~ Early Web Links ~

Man this directory is great. I've been hand coding html since like 1997 and what I miss most about the old web is that everyone just made stuff because they wanted to. Nobody was trying to build a brand or optimize for engagement or whatever. You just had something you cared about and you learned enough html to put it out there. Every site looked diffrent and that was the whole point. We need more of that energy again tbh.

So glad I found this directory! I run a little hand-coded site dedicated to antique oil lamps and the moths that love them. It started as a joke but now I have like 40 pages documenting different lamp styles and which moth species they attract. I even have a guestbook of my own that gets maybe one entry a month, haha. Love seeing other people keeping the personal web alive. Going to spend all evening clicking through these links.

oh man this site is giving me FEELINGS. i remember being like 12 sitting at the family computer at 2am waiting for a geocities page to load over dialup and just being totally amazed that some random person in another country made a whole website about their cat. i literally taught myself html just so i could have a page with a starfield background and midi music. those were the days honestly. glad places like this exist to keep that spirit going!!

OH MY GOSH I love this directory so much!!!! I'm an illustrator and I've been making my own little hand-coded site with tiled backgrounds and visitor counters and it makes me SO HAPPY!! Modern social media is just endless scrolling through the same templates and algorithms deciding who sees your stuff?? No thank you!! I want WEIRD pages with sparkly cursors and guestbooks and SOUL!! Every old website felt like walking into someone's bedroom and seeing their posters on the wall!! That's ART!! Tha

this site rules. i spend all day at work wrestling with react and webpack configs and then i come home and just want to write plain html in a text editor. theres something so satisfying about a page that loads instantly and does exactly what it says. no build step, no node_modules folder bigger than the sun. just a guy and his index.html. bookmarked a bunch of links from here, keep it going!

man i spend all day at work fighting with webpack configs and node_modules folders that weigh more than the sun. coming here and clicking through sites that are just... html. maybe some css. it honestly makes me want to cry a little. i started a personal site last weekend, no frameworks, no build step, just index.html and a text editor. forgot how good that feels. thanks for keeping this directory going, bookmarked it immediately.

Does anyone else remember webrings?? Like actually clicking that little "next" button and just discovering random people's pages about their cats or their mineral collection or whatever. I mass no JS sites for a living now and honestly the old web had it right. A few hundred lines of HTML and you had a whole world. No build step, no node_modules, just vibes. This directory rules btw, bookmarked immediately ^_^ If anyone ran a webring in the early 2000s I wanna hear about it :)

hii!! i literally just found this site and ive been clicking thru links for like 2 hours lol. i started my own site a few months ago, its mostly about my art and the music i like (alot of shoegaze stuff) and i have a page where i collect cool gifs i find. the old web is so much more fun than regular social media imo. gonna add this directory to my links page for sure!! ty for keeping this going :)

Hey! Does anyone else remember those old web cliques where you'd put a little button on your site saying you were a member? Like "I love rainy days" clique or whatever random thing. I'm writing a paper on early web community building for my digital culture class and I'm trying to find examples but so many of those sites are just gone now. If anyone has screenshots or remembers specific ones please hit me up!

AHHH i just found this directory and i'm freaking out!! i literally JUST finished my first homepage like two days ago and i've been clicking through everyone's link pages for hours!! webrings and link pages are SO underrated, like that's how the internet is SUPPOSED to work!! just people going hey check out this cool site i found!! no algorithm telling you what to look at!! i added a whole links page to my site already lol. signing this guestbook feels so right!!!

omg i love this directory so much!! i actually still have my own site up, its basically a shrine to my cat Biscuit plus a page of midi files i collected in like 2002 lol. theres also a guestbook nobody has signed in years which makes me kinda sad haha. i keep meaning to add more pages but i always get distracted messing with the css instead of actually writing content. anyway thx for keeping the old web spirit alive, bookmarked this!!

wait this is so cool, i've never actually signed a real guestbook before!! i thought these only existed in like screenshots of old geocities sites lol

dude i have mass lost like 3 hours just clicking through this directory tonight. every link is a rabbit hole of someone's weird passion project with tiled backgrounds and under construction gifs and i LOVE it. no webpack, no node_modules, no build step, just index.html and vibes. this is what the internet was supposed to be. thanks for keeping this list going, bookmarked immediately

Give me a hand-written index.html over a React app any day. The old web was just people sharing stuff they cared about, no algorithms deciding what you see.

OH MY GOSH I love this directory so much!! I found like 8 new sites to bookmark just today!! What got me into the retro web was honestly just being SO TIRED of everything looking the same on social media. I missed when people's sites actually looked DIFFERENT and WEIRD and you could tell a real person made it!! So I taught myself HTML last year and made a little site for my beadwork hobby and I haven't looked back since!! This rules!! Keep it going!! ♥♥♥

does anyone else remember those "you are visitor number ____" counters at the bottom of every page?? i just found out about those and i think they're so cool, i wish we still had them lol

I found my mom's old Geocities page on the Wayback Machine last semester and it totally sent me down a rabbit hole. She had a whole page dedicated to her cat with like, custom cursor trails and a MIDI playing in the background. Now I'm writing a paper on web self-expression for my digital culture class and this directory is seriously a goldmine. Thanks for keeping this stuff alive!

Found this place through a link on someone's retro web ring and I'm so glad I did! I run a little personal site where I catalog every sunset I've photographed since 2019, sorted by color. It's all hand-coded HTML and I taught myself tables just to make the gallery layout work. Would love to get listed here someday. Bookmarking this directory for sure. Thanks for keeping the spirit of the old web alive!

ok so i literally only found out about neocities like 3 months ago and it completely changed how i think about the internet?? like on tiktok and instagram everything looks the same and ur just a number. here i can make my page MINE with whatever ugly colors i want lol. nobody is trying to sell me anything. ppl just make stuff because they want to. this directory is so cool btw i have mass opened like 40 tabs already haha. signing this from my room at 2am oops

I found a geocities archive last month and spent like 4 hours just clicking through people's weird little pages about their cats and favorite X-Files episodes. Made me want my own corner of the internet that wasn't just a social media profile. Just finished my first homepage yesterday!