Welcome to the Help Page!

The Swiss Army Knife of this website

This page serves as a hub to help you in three things:

1. Navigating this website
2. Helping you understand the old web and Neocities
3. Giving you tips and tricks for making your very own websites!

You're out of luck however, since this website is still a new thing and I haven't really begun writing a ton for it yet. Most of the work is spent setting up proper HTML and CSS to get this website on a good baseline!
Because of this, you need browse this website the old-fashioned way...

Click on all links and see what happens!

Navigating this website

Navigating the old web

The Origin Story

There are a lot of different names for the old web. All of them refer to simply one thing though: The internet around the time of

Geocities and Personal websites

Neocities and the Neo-netizins

Common terminology

Neighborhood

The neighborhood is a webpage often found on pages of the old web. They are a page that contain a lot of links to other

Keyrings

Keyrings are one of the ways to make discovering new sites that fit a certain interest easier!
It's essentially a collection of websites that feature something similar. Some webrings have websites specifically for them. Every webpage in a keyring probably features a small little widget, where people can go to another website in the keyring. Every keyring has a festgelegte list of webpages, and which one comes before or after the other. If one were to repeatedly go left from a webpage, you would eventually end up at the page you started on. This circular structure gave keyrings their name.

Buttons

-> See also: The Article about Buttons

Buttons are essentially a way to link to other websites, stemming from the times of the old web to probably make searching for new sites easier and focused around similar interests. Buttons usually feature visuals that fit to the page as well as a name for easy identification. This tradition of making buttons and sharing them with others in here is still held on most websites!

Stickers, Blinkies, Userbars & Co.

From what I can gather, these are collectibles. Each collectible follows a certain design like size or color choice. The content of each sticker can be anything: Things you support, Jokes and the art of the Maymay, Cool Designs - Anything goes! Most stickers: have the size of ??x??px have a envelope sticker like border Most blinkies: have blinking borders are animated

Shrines

Shrines are often websites on pages on the old web dedicated to a particular interest or thing. This thing could be anything, ranging about talking how good an anime or a character from fictional media is to talking about an obscure interest or unknown video game.

Userboxes

Netizens

A name for the website makers of Neocities

Information Dump

There are a lot of webpages on the web. A l o t.
This makes it not surprising that after a while of browsing the websites of other people it can become dull.
With everyone sharing all their crazy hobbies and interests and whatever else they can scrap up, each person can start to blur together in a homogenous mass of people that unify themselves in that they have webpages about themselves.
It's a metric fuck-ton of personality that although in some aspects unique also feels samey, indifferent.
I can probably imagine that it's the same with real life. If you constantly surround yourself with other people and learn about them, their interests may be unique to them, but it all looses value the more and more gets dumped on ya.
If you were to be pursuing one hobby constantly, it would probably become dull as well if that hobby doesn't deck a lot of unique tasks that are seperated by a moderate amount of time (like multiple hours).
Variety brings value to nearly anything. The effect a thing has is strongest when it hasn't been done in a while. The effect is even amplified depending on how you felt before doing the thing and the thing made you feel. In other words we best feel the difference between feelings instead of constant feelings themselves. So what would be a non chemically caused depression then? It's a constant feeling, right?

Things can also go the other way. If you are interested and want to learn about new things, browsing random websites and seeing their niche interests can be interesting. I can compare the feeling I have when I'm having fun browsing other people's websites to the one I sometimes get from the Deep Web Browsing Series from SomeOrdinaryGamers

Making your own website!

Making your own tags

You can make your own tags in HTML akin to <e> or <b>!
Simply writing <ENTER_TAG_NAME_HERE> and then defining it in CSS using:

    ENTER_TAG_NAME_HERE {
      color: red;
    }

HTML "Entity Codes"

Internet Terminology

I specifically made this section to link to from the Neighborhood.

Hotlinking

Any file (like image-files or HTML-files) is hosted somewhere on the world on a server.
Every one of those files has a link that points to them. (For example, one of my buttons is hosted on the address https://squaredpancake.neocities.org/assets/buttons/sp1-static.png).
Any HTML-file can link to this adress, regardless if that HTML is hosted on my own server or on someone else's.
If I myself in the context of this website link to it (like on my Neighborhood page), it's acceptable, but if a different website links to that image file, it's called hotlinking.
Anytime a website calls a hotlinked file (or by extension, everytime a user accesses a website that hotlinks a file), it retrieves it from a server that is not it's own, using the bandwidth of the server which hosts that image instead of one own's bandwidth.
This is bad since usually the one who hosts the original image has to pay for a file transfer that is not called by them.
But besides that, there are a few more disadvantages to hotlinking:

• Hotlinks are more susceptible to link rot, where the file linked to isn't hosted anymore under that adress and the link insteads leads to an error screen.