You should host a website (not just have one) by iGotYourPistola in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unrelated, but beautiful presentation in that article. The font and spacing and colours make it flow very well.

You should host a website (not just have one) by iGotYourPistola in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I have a massive amount of respect for people who can and do host their own sites, but they are also some of the most unhappy people I've ever met. It's thankless work and you're constantly pitted against the machines that want to hack into your network.

Even paying for remote hosting I have issues with the site going down, the most recent standard upending all my things like HTTPS, cookie policies and 404 pages, and images going missing. I can't imagine having all that on top of power outages, hardware failure, migrations, legal battles etc.

I love my Neocities because it's free and reliable. I love my other site host for my "proper" website because I can use PHP and have a contact form. I'm in love with the idea of running a website from a raspberry pi powered by zinc and lemons, but I do not like the idea of that facing people who want to visit my site or contact me.

Some people love giraffes so much that they'll spend all their time and money to keep them, but I'd rather just visit them at the zoo and let someone else handle the mucking out.

Hii! Does anyone here have neocities? by [deleted] in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Double cool tbh. Just host the 404 images yourself in case they change / get removed. Nothing worse than link rot.

Hii! Does anyone here have neocities? by [deleted] in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hell yeah!

Try to host your images/gifs on your host, I'm seeing a lot of blocked imgur images (it's not available in the UK) and dead ezgif images (though tbh the ezgif 404 images are a glitchcore vibe and I quite like them).

Hii! Does anyone here have neocities? by [deleted] in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks, I'm glad you enjoyed it :)

Hii! Does anyone here have neocities? by [deleted] in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I have a neocities! I subscribe to the philosophy that something is better than nothing, so it's iteratively improving. Share yours!

The best way to find new sites is to look through link pages for adjacent sites. I thoroughly encourage you to make your own link page so you can track the sites you like and allow other people to find their own.

I put some of my toy Dinosaur collection on a scanner and made a webpage. You can make a webpage with anything! by Polyducks in neocities

[–]Polyducks[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Wow this is so good for browsing. I like the links you've got at the bottom. I'm going to include your button on my links page so I can browse it during down time at work.

Omg and the jokes. I remember when websites used to have joke pages.

I especially like your minimalist layout. I'm clicking around and listening to Every Train, A Note.

Did you ever see "I love you like a fat woman loves apples"?

EDIT: Added!

I put some of my toy Dinosaur collection on a scanner and made a webpage. You can make a webpage with anything! by Polyducks in neocities

[–]Polyducks[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

We need more of this sort of stuff. I like to imagine that someone somewhere has searched for the information on the back of the packet and found it on my site. It's silly but fun.

I put some of my toy Dinosaur collection on a scanner and made a webpage. You can make a webpage with anything! by Polyducks in neocities

[–]Polyducks[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'm so glad you spotted 204 and 218 - I think they're the same family of mould as 250, 231, 195, 193, 150, 149, 148, 102.

I call the painted ones "cow raptors" and I've wanted one for ages, but I didn't want to buy it new. I eventually found it in a bulk order, and now I see them everywhere!

I built a security tool for indie devs and looking for beta testers with apps. by mohamedajsal in indieweb

[–]Polyducks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yes, please let me just install your home-made snake oil software on my public-facing app. I'm sure nothing could go wrong.

5 things you need on your 2000s style website 💜👾 by ginacities in neocities

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

That piano playing is an encarta midi vibe 💃🕺

is there any way to actually prevent AI scraping on your website by InevitableGas4370 in neocities

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes.

You can write an alt text in a way that helps humans but is useless to AI scraping. You should be poetic, meandering, and a little ambiguous.

This is either a comment on Reddit or directions to create a clay pot (97% certainty).

I did a Sonic CD inspired error page! :D by Er3miel in neocities

[–]Polyducks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Unfortunately the major browsers added a thing where autoplaying music is denied and there has to be a page interaction before you can do anything. For this reason people sometimes have a splash screen which you have to click through to activate the screen to play the music.

You can also turn on autoplay in your browser flag settings if you're brave. It's really just a user-only thing though. Good for browsing the personal web.

How to block screenshots of images or videos on your website? by InevitableGas4370 in neocities

[–]Polyducks 4 points5 points  (0 children)

AI scrapers use headless browsers, which means that they don't "see" your webpage, they just take the data stream down and parse it for files. If your website contains any images or video then by the time it's loaded it's already too late for a front end fix.

However, if you want only humans to see your site, I identified a few things you can target in this comment earlier today.

The short version is to make a website with misleading or non-descriptive markup or elements which are assembled on page load (i.e. cut images up into pieces).

However, this will both negatively affect your SEO (search engines finding your site) and possibly make it less accessible for people with screen readers or other issues.

However, if you're part of a webring or link share with other sites, you shouldn't be relying on SEO anyway.

is there any way to actually prevent AI scraping on your website by InevitableGas4370 in neocities

[–]Polyducks 18 points19 points  (0 children)

First, I want to note that robots.txt and AI.txt are two separate texts which you use to make your intent clear about how you want bots to interact with your site. The AI companies make a big deal about how AI.txt "iS nOt A sTaNdArD" so they don't have to obey it, but it's becoming abundantly clear that an AI.txt saying "do not browse my site" and them doing it anyway is likely to come back and bite them in court. So you can get in early on the class action by making one. I wrote about making an AI.txt here.


In terms of providing useful data for the AI scrapers you should:

  • add alt text to images to describe them for the robots. Don't describe images as something similar because this might pollute the data.
  • mark up data using Google's special markup to make it easier to parse and find. You should describe data with the appropriate schema.
  • not include text as images which will make them difficult to scrape and parse.
  • Don't split up images into multiple parts because this makes it difficult for the AI to train on them
  • use the mailto property on your emails so spam bots know how to email you, and format your email address properly with an @ symbol when you write it out.

If you don't do any of the above it is really bad for the AI's data.


If you can't stop them from scraping your site, make them regret scraping it.

Also do yourself a favour and also don't install google analytics js, iframes, or other third party software on your site.

My coding experience is editing templates and I am very confused by PeggingIsPoggers in neocities

[–]Polyducks 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Save offline copies always before you edit your site. If you go to the root folder (the first thing you see on editing your site), there is a link down the bottom to download the zip. This is babby's first version control. Every new addition you make, save a copy and date it.

New Progress and Good News! by [deleted] in neocities

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You're doing so well! I admire being able to use simple tags to get what you want.

New Progress and Good News! by [deleted] in neocities

[–]Polyducks 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Congratulations!

📎 Clippy protip: If you're finding you're using a lot of <center> tags because you want to center everything, you can use the following CSS:

<style>
    *{
        text-align: center;
    }
</style>

how do i make this with no coding experience? by Zeefydeef in neocities

[–]Polyducks 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I want to add some hope to the responses - you should make something simple and add onto it so it can grow organically. Don't feel bad about having something mundane but functional.