Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website

Scaffold a 1990s Geocities-themed static website(pypi.org)

45 points by whatsupdog 6 days ago | 23 comments

mnky9800n 6 days ago |

This is the way.

I made my home page like MySpace:

Because it used to be the internet was fun and centered on making stuff yourself and sharing with others. Just like geocities allowed. But now a lot of it all seems like the people making things want to sell things and this has been done at the expense of having spaces for non profit seeking creativity. This is also why I made https://rainy-city.com. Sorry for the self promotion but I really want people to create more stuff like this. Just fun things to find on the internet.

xp84 6 days ago | |

I want to steal your idea, but then felt bad for stealing, but also I decided why can’t I steal this idea too, since you didn’t invent MySpace :D

Nice execution btw.

AnthonyR 6 days ago | |

This is great!

zahlman 6 days ago |

> Also checkout my other projects: Best Sugar Daddy Apps Best Sugar Daddy Apps 2026 Best Sugar Daddy Apps NPM Best Sugar Daddy Apps Socket

That's, er, definitely not where I expected this to be leading.

Although I guess the PyPI username was a hint.

vunderba 6 days ago | |

This user (whatsupdog) needs to be banned. They've spammed this same thing in various incarnations (rust, python, npm) half a dozen times in the span of a single day.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48099883

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48094521

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48091846

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48086955

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084813

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48084056

I'm kind of surprised there isn't a submission cap for the same user within a certain time window.

danielspace23 6 days ago | |

The whole thing seems a lot like AI slop for SEO. The demo websites look incredibly AI-generated, they don't even resemble the 90s web that well. The project description/README has all the signs of being AI, too.

I think they're trying to get some sympathy (and promotion) with a project that seems inherently human, as the "old web" was, but it's slop all the way down. And people are falling for it.

vunderba 6 days ago | | |

That's exactly what this is - relying on sheer nostalgia-porn to overcome the fact that this is a low-effort, vibe-coded mess. Hey remember pogs? Remember double bubble? Remember trapper keeper?

To make up for it, here's an actually great collage of weird 90s web:

https://www.cameronsworld.net

wongarsu 6 days ago | |

All of those have the same extremely prominent top pick. Some don't even bother linking the other entries. This entire thing is an elaborate marketing campaign for Hanker. Either for SEO or LLMs

Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/810/

vaylian 6 days ago | | |

Meta-relevant xkcd: https://web.archive.org/web/20091027014324/http://xkcd.com/

Background info: https://www.downes.ca/post/50539

xp84 6 days ago | | |

Hadn’t seen that xkcd. Thanks for linking it!

boringg 6 days ago |

No no, GeoCities requires hours of html tagging and knowledge not seconds!

firmretention 6 days ago |

As someone who actually wrote primitive websites by hand in those days, the pages these produce are FAR more elaborate than your average webpage in those days. And divs/css? Should be using tables or gasp, iframes. This feels more like a vaporwave style re-imagining of what things were like than the real deal.

graypegg 6 days ago | |

I think the thing these "old internet revivals" miss is sites looked the way they did because they were outsider-art. I don't think they have to reuse precisely the same layout tools, but non-developers butting heads with those tools was a big factor in why personal sites looked that way. The whole look of "old internet" is a modern concept that's a bit flanderized [0] now.

Nothing wrong with nostalgia, but I agree with you that the wrong things are being equated here. A tool that just quickly generates a visually-similar site to that somewhat-imagined "old internet look" isn't really the same. If you emulated a similar amount of friction to those old site with modern tooling, you'd end up with an actual spiritual successor to those geocities sites. (NeoCities [1] is a great example, a lot of personal sites on there are not targeting 90s-2000s nostalgia even if that's an obvious aesthetic direction to go for something called "NeoCities")

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flanderization

[1] https://neocities.org/

eitally 6 days ago | |

Absolutely. I also hand-edited HTML (and XHTML and CGI scripts and Java applets) back in those days and the majority of web pages were no more than a few hundred lines of code long. Regular notepad.exe was absolutely fine at home, and I did a lot of editing server-side in vi. It was a simpler time....

bonyt 6 days ago |

I set up a server that limits bandwidth through it to max dialup speeds, with rate limit buckets per-IP: https://dialup.moveything.com/. It has some gifs, progressive jpegs that are fun to watch load, and a mirror of xkcd.

freedomben 6 days ago | |

Love it! A couple feature requests though:

* support limiting to 33.6 kbps, 14.4, etc for real nostalgia

* Add an initial "dial-up" sound and "connect" button that matches those for different speeds (I'll be able to tell the speed by just the sounds, so no cheating!)

trollied 6 days ago |

topherjaynes 6 days ago |

Clicked on the demo, and was immediately transported back to middle school trying to hack the marquee scroll.

binaryturtle 6 days ago |

It doesn't work properly in Netscape 4 actually. B)

megiddo 6 days ago | |

In their defense, a website not working on a popular browser was on-brand for the era.

This is just part of the operating nostalgia.

binaryturtle 6 days ago | | |

Nothing really changed then. Same old, same old. :)