yahoo.com buys them -> death of Geocities in 2009 -> revive the spirit of geocities in 2013 as neocities.org initiated by Kyle Drake.

The spirit:

Indie web principals # own your own data
commercialised and AI drivven web today lacks web autonomy
more on this topic
POSSE - Publish your own Wbsite and Syndicate Elsewhere

Cultural significance
It is not a coincidence that we are hosting this workshop at De Kurk - the local queer bar in Arnhem. There is an interestin connection to explore between physical queer places and neocities.org as a queer place for personal/individual websites.

"Building a site involves coding, but also creative strategy for page layout, image use, focal points, colour motifs and other decisions not too far off from curating a show, or designing a visual arts magazine, the difference being that no one decides how things look except for you."

" personalised sites, many users have used Neocities to house different parts of the art industry digitally, often promoting their zines, curating art in cyber galleries and sharing their portfolios"

" users are brought together through community ‘webrings’, small hyperlinked widgets attached to their pages."

Olia Liliana net artist works with saved Geocities websites
One Terrabyte of Kilobyte
search on Netart tag on neocities.org
melonking.net

Webrings

Before google's search engine there was a very different way to browes the internet. Webrings are a very apparent method of connecting websites together, like a ringroad in the neighbourhood.

"pre-Google days, search kind of sucked"

Commercialazation of the web creates certain ways of interctin with the web.

"users decided to self-organize their pages through lightly-organized “rings” that would lead users to pages on a similar topic. Having a link somewhere on your site that ensured users that your page was a way station in a series of pages on a similar theme."

"when the ring gets big enough—it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring ‘intact’ when pages go down.”"

"Web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are batty about a favorite hobby"