0 THE PORTAL 0

Wow, that's a vague page name. What the hell is "THE PORTAL???"

Well over the years of me using the internet, and especially while doing research and gathering resources for this website, I've found quite a few websites I think are very cool and want others to know about!

One of the biggest issues with the modern internet landscape is how centralized everything feels. 95% of content on the internet is relegated to the same few corporate websites. Very little attention is given to the more obscure and unorthodox sites.

I hope this page can serve as a nice catalog of other sites you may not visit regularly! And maybe a place to find resources for your own site? *nudge* *nudge*

I'm still just one guy, and my knowledge of websites is still very rudimentary, so apologies if this list is a little short and disappointing. I'm trying my best here!

(Just click on a website's picture to be sent to it.)

COOL NEOCITIES SITES

Flurry Land

Flurryland is the personal website of Dille, who you may know from her twitter account, @nescartridges. Her website is really neat, and multiple aspects of it served as inspiration for mine. (the about me page on my site was directly inspired by hers, but don't tell anyone, shhh!)

Oddity Commoddity

This site is chaotic as FUCK in the best way possible. I found this site just by browsing the first page of the most popular neocities sites, and I definitely see why it was on the first page. It's clear an unbelievable amount of time and effort has gone into making this site as jumbled and "free internet" as possible. This site even has a section called "explore the web" that contains multiple links to cool websites, which is awesome! and exactly what inspired me to make this portal page on my own site. If you're at all interested in this kind of thing I highly recommend you check it out!

Pandora's Zone

This is the personal website of Pandora, otherwise knows as @SignmanstrrEy on twitter. Pandora is actually a friend of mine, and her creation of this site and overall interest in early internet culture is what inspired me to make a neocities in the first place! Her website is really cool, and really captures that old geocities vibe. Some of the other pages are fun too, each going for a different vibe. (For example, her commissions page is an old fashioned notepad tutorial with Trance - 009 Sound System Dreamscape playing and everything.)

The Internet Archive

There's a high likelihood I don't even need to explain to you what the internet archive is, but I'll do it anyways! The Internet Archive is a non-profit site dedicated to the archival of... well... fucking anything, really! The site has an unbelievably large collection of various things such as digital scans of books, old software, images, audio files, videos, and yes, even websites! I don't mean to get too emotional here, but the internet archive is genuinely one of THE best things ever. It's heartwarming to know how much of history that could have been lost has been archived, and all for free.

a gif of the characters itchy & scratchy from the Simpsons repeatedly hitting each other with large, cartoonish hammers.

GifCities

An offshoot of the Internet Archive, GifCities is essentially a search engine for old Gifs. More specifically, it serves as a way to search for Gifs that were posted to old Geocities pages.
(If you don't know what Geocities is, don't fret! You can read up on what it is here!)
Simply type a word into the search bar, and voila! You've got hundreds, if not thousands of old-school Gifs! But the absolute COOLEST feature of this site, at least to me, is that you can click on any Gif, and it'll TAKE you to the archive of the Geocities site it comes from! I have spent... an irresponsible amount of time on this site, just clicking on Gifs and looking at old websites. I imagine it's how archaeologists must feel.

Windows 98 icon of a magnifying glass being used on a document

Windows 98 Icon Viewer

You may have noticed I like the aesthetics of Windows 98 and heavily based my main home page off of it. Well, in the process of finding assets for the main page, I came across this cool website! Not only is it a place you can download all the icons from Windows 98, but the whole site is also designed to look like Windows 98. Pretty cool!

(I will admit I didn't end up using this site nearly as much as I thought I would, still neat tho.)

screenshot of the guidbook gallery website

GUIdebook: Graphical User Interface Gallery

Another website I found while searching for WIndows 98 assets. And oh man, this site is the fucking holy grail! It was so hard to find any screenshots of Windows 98 in high quality, and this website has it in spades, as well as various other operating systems. All the screenshots are neatly organized so there's one for every program. It's good stuff, I'm genuinely surprised I've never heard anyone talk about this site.

Backgrounds!

Pretty simple to explain, this site has a huge collection of old internet-esque tiled backgrounds you can download to use on your website. The starry background on my site actually comes from this place, pretty neat!

This is actually hosted on a neocities site... This is getting kinda meta...

3D GIF Maker

Wanna make a gif like the one you see to the left? This site's got you covered. There's tons of templates and you can upload any image you want. Makes for a good twitter shitpost, methinks...

Wii Shop Channel

This site is an insanely accurate recreation of the old Wii Shop Channel! This place is super nostalgic for me, as a person who was the right age to grow up with a Wii.

PictoChat Online

Another recreation of an old console application! This one's a very accurate recreation of pictochat on the DS. It's online, too! You can connect with other peeps in rooms and chat! Pretty neat...

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