100 Questions for Webmasters

back then, when i thought computers were fun and i first started using surfing the World Wide Web, everything seemed to be published in a completely haphazard way on people's personal home pages. commercial web sites were pretty rare, and big knowledge bases like Wikipedia and fan wikis didn't exist yet. there was no such word as blog. everything was just cobbled together by hand, the best we could. and that's what made it wonderful.

when you searched around the old web for cool stuff (like, you know, Star Trek or something,) you invariably ended up on some bloke's web page where he had all of the Star Trek facts intermingled with photos of the cat's breakfast.

it was one of those moments when we felt like we were living in the future.

it was cool, and i naturally wanted to be part of the club!

i find anything published on the web (by people) fascinating. because even if im not interested particularly in the subject matter, i love seeing what other people are doing with their subject.

i guess, though, i lean towards web sites related to technology or scifi.

i'm kind of intentionally un-workflowy right now. i'll come back to this later.

// TODO: come back to this later

(see also: question 13)

the man, the legend: Sir Tim Berners Lee! the dude literally invented the World Wide Web as a side project... need i say more? read this.

Douglas Adams. that frood really knew where his towel is was. RIP, sir.

my old mate SteveW, that guy could code man. he's written a script to do the job before ive even finished thinking about it. "what language is it written in?" "doesn't really matter." legend. (oh well i can't find a link right now so i guess it doesn't count)

Polyducks is the person that reminded me i could just put a load of random stuff online and it's cool. it can be fun, inspiring, useful, or anything, really. it's all good.

// TODO add some more

i think ultimately i like making web sites because i can. anyone can. (and there have certainly been times when i felt like i was pretty good at it.)

(see also: question 3)

finishing stuf

on this site, a persoal project, im not using any kind of template. every page is hand-coded with just a very simple base stylesheet that sets the default font and colours etc. so each page is unique. (unique does not necessarily mean good.)

a long time ago i would have answered this question by saying im an "expert" on css, especially cross-browser compatibility. but in later years i didn't actually need to use css because i had people for that. and frameworks. (the people and i eventually settled on Bootstrap.) things moved on and i lost touch. however, since ive started building this web site, im enjoying CSS again. im coding everything by hand with no frameworks, discovered new(ish) properties like display: flex and grid (where have you been all my life?) cross-browser problems dont really exist anymore, we are truly blessed.

i first learned about CSS properly by reading DHTML for the World Wide Web, a 1998 book by a gentleman named Jason Cranford Teague. it exposed to me the relationship between html, css, javascript, and something called the document object model. way before its time, really, and it was a bit of a nightmare to use practically. the v4 browsers had totally different implementations of css, js, and dom. we had to have workarounds for everything. but we made cool stuff and it was fun.

for 2026, the css on this site is pretty simplistic (and a lot of it's still inline,) but it works. and that's good enough for now.

(pretty sure) i do, but it's not something i use a lot. let me just check...

update: yeah i know how to use it! interesting to note that you can wrap each list item in <div>, i'd been wondering about that (so i can use break-inside, unless there's a better way.)

panic.

on this site, if i need a new page i just go to my Neocities dashboard, click New File, and just start writing.

(update: actually i now start each page by copying my default html code from /blank.html)

in the olden days i would have mocked-up the page in Macromedia Fireworks. i suppose Inkscape is the tool for that now, but i dont really do it that much. (i reach for a notepad and pen occasionally though.)

yeah, i must have written hundreds of thousands of lines of obsolete javascript code in my time, although im a bit rusty at the moment. i guess at some point everything moved to jQuery and i forgot how to do everything natively. (mind you, that's not all bad because old-school native javascript was an absolute ball-ache.)

(see also: question 10)

i learned PHP at version 4, i like it. i've developed and maintained two large php/mysql frameworks (CMS & ecommerce) in the past, plus a few ancient personal projects. later in my career i developed most things in Microsoft world, so i lost touch with php. i might give it another go for my next project (is it any good these days?)

not really, it's just a personal web site. i upload a bit of everything.

neither really, i'm just glad to be going through the motions if making things again.

i do, but it's for an un-related project which has completely stalled while i potter about with Shen’s World.

i do, we're in shens.world now, baby!

i used to buy domains for fun or random ideas, but i've let most of them lapse over the years because i never did anything with them.

it's not all bad, though. i've done more web development for myself since i joined neocities than i have done in perhaps ten years.

i suppose i could point a custom domain here, but i like my .neocities.org URL, it's a badge of honour.

