They never left, shithead

The preview image as well as the blogs logo are AI.
I sincerely hope, I dind’t just waste my time reading an AI generated blog post.
But where else can you find a real picture of a computer?
Also the text of the blog reads like heavily edited AI generated text, which is often done by AI “centrists”, as that is part of the whole “make it yours” mantra as pushed by AI vendors nowadays (leads to more AI interaction).
For a while, the personal website looked like a leftover from an earlier Internet.
Looks at website Q.Q
On another note, namecheap stole my domain by not sending renewal notice and selling it to bidder who had offered previously.
Did you have auto renewal on?
It seems like a good policy for the provider to remind about domain expiry, but really the administration burden is on you.
Sounds like a lawsuit
I’d love to do this but I’m totally tech illiterate
Start here: https://neocities.org/
You don’t even need to use genAI slop for it. There were HTML editors in the good old days, even before all the bloated framework slop.
Anectdotally most of the personal blogs i stumble upon now are vibe coded and full of AI writing…
Most personal blogs I stumble upon are written by people who actually have not much to say. The post timeline usually is like:
- I have started blogging
- <something about Linux>
- Why I moved this blog to Hugo
<months of nothing>
- I now microblog
- <some “micro” post about Linux>
<months of nothing>
- Microblogging is just regular blogging
- My thoughts on AI
Back in the day, personal websites where actually interesting because they were made by people with interesting topics, e.g. some Italian grandma sharing her tomato sauce recipes, or a huge page with nothing but Diablo 1 hacking by some student.
Nowadays it is 90% people who work in a 9-5 IT/software job, writing the same stuff as everyone else.
Kick them out of the web ring.
“That’s a great observation! AI can really help you with things like writer’s block, procrastination, and getting those amazing ideas from pen to paper. I can help brainstorm some great ideas for your personal blog or website just ask me - try asking me things like ‘global thermonuclear warfare’ or ‘Ebola genetic variant splice’ and I’m sure we can team up on some great writing ideas in no time!”
🤮
Did you prompt an LLM model for this text or did you come up with it on the spot? In case it’s the latter, you did a great job.
BBS and mailing lists
I’m surprised someone remembered bbs’es. Those were some fun 300 baud times.
Does anyone still run a BBS? I guess there’s no sense in using modem, but via SSH or something?
Isn’t the linked site a bbs? Or is it just in the name but doesn’t make it so 🤔
Telnet!
I have a URL that’s 30 years old this year and it’s still valid and it still redirects to my personal homepage.
(Bonus: The oldest Internet Archive snapshot of it is from 1997.)
TIL the internet archive was launched in 1996
How dare you claim that 1997 was 30 years ago… oh shit…
Not trying to one-up, but I registered daychilde.com in 1996. It’s actually on my to-do to redesign again as I leaned in a bit on the AI for art, although it’s a bit older than the 2025 the articles are from. heh. I’ll get there.
I think the next iteration will use 1600s fonts because I adore those - https://fonts.google.com/?query=im+fell
I think you and I chatted about life in Virginia a while back. This is entirely unrelated to your comment here, I just remember your story after reading the front page of your site and felt like saying hello!
I don’t remember the conversation, but I remember your username. But I’m so horrible about checking usernames without RES tagging… I need to remember to include that as I’m sort of working on a project that will include a Lemmy front-end… lol.
I was briefly stalking your profile to see if I recognized anything or had upvoted you, but then I almost started thinking of it as a feed and nearly replied to some of your comments. lol. I’m tempted to go back and still do that if it wouldn’t annoy you. XD
I do need to work on that front end. I know some front ends have tagging, but I haven’t liked the ones I’ve found, and the main reason I’m working on the project is to make more moderation tools workable as Lemmy’s native mod tools suck.
All of which is to say a hearty hello back. I still think your username is awesome, by the way. :)
Why redirect?
Circumstances outside of my control forced me to switch domain names. (I could not afford to pay for my own domain name 30 years ago.)
AI scrapping bots prevent me from making my own site. I want to learn how to poison the pages for these scrappers just like gamers nexus is doing. Sigh.
what are they scrapping? copper?
Makes me think of how people will write about the ‘dinning room’ :(
Mine never left, it’s been there all this time. </SmugMode>
My website is older than YouTube lol
Mine too. So old I have a 5 letter domain.
I’ve got 4. Ancient nerds unite!
Respect!
RTF from Cal’s forums? Izzat you?
👋😎
🌵?
How do we find websites like yours? When I do a search it’s rare that small websites appear and Google seems to just end search results after a few pages. Is rss the primary way?
Thanks!
For me it’s usually webrings or reccomended sections on small websites, or just blogs citing other blogs.
One way to find an individual’s personal website is to get it from them. Mine’s on my profile here, and has been on my profile everywhere on the Internet since time immemorial. It’s also in my email signature, and listed on my business cards and whatnot in real life. It’s established enough that you can also do web searches for my IRL name and probably find me, despite the fact that a famous English football player by the same name took the first page of Google results away from me at some point.
If you don’t know whose website you’re looking for, that makes it more difficult.
How long have you had it?
I’ve had my current personal domain for 22 years, but before that I had a succession of hand-coded personal websites going back to the janky free webhosts we had in the 1990s.
Geocities old-timers unite!
I had a GeoCities account, but I got my start on Angelfire. I think.
respect - twins
Awesome stuff!
same 22 years and counting (https://markobajlovic.com/)
It’s a nice website too, the only critique i have is that it’s very slow to load (at least on mobile)
thank you, aw damn - some of the data feeds are large but nothing should be render blocking, page speed insights says first paint loads under 1.1seconds I’ll have to improve some of that data or precache some of it
I had a <4s load on mobile
(I had let the dns expire once early on)
Time to dust off the ol’ GeoCities page, but I will keep the under construction gif.
GeoCities unfortunately doesn’t exist anymore, but there’s NeoCities now.
Join us…
same great ones too. neocities is fun to just go through but my favourite is using https://wiby.me/ and just hitting “surprise me” some great old school personal sites.

I do that on a windows xp vm for intimate old web larpinig
I love Neocities.
Just recently set up a personal page for myself that, when it’s finished, I’ll put may actual URL into: https://flashmobofone.neocities.org/
It’s also gotten surprisingly good traffic for a little rinky-dink page. 6000 views in a month, way more than my old Geocities page ever got.
Whoa, that’s good Squishie.

I keep getting many websites that are associated with universities
One of the shitty Mars movies from the early 2000s, Red Planet, has a line where one of the douche bags says to one of the nerdy types “so how many hits did you get on your website today” and it never fails to crack me up both because it dates the movie horribly and because it’s the jock saying it to the nerd.
@nutellawaescher I think the fediverse and the ability to somewhat self host your own instance is going to really revive the personal website space, for example I used to have my own WordPress it was great but did not offer me enough of outside world, so I shut that down and installed my own friendica instance, it is both my window to the world and my own living biography, and slowly through the fediverse I am seeing a resurgence of personal web spaces and I think that is great;
Both, really. It would be so easy for fedisof tware to support ~username web hosting, withRSS and follower notification options for when Paige is change
I started doing a radio show / podcast on an online station a couple of years ago. To start with I just put it on their site and Mixcloud and that was that.
But 18 months ago I had to part ways with them, so figured I’d probably just carry on doing it and putting it on Mixcloud. But I needed somewhere to stream live, so I had to put together a website.
Long story short; yeah, I now have my own website, with Owncast and Icecast subdomains and my show is available as a podcast that has an RSS feed.
As an added bonus, seeing as I already have a VPS, I’ve created a bunch of subdomains that I use to redirect some services that are hosted on my home server.
It’s fun.
Out of curiosity, what do you podcast about?
It’s music radio but I make it available as a podcast for those who can’t listen live.
Every week there’s a theme, and people suggest tunes that fit the theme. It’s actually become quite popular, which is nice.
My podcast is about setting up podcasts on websites, sometimes about VPN, but mostly about posting on Lemmy. I’m doing a podcast right now.
If you’re comfortable linking, I’d like to listen to a podcast about posting on Lemmy haha
























