#website wednesday

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Interesting Websites #2: Ne0nBandit Street

ne0nbandit.art is a site by @ne0nwithazero! It also happens to have been my first exposure to neocities, and what inspired me to get into the indie web.

This website features:

Mobile-friendly layout

Brightly-coloured graphics

Chromatic Aberration

Queerness and Self-indulgence

Mature Language and Themes

Autoplaying music

Tacky decorative gifs

Dubious coding practices

Work-in-Progress Optimization

Objectum propaganda

Overuse of pink and blue gradients

Hidden Achievements!

AI-Free, 100% human!

It can't not point out how polished Ne0nBandit Street is. This site has an amazing aesthetic and design. It was made by an amazing artist, after all!

As for how to describe the website, I think it's best to let Jay themself explain it:

A portfolio/personal website is exactly how I would put it as well. Jay posts their art on Tumblr, but viewing it on Ne0nbandit Street is a way more immersive and fun experience, in my opinion.

They're an amazing pixel artist, among things. The main thing they draw are their Deltarune OCs, from their Deltacable chapter 3 AU.

Deltacable gets its own section on this website, and it's equally fun:

There's a lot that I could showcase about this AU, but you're better off exploring the site yourself. I merely want to highlight my favorite page in the cable section, The Backstage:

This is a fully interactable, Deltarune-style shop!! You can talk to Host and Mike here, and learn a bit about their lore. It's sooo cool and creative. I keep coming back to this page, with how well it emulates the look and mechanics of Deltarune. I mean, look at those shop sprites! They're spectacular!

Buuut, lets return to Ne0nbandit Street again. You can draw on this site!

Any drawings you submit show up in the gallery!

The site also has a guestbook, but not only that! There's a chatbox as well:

It's great that there's so many methods of leaving messages and doing interactive things on here.

There is... so much more that I could showcase, but I'll leave it at that. If you want to see everything that ne0nbandit.art has to offer, check it out yourself! I promise it's worth it.

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Interesting Websites #4: Oddity Commoddity

Today, let's look at odditiycommoddity.neocities.org! This site belongs to @gummiewerm.

Oddity Commoddity has been in my bookmarks for a while, something I always wanted to explore, but never got around to. It's VERY bright and colorful, and can be straining to the eyes, so please be aware of that before visiting.

Honestly, I don't know where to begin with this one. There's so much on just the homepage alone that it's almost overstimulating for me. I suppose I can grab a snack while playing a game of Pacman:

I like when sites feature little games like that! They're fun, but likely a lot of work if they're hand-coded rather than an embedded widget. I can't tell which one this one is.

Let's take a look at Oddity's about page:

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think this is an Earthbound/Mother inspired battle screen? Regardless, it's a really fun way to do an about page. You can't actually fight the webmaster, but you can click on the options to expand/collapse the various menu boxes.

Oddity lists minimalism as one of his dislikes, something that gets really obvious with just a single glance at this whole site :)

I think my favorite aspect of Oddity Commoddity is the way the gallery is set up:

Instead of having a simple grid layout or images to scroll through, it's more like navigating a point-and-click adventure. You can click on parts of this artwork to take you to other directories.

Wait, I didn't even notice this before! On the homepage there's a small section called the sticker bank. These stickers can be moved around!

I bet there's a lot of other details I missed.

Anyway. This site hasn't updated since 2024, and Oddity has also stopped posting on any other socials. I hope that she is doing well. Regardless, the website still remains and still gets daily visitors!

Let's wrap this showcase up with a small message for the guestbook.

Even if it hasn't been maintained in a while, odditycommiddity.neocities.org is still worth giving a look.

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Interesting Websites #5: onio.club

onio.club might be familiar to some due the webmaster's Youtube video about the web revival. It's a very interactive site! The homepage drops you right into the site's chatroom:

As you can see, I caught this screenshot just as Onio themself was online. You can also play Minesweeper in the background, which is very neat. I don't think you can actually beat it, but I have managed to fill up the whole screen before! You can drag the site widget across the screen so that it won't cover up the center of the minefield.

The chat is the site's main feature, but it's far from all it has to offer.

vibes.fish is technically a separate domain, but it's also a section in the onio.club directory. It's a small game where you can fish and unlock map sections that each add a unique ambience sound to the landscape. I have a complete map here! I wouldn't be surprised if it was inspired by Webfishing.

There's also another game called OnioPet, which I haven't messed around with yet.

It looks like a tamagotchi inspired pet game, which makes me wonder if the pet can evolve or pass away. I should play with this more!

Then there is HomeSpace, which lets you bookmark pages as planets in the solar system:

This one also provides ambient sound to enjoy in the background. I like the look of it, but haven't found much reason to use it.

Of course, Onio also has a blog and guestbook. The guestbook is actually atabook, which I use for my own site as well.

I honestly struggle to say much about onio.club, I think it's better to be experienced than described! There's so much to do here after all, and my descriptions wouldn't do it justice. One thing I do have to say is that this site has a very pleasant look to it- while I love all those bright, rainbow-colored websites full of gifs and webcore sensibilites, it's also nice to have something more grounded and accessible.

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Interesting Websites #3: NinAcTi0N's Lab

ninacti0n.art is a personal website by @ninacti0n, a friend of mine!

NinAcTi0N's Lab is one of my biggest inspirations when it comes to making websites. It just oozes personality. The neon colors, the hand-drawn pixel art assets, the style- it's as if it was tailored to appeal to me in particular!

I've been online mutuals with Nina for a while. I first discovered her on Artfol, actually! Back then I didn't know about her website, and only discovered it after I got into neocities. It was such a nice surprise to look at the url and recognize the name.

Here's some snippets from Nin's about page. The text boxes scroll, so if you want to read the full texts, you should check them out for yourself.

Something I love about this site is the varied and skeuomorphic layouts. The text boxes being presented on sticky notes, the blog link section being an actual notebook, etc. As someone who's tinkering with my own website, I have a lot of respect for the work put into the look of this one. It would be a lot easier to just have structured grid layouts, but these freely positioned elements and custom assets give everything a very unique touch.

Let's take a look at the creative zone:

Nin's art style is a huge inspiration to me. It's so vibrant and weird, and the way she plays around with anatomy and proportions is also very fascinating to me. She likes to experiment with many different art programs and makes her own custom brushes. I'm also proud to say that two of my own characters get to live in her gallery! She drew Life and Judge for Art Fight back in 2022.

So far there's not too many entries on Papercut Rambles, Nina's blog. With so few available, they're a fairly quick read, and quite interesting!

A lot of the pages on NinAcTi0N's Lab are still under construction. The blog currently only has a placeholder background, and the guestbook's lack of even that means that you get flash-banged the moment you open it:

But what is there, looks really nice. I know that Nina had to wrangle the code of this guestbook and its backend herself- whereas most indie websites usually just embed a guestbook hosted somewhere else. Part of that is due to neocities' limitations: it doesn't allow hosting your own backend. But, even if you host your site elsewhere, like Nina did, coding this stuff is a lot harder than an HTML/CSS/JS frontend, even if you have a base to work with. I think it's quite impressive!

Anyway, that is ninacti0n.art! I love this site.

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Interesting Websites #1: Melonking

I want to highlight some cool websites that aren't part of the mainstream internet! And well, what better place to start with than melonkinq.net?

Melon has many, many web projects, one of which is this personal website. He's a very well-known figure in the web revival movement, in part due to his Intro To The Web Revival, but that is only one of the many things he has contributed to it. I won't get into it here, since my focus is melonking.net, but there are a lot of things Melon's made that are worth looking into.

Anyway. I LOVE this website. It is so much fun to explore! There's a LOT to find, from the blog, the art gallery, random collections... but also games and secrets. Every page has chill background music too, so sometimes I just like leaving the site on in a background tab so I can listen while I do other things.

(Turns out my hacker name is LordWire)

The wild mix of textures and gifs and other assets makes this site feel so old school and whimsical, and somehow the mish-mash of everything still ends up feeling coherent. I adore this type of organized chaos.

One of my favorite pages on melonking.net is the voice mail section:

There's only five messages in total, but something about getting to listen to these people who once upon a time stumbled across this same page and decided to record a message, is so special. Maybe I'll leave a message too one day! Not yet though, I'd like to improve my accent a bit first :')

Luckily, there is an easier way to leave messages on the site, through the guestbook! Most websites like this have one, it's a staple of the small web.

I hope that anyone who reads this post gives melonking.net a try. I only showcased some key parts of it, but there is so much more to find! Note that it's best viewed on a computer.

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I'm out of queued posts for Website Wednesday, I have some drafts that I should work on, but I'm also open to any website suggestions! You can send them to me through asks.

I showcase/review an indie web project every Wednesday, cause I think more people should check them out.

[samanita-surfin]

Website Wednesday - Botanical.com

Botanical.com

A Modern Herbal is a resources for herbal information. Written in the early part of the last century, the advice is both timely and historic

An HTML version of the 1931 text A Modern Herbal by M. Grieve, which goes over medicinal, culinary, and other uses of a wide variety of herbs. A good resource for learning about the common botanical wisdom of the era, as well as some of the folk-lore around various herbs.

[samanita-surfin]

Website Wednesday - Esoteric Archives

A website dedicated to compiling free-to-access old occult and esoteric western literature. Most are in an HTML format, some are only available as PDFs. A great resource for learning about early western mysticism.