(im still hosted on neocities but i eventually forked-out for a domain because i got scared neocities might disappear forever thought it made more sense to own the url myself.)

i've been thinking about this one way too much and i reckon there are a couple of factors at play on what let's call the "retro scale": intentionalness (look at my retro-page!), and obtrusiveness (best viewed in such-and-such browser at whatever-by-whatever resolution.) retro stuff is cool, everyone gets nostalgic. but a splash page abruptly denying access for mobile devices is not something to strive for. and not every web site has to look like a badly-designed operating system. again: it's cool but decent web sites never worked like that, guys. back in my day we tried to make our stuff as usable as possible and we were building for 800x600 pixels, not 1920px. lowest common denominator and all that.

if you want actual nostalgia check out stuff like 2advanced studios at the web design museum or go and read an old edition of HotWired at the internet archive. those are retro, man.

so anyway, with that said, i guess i would have to classify my site as undeniably retro yet low-to-middling on the intentionality axis. (that is: my stuff primarily appears retro because i'm a miserable old git.)

to be honest on this particular web site, ive never checked.

but back in the day, especially during the browser wars followed by our brief, well-formedness-obsessed dalliance with XHTML, i made validation a pretty high priority. the first step of diagnosing a front-end problem was "validate your HTML!" but then there were third-party frameworks and widgets that we had to use, which refused to produce valid markup no matter what i tried (yes ASP.NET, i'm talking about you...)

ok, i checked my homepage: 2 missing alt attributes, 4 bits of broken inline CSS (oh, that explains that then,) 8 minor warnings. not too bad. nothing i can't fix.

UPDATE: i've fixed all the HTML errors on the home page. (i havent checked anything else yet.)

well well well, this is another fascinating one for me!

in the early days of my web dev career one of the final steps towards building a web site was to sit in front of Photoshop Fireworks and quickly knock-up a set of standard-size banners. and i HATED it. i hated it because i knew my banners were intended for intrusive, corporate marketing: to bastardise our Web in favour of revenue streams.

and i told them! "ad-revenue driven business models will never work on the World Wide Web," i said, "no one will use it!" but as usual, they didn't listen and now they are very very rich and i am very very poor. but then, i'd rather be happy than rich any day. and am i? not especially.

so, yes, let's embrace banners and buttons (especially our custom 88x31s) that link to our OWN, INDEPENDENT web sites (rather than the corporate web) as a sort of free, open, and voluntary advertising network and spread our word everywhere!

well in 2026 i believe that 88x31 buttons are such a vital tool for connecting us all together that every independent web site should have it's own 88x31 button. (it really doesn't get more low-tech than swapping a gif and a url, i love it!)

so yes! i have a button wall! (if you don't see your site on there, drop me a message)

i've got loads of cool ideas but, being honest with myself (and taking into consideration the fragility of my mental health,) i'm operating on a significantlly diminished range of competencies at the moment. (that's another way of saying i lost my mind and all of my techie confidence at the same time.) so i expect that a fresh start now would probably end up being more-or-less the same.

yes of course, absolutely all of the time! there's some incredible stuff out there, way out of my range of both artistic talent and technical skills. beautiful, clever, entertaining, educational, inspiring... the World Wide Web can be is amazing!

i mainly just use the web-based neocities editor, although i do occasionally write a snippet in codepen if im not ready to change a live file.

im on mobile and i very rarely use a computer at the moment, so most of the software im using is necessarily web-based.

eveything is hosted on Neocities. i have no need for CDN right now.

(minor rant: stop using imgur for images, it's blocked where i am and it's spoiling your layout)

oh, is there a debate? i didn't know.

i chose Neocities for its (admittedly tenuous) "Geocities revival" vibe, and i (currently) have no desire to move.

it's grown quite rapidly recently so i'd guess around 50MB

oh, hopefully.

my old mate Mark insisted that backups don't exist until they've been tested.

i like them both when used appropriately.

i've never been that clever with colours. i do have a simple colour pallette defined in my base stylesheet that i try to stick to, but i have a few pages that ignore it completely.

(this is going to be an interesting one...)

let's just say (for now) that i already quit a handful of years ago for *waves finger at head* health reasons.

this web site is my reincarnation, baby!

right now the only other webmasters i know are people i met online since i joined neocities.

when i was in the industry i knew loads of web developers. some of them quit for *waves finger at head* health reasons, but the ones who survived increasingly just stopped building anything personal.

a few, but i don't make a big fuss about it. they wouldn't care understand what we are trying to achieve here.

at the moment i'm at least tweaking something pretty much every day, but i'm sure that won't last too long.

my big updates should be are listed in my rss feed.

it just sort of evolves at the moment.

well this web site is my hobby at the moment. i guess that's why a lot of my content is meta or "coding" type stuff. hopefully not too much sitely content (but then you need it because that's how we interact on this "indie web" thingy.)

there's also a lot of personal stuff here (obviously, because it's my place.) some is drawn from the "archives," but most of it is new. and there are a load of random and unfinished pages about some of my other interests, if you want to look for them.

as for outside-focussed content, one of my main uses of the site is to collect links to other stuff on the web. tbere are outgoing links on pretty much every page. that's the whole point of the World Wide Web, after all... to share information and to put things into context.

uhhhhhh......

i used to, but not any more. i did it for a Long Time. but most of my professional work was done for companies who own all the code, so i don't really have anything to show for it.

you son of a bitch, i'm in!

(seriously though, see Q33)

not a lot, although i have made my address available on the site should anyone prefer to contact me by email.

i do have social media in real life, but i don't read or post much anymore because ive moved all of my attention to the indie web. ive kept all of my accounts (for now) because most real people i interact with can only be contacted on one of the closed networks.

i logged onto a discord server once and was immediately overwhelmed so i logged off again.

ive created bluesky and mastadon handles to use for sharing and discussion along with this web site, which i think people can message me on. or you can email me.

sometimes, depends on my mood

well i created a little refuge page on nekoweb the day we had that neocities outage, but really this is my main web site.

laptop: mint, phone: android

i just can't use Windoze anymore: too slow, too much ai.

yes. the real question is: are they desktop friendly?

unnecessary and rude.

funnily enough, just yesterday i was added to three web rings: html energy, no ai, and rewild the web. check them out on my homepage.

the wikipedia describes web rings as a relic of the old web, which makes me feel.... well, let's just say this isn't the first time i've joined a web ring.

it's something i havent thought about for years, but i think web rings are a great idea. let's all get out there and link to each other! as soon as i realised they were relevant again, i immediately applied to join a few (although i think three is probably enough.)

i do but i can't say i'm particularly happy with them at the moment. i can never decide whether to finish one properly, start a new one, or abandon the concept entirely. some of the more important shrines i want to build i'm too scared of dishonouring the original material that i don't know where to start.

perhaps i should take up stamp collecting.

in my opinion, yeah. but then a lot of my stuff is pulled from random things that simmer away in my little old brain and most of the images are sourced from my ancient archive of files. to other people with fresher eyes it might be cool, but who knows?

i'm sure it's not just me but i've always found it difficult to be objective about my own stuff. the euphoria of building something new and it actually working for the first time rapidly fades, leaving the distinct possibility that it's all a load of dingoes kidneys.

this is why feedback and sharing is so important on this little World Wide Web thing.

i really don't know how to answer that, i like different things about all kinds of web sites. as for my site: at the moment i'm just happy to be building stuff again.

i can operate Photoshop etc, so i can make my own graphics when i need to. but i'm most definitely not an artist.

webmaster resources? ok. developer.mozilla.org is definitely the coding reference i use the most, and i frequently end up reading articles on css-tricks.com which is excellent. i occasionally go over to W3schools but, to be honest, i dont really like the style of their articles and a lot of it seems to be incomplete or out-of-date.

occasionally i need a background image for something and i really like this collection of tiles at swifty's hq. ive also occasionally used sadgirl's tiled background archive and The Internet Pattern Book for backgrounds.

a lot of the fonts have sort of been stumbled upon but if i wanted a new one i'd go to dafont.com first. occasionally i need to quickly knock-up a text banner in a pretty font and i go to either textcraft.net or cooltext.com.

there are a couple of online image editors i use a lot: photoresizer.com for quick crop, resize, and export, or photopea for a full-featured image editor in the browser.

as for code, i try to write it all myself if i can, but inevitably use the occasional code snippet (especially for proof-of-concept type work.) css-generators.com is the place for every cool css effect you can imagine, and scripted is a neocities site that has loads of interesting code effects you can pinch use.

so far i dont use any layout or ssg resources, but ive got a few links saved for future reference.

style=""

i just cant resist putting my css inline quickly and a lot of the time it only gets moved when i come back around and realise it's unmaintainable.

start small, be proud of what you've achieved at every step, and don't be scared to reach out for advice. we're all in this together and nothing is ever really finished on the web. don't panic.

see question 65 and don't look at my code!

i miss them, although i fully understand the reasons they are gone. i/we did some fun and useful things with <frameset> over the years. they might have been abused over-used for layout, but it was the only way to do "single page apps" or partial loading... before we had partial loading.

// break out of frames
if(top.location != location)
{
  top.location.href =
      document.location.href;
}

🥲

tables are perfect for tabular data! ha ha ha!

but seriously, i miss them too. i was a strong advocate for moving away from tables because it was best practice, not because i really wanted to. you knew where you were with tables. obviously bad table implementations were common, but a well-constructed table layout was a thing of beauty and absolutely rock-solid. i might make a new one just for fun.

yes, but on this site i dont use a fixed layout (although i have tried vaguely to make some of my pages expand into multiple columns on wide screens.)

the css just sits there not moving a lot once it's settled down, but html is the every-day language of the web. so yeah, im wrting html all of the time.

<font> and bgcolor etc were still around when i started, so yeah. but i was using css fairly early even though you needed non-css fallbacks, so it wouldn't have been for long. or do you mean a page that simply has no styling? probably, but not as part of a real web site.

only when i need one, and even then i probably don't.

i was quite advanced before my brain popped.

yes, of course, if im interested in how something works or how it doesn't work. it's essentially how i learned a lot of html originally.

(i feel like this question should have been higher in the list, but here we go)

i remember trying to export web pages from Publisher and couldn't really understand why the result looked nothing like my design and all the image colours were bandy instead of nice and smooth. and then my friend told me to try AOLpress. woah, this is cool: you can hit the "HTML" tab and actually see the code before you publish it! and... wait a minute... this "code" is basically just plain text with a few simple markers in it! maybe (and i mean surely not but just maybe,) i could load that file and edit it directly in Notepad? and how do you know what code to write? simple: just right-click-view-source on any web page to see how it works.

almost certainly. the whole web was built by making use of what we had. like, the aforementioned <table> layouts were only ever just a hack, really. and what about spacer gifs? and all this "just wrap it in a div with some negative margin..." stuff is just a hack, really. this is where semantic html all breaks down, you see: it's all good until it just doesn't work for some reason, and then we begin to improvise.

they have their place (hah!), but i'm glad we don't have to rely on them for page layouts anymore. i'm convinced i still dont really understand how clear: is supposed to work.

uhhhh, it's sort of a mix at the moment because im not fully up-to-date on good practices. rightly or wrongly, i usually do em or % for text, and px or % for layout.

(i only learned about clamp() yesterday and im still dizzy thinking about the possibilities)

not really. i used to use Verdana for pretty much everything, but that's old hat now.

the default font on this site is Old Timey Code by Darren Embry.

yeah if the opportunity arises and it sounds like a cool project, id love too. i've certainly spent a lot of time running websites for orher people in the past, is that the same thing?

as for how it would work? if we were both writing the code it would have to go into version control (like git), preferably with only one person comitting to live.

yes, all the time since i've realised people still make them!

yes! i love collecting links!

and, yeah, it is a bit of a thrill to find an incoming link to my simple little world.

i don't think i have either the creativity or the skill to impress anyone. but i love to imagine people arriving at my home page and saying "hah, that's cool, i get it!"

not really. i mean, i'll always be a technologist at heart but latest gadget culture isn't something i keep up with anymore. the web and all it's related software is what interests me, and you can do that on any old device these days.

yes.

me, me, me, and me!

seriously, though, i created my neocities account originally as a place to store my own stuff. i'm happy if you like my stuff, that's cool. but if people don't like it, thats fine too: it wasn't made for them, anyway.

absolutely, it used to be the future!

(see question 20.)

my first programming languages were Turbo Pascal and COBOL at college. both of those languages were already pretty much obsolete, but a handful of years later i bought some books on javascript and realised that, apart from the fact it runs in a browser, it's all basically the same. later i was coding web applications in PHP and then C#. my current neocities hosting doesn't really allow anything like that but i do have access to some hosting elsewhere which i might make more use of in future.

i'm not using one right now but i have done. i guess my first experience with generating pages was using Dreamweaver templates which used placeholder comments to mark the editable sections.

yeah on my home page (only) ive got a classic-style counter powered by hit-counter.net. it's free and doesn't use any cookies, so i can't speak to the accuracy of it. i installed it more for the aesthetic and the novely value, really.

the only other sense i have of traffic to the site is on my neocities dashboard.

to be fair this site is more of my own personal hangout, so im not that bothered about visitor numbers.

(i love a good guest book signing, though!)

i'm on reddit, but most of the old discussion forums seem to have died and i can't get my head around discord.

pretty much just key it directly into the editor.

i dont really know how i appear, but i collected a bit of feedback and put it on my back cover (and one of the comments does use the word cool, yay!)

ive certainly built some embarrassing stuff in the past, mainly because i was paid to do it. my old personal pages (not that i can find any of them at the moment) were certainly primitive, but i don't think that's anything to be embarrassed about.

i would probably keep it archived out of interest, but being able to edit it is kind of the whole point. i wouldn't buy a plastic shrubbery.

i'm certainly selective about what i write. there's plenty going on in my life that you don't need to know about. and i didn't really start this to rant on about perosnal stuff anyway.

my best online friend was an American girl woman i met on icq in 1998. we never met in real life, and the last time i checked up on her Facebook page she had been dead for nearly a year and now im crying

not as much as i probably should to be honest, but i don't feel like i use that many images and the internet is really fast.

old, tired, apathetic...

oh wait, how do i feel about the questionnaire?

well to be fair it's taken me six weeks on-and-off to answer all the questions. i still don't feel like it's complete and some of my answers are aging badly already. i've trawled through 30 years worth of extremely tarnished memories to reach the bottom of this page, it's been emotional fascinating. this might receive living document status if i occasionally come back to add more thoughts.