outbound links
Some cool sites to check out:
I have my Neocities profile turned off, so these aren't friends/follows or anything. I switch them out whenever I feel like it.
Resources for making your own site
This is just stuff I found helpful as someone with zero coding experience. If you want to build your own house on the interweb it does not have to be that hard! Take my hand
The two main hosts I see for people making personal sites are Neocities and (more recently) Nekoweb.
For the sake of transparency I do think it's worth mentioning that a lot of artists have been moving to Nekoweb because the creator of Neocities has spoken out in support of AI.
However, I did find this thread from someone who actually reached out to him about it, and he says outright that he will not force it on anyone using Neocities or scrape user data. For the time being I haven't felt the need to move, because I'm doing this for fun and I don't post art here anyway.
Either way, the site editors are pretty similar, so following basic tutorials for Neocities should be relatively easy on Nekoweb too.
General stuff:
Absolute beginner's guide to Neocities
W3Schools free coding tutorials for literally anything
Why you should avoid hotlinking
Zonelets Easily set up your own blog (can also be used as a template if you want)
status cafe For the status widget in my sidebar. Pretty self-explanatory, but I would also like to say that the person who runs it is really nice and if you forget your password or something (I did) you can literally just email them for help. I keep seeing people moping about their lost accounts. Send an email brother...
Neocities site counter I like this one because it pulls directly from your neocities data. it's a little extra work but each step is explained very well
Similar option for nekoweb (I assume. have not used it myself)
FC2 Counter cuter and easier to use, but less accurate bc I'm pretty sure it just counts every single click
If you want to start with a premade layout:
Graphics:
Repeating backgrounds but this time they're in CSS
Bonnibel's graphics collection buncha fun decorations to liven up your site
blinkies collection (flash warning)
cursors-4u fun cursors