🗺Relive Geocities, YikYak is Back, and Website Pets

Don't you miss Geocities?

Aug 23, 2021

Greetings! I hope you’re doing well this week.

How did another week pass by so quickly? I’m not sure either, to tell you the truth. All I know is that you got to watch the American Horror Stories spinoff episode “Feral.”

It’s all about the conspiracy theory that there are off-grid people scattered across the American forests who have a penchant for snatching hikers, kids, or anyone who has entered their domain.1

And it’s really scary. Without spoiling anything, it’s a whole lot scarier than that Wrong Turn remake that came out last year and that was intense.

If you get a chance this week, make sure you watch it. It’s really good!

I’m sure you’ve been reading the awful news about the U.S. Afghanistan evacuations. Things are absolutely insane down there, and my heart goes out to anyone involved - whether they live in Afghanistan or are trying to get out.

Amidst the sea of darkness, a bit of dark humor surfaced in the form of the saga of Lord Miles - an “absolute 4chan chad” who decided to take a vacation in Afghanistan at the worst time possible.

Read the complete saga of his misadventures here, or watch this excellent video.

Shall we hop into today’s topics?

🌎Relive Geocities

Remember the ancient days of Geocities? Those weird and wacky 90’s to 00’s websites?

It may have closed down state side back in 2009, but Geocities Japan wasn’t actually shut down until 2019.

Crazy, I know.

I discovered a large gallery of preserved sites, and whaddyaknow - nostaliga feels are hitting hard.

For those of you who don’t know, Geocities was subdivided into different areas and places - and different places were often focused around different topics. For example, Silicon Valley was focused on tech.

Of course, people made whatever they wanted within the confines of the url they had, but the subdivided pages (Bay,Byte,etc) were sometimes relevent to the title.

I went on a treasure hunt in these ancient archives - and discovered the following.

Someone who built their own hand made DDR platform
An uncompleted pokemon website
Someone’s Computer zone full of links with a Space vibe
This dude’s site from 1998 with a secret email list. Very clever haha

Of course, there are hundreds and hundreds of glimpses into the creativity of people from the early 2000s. It’s hard to pull away from, I must admit.

This one is my favorite so far! Just look at it - it’s chaotic urban beauty. Fun fact - he’s still active on Youtube. Helllooooo David if you’re reading this.

It’s so much fun browsing through the unbridled exploratory creative internet of the early 00’s. I miss it! I do feel that products like mmm.page are trying to bring it back.

Well, what are you waiting for?

GO EXPLORE THE AUNCIENT WORLD OF GEOCITIES

Geocities Archive

🐃 YikYak is Back

Once upon a time, there was a popular college app named YikYak. Basically, it was an app version of one of those crazy anonymous chat rooms - but location based. You could chat with other people within 5 miles.

As you can guess, there was a lot of controversy and a lot of horrible things said on the app. It didn’t really recover . . . and slowly died.

WELL IT’S BACK

Probably not, random yikyakker.

This time around, YikYak is putting a HUGE emphasis on their community guidelines, mental health resources, and other content. YikYak wants to be anonymous and fun - without the toxic baggage that came with the old version.

like Snapchat 7 years ago vs now.

It’s basically Reddit, but if Reddit was only available in a 5 mile radius.

Here’s the UI if ya need a yikyakkin’ reminder.

Once you get into local top yaks, there’s some decent content to interact with - but in terms of recent yaks - those are pretty eh at least in my area.

To be honest, it’s been several years since I last downloaded YikYak, and it was pretty eh then.

However - I don’t exactly live the right area for YikYak. I