Geocities Backgrounds

pixelmoondust.neocities.org

162 points by marcodiego 5 days ago

https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles

Dear Web Developers: THIS is what I want for surfing the World Wide Web. Simple UI, maybe some tiled gifs, and that's it!

Stop all the corpo-brutalist nonsense and give me back my flame gifs!

reaperducer - 3 days ago

I once rebuilt an internal employee directory tool, and added the ability for people to add an emoji below their name.
Before that, hardly anyone used the internal directory, which is probably why I inherited it (I was the stig). After the feature was added, people went nuts and used it all the time. I feel bad for the guy who runs it now, as I understand he is bombarded with feature requests from the employees.
- cluckindan - 2 days ago
  
  Making things a little bit fun and personal yields engagement, who would have thought.
rjh29 - 3 days ago

Obligatory mention of Hypnospace Outlaw, a game where you play a moderator of a 1990s AOL-style internet (right down to the tiled backgrounds and flame gifs) and uncover a mystery.

PixelMoondust - 2 days ago

Oh, hey, that's my archive!!! I noticed a sudden jump in activity to my neocities and through a little bit of sleuthing (a single search on Twitter) I found a post, and through that post I found this website...kinda wild to see my little archive being noticed anywhere, but I am definitely flattered!

standardUser - 3 days ago

I miss having my own little website. It wasn't a blog or even a weblog because those words didn't exist yet. I especially miss the mix of icons and widgets I'd curate at the bottom of the page, the most important of which was the counter (which was mostly counting my own visit to my own page). This was probably around 1994 when I was 12 or 13.

konfusinomicon - 3 days ago

i recall the glorious day the linkexchange counter on my site hit 10k. still waiting on my check for $176 from featuring cyberthrills casino banner ads though.

miffe - 3 days ago

Anyone remember a software to generate images such as these?

I think it was called something like Terralogic Texture Maker (ttm.exe) and I've been looking for it for years.

Lammy - 2 days ago

It was TeraLogic; one ‘r’ :)
DOS ver 0.95: https://www.geocities.ws/freewin3/textrev.html
Win32 ver 1.1: https://www.jazz2online.com/tilesets/stuff/TTM32.zip
Win32 ver 2.0: https://web.archive.org/web/20240213195823/https://www.sac.s...
Both Win32 versions worked for me in Wine just now:
https://i.imgur.com/nRan0Z0.png (1.1)
https://i.imgur.com/976wzwh.png (2.0)
- miffe - 2 days ago
  
  Thank you!
127 - 3 days ago

I would recommend https://rodzilla.itch.io/material-maker
It's free and fabulous.

jaynate - 3 days ago

Geocities and Angelfire are how I learned to program for the web. Amazing how much of the fundamentals of the web are still exactly the same as they were back then (90s). Just with a lot more layers of libraries today.

giantrobot - 3 days ago

A great thing about the Web is it can still be programmed just like it was thirty years ago. Unless you actually need an application a lot of web tooling and libraries are a waste of time. It's a great medium for actual documents.
- soneil - 3 days ago
  
  The part that really feels different to me, is that I'm not sure that a 12yo equivalent of myself would get far with View Source anymore.
  I think that was my single greatest resource, and on a huge majority of sites it won't get you far anymore.
  - camcil - 2 days ago
    
    Being able to paste source into early version of Dreamweaver really made things "click" for me. Image maps, IFrames, and SSI really set you apart. Ah, thems were the days.
- spennant - 3 days ago
  
  What? No love for Perl scripts in cgi-bin/ ?
  - giantrobot - 3 days ago
    
    In today's world of stupidly fast CPUs and IO a CGI program can be surprisingly performant and effective.

simoneau - 3 days ago

I think I recognize some of these as coming from a tiled background pack I used back in the 90s. Maybe associated with the Enlightenment Window Manager project?

chromehearts - 3 days ago

Wish I found this sooner; my first website I made many years ago contains 2 or 3 background images which I also found on various neocity sites (yungztrunks.de)

biofox - 3 days ago

They also make for great retro PowerPoint backgrounds :)

gopher2000 - 3 days ago

Is there a way to dig up old GeoCities pages? My only thought is to remember the URL and get it from internet archive but I can't remember my 4 digit number. I think I was in the "Baja" area.

PixelMoondust - 2 days ago

There definitely is!!! There's a few GeoCities archives projects out there, but these ones specifically let's you search through the areas:
https://geocities.restorativland.org/Baja/ https://www.oocities.org/baja/
If you can find your site here (you may not be able to because I'm sure these sites don't have every single site archived), then you could try to find it through the Internet Archive, or through geocities.ws!

luckystarr - 3 days ago

That page can't be very old because it doesn't use any frames!

SpecialistK - 3 days ago

I love these - I wonder if anyone has put them together in an archive to download all at once?

medstrom - 3 days ago

In the spirit of "analog browsing", there is always https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/downthemall

Gualdrapo - 3 days ago

As a person that loves tiled desktop wallpaper backgrounds, thank you

medstrom - 3 days ago

Just found that GNOME seems to have lost support for tiled wallpapers...
Unfixed for years https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/mutter/-/issues/1473

giancarlostoro - 3 days ago

Page doesn't load correctly for me, they seem to be hosting the images in a sketchy looking domain (I'm sure its not actually sketchy), corporate firewall is ruining my retro nostalgic experience.

PixelMoondust - 2 days ago

Oh, I'm sorry to hear it's not loading properly for you :c I host my images through filegarden and I certainly hope it's not sketchy because it's the best file hosting service I can find since I no longer use Imgur.

luc_ - 3 days ago

bless this mess

p3rls - 3 days ago

yeahhh, but did you have a cool cjb.net redirect to show your friends in the progs channel?

nonhaver - 3 days ago

dont forget blinkies!

https://adriansblinkiecollection.neocities.org/

marcodiego - 3 days ago

Actually, the correct index is this one: https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles/b...

dang - 3 days ago

Changed from https://pixelmoondust.neocities.org/archives/archivedtiles. Thanks!
sp0rk - 3 days ago

This page only contains links to about half of the backgrounds present on the page that is linked currently.
jihadjihad - 3 days ago

@dang can we update the post's URL to this one? It seems more relevant and usable.
- medstrom - 3 days ago
  
  I found it much less striking. The original link is perfect -- and subjectively, I find it more "usable" that it puts everything on a single page.
  - dang - 3 days ago
    
    Ok, I've put that link in the top text so people can access both.

486sx33 - 3 days ago

Geocities was pretty darn cool. My very first website was there but just figuring the place out, the neighborhoods and the depth of the place was like a new adventure at the time. I chose area51

bityard - 3 days ago

Geocities hosted my second website, my first one was somewhere on CompuServe I think? I had a GeoCities site for quite a few years, somewhere at the top level of SiliconValley. I can't remember the 4-digit number and I've never been able to find it in any of the archives just by searching for it. (I likely deleted it some time in the early 2000's.)
- sejje - 3 days ago
  
  I lost my first website, it was on angel fire.
  Frames layout, goldeneye fanboy page.
  They have a lot of the old sites, but not mine.

righthand - 3 days ago

Can’t tap tiles to change background on Firefox iOS.

crtasm - 3 days ago

if you can access the console, this adds that functionality:

  document.body.addEventListener('click', function(e) { if (e.target.nodeName == 'IMG') { document.body.style.backgroundImage = `url("${e.target.src}")`; document.body.style.backgroundRepeat = 'repeat'; } });

p1mrx - 3 days ago

If you're using a mouse, change 'click' to 'mouseover' for easier browsing.

medstrom - 3 days ago

Long-press and download the image?
- righthand - 3 days ago
  
  Analog browsing, wouldn’t that just download the thumbnail not the actual gif?
  - inanutshellus - 3 days ago
    
    Those ain' thumbnails, whippersnapper. Them's the whole image.
    
    righthand - 3 days ago
    
    Interesting. From the mobile view it appears the page has a right side menu with preview options of all the backgrounds with the space background set as the default tile but I guess I’m misinterpreting the page UI.
    
    inanutshellus - 3 days ago
    
    Correct, you're thinking with modern-UI brain.
    It's just a page template and the content of the particular page is a long list of images. No javascript to do fancy stuff. Just a collection of backgrounds the dude found.
    Actually, this page is already "advanced" for a Geocities site, because the starry night pattern is for the left-gutter next to the site's content, and then there's an easy-on-the-eyes background behind the real content. Normal Geocities would just have one super duper beautiful and impossible-to-read-on background.
    (Oh, and you wouldn't /also/ do that cool background on the right side too because... "who knows how to figure out a floating left side border image?! that's basically impossible.") ;)
    
    nemomarx - 3 days ago
    
    The preview is probably just one imagine that would be tiled to create a full background. Isn't that how all backgrounds and wallpapers used to work?
    
    righthand - 2 days ago
    
    With the animation on the space background and how the page was previously squished on mobile it looked like preview thumbs for animated backgrounds.