Exploring NeoCities

Lately, whenever I need to take a few minutes to veg out I will dig around NeoCities looking for interesting sites. I learned the hard way that websites > old is a pretty thankless method. The activity feed is good, but there are still plenty of interesting sites that are sleeping or haven't been updated in a while.

Websites > random is slightly better, it usually brings up a mix of old and somewhat recently active sites so there are far less Welcome to my Website! blank templates.

I've been messing around with ideas for making a NeoCities travel guide that doesn't overlap with and . It quickly became apparent I need some sort of critera. Roughly:

• Site should be of interest to NeoCities or the larger online community. Which excludes a lot of landing pages/carrd-type profiles, RPG character profiles, CS assignments, portfolios, resumes, most webgames (unless particularly novel) and most meme sites.
• Site is preferrably a "lived in" digital space. Site doesn't necessarily have to be recently updated, but I greatly prefer sites that have been developed and somewhat updated over time rather than code-and-run.
• Site is notably weird or interesting. Obviously everyone's metric for "worth clicking on" varies. While I'm not big on meme sites, I am very big on people being incredibly weird or geeky in their own personal digital space.

Then there's the matter of organizing it. I don't want to use a neighborhoods or district format like the forementioned directories. Static categories lack fluidity. So I'm experimenting with ctrl-f #tag concepts.

For aesthetics, I want to de-emphasize buttons when possible, because NeoCities 88x31 button culture has led to sites without buttons getting less links, but I want to try to give each website it's own little "plot" so to speak--something more visually informative than a basic hypertext link and description. I'm taking some inspiration from webgardens.

Anyway, that's where it's at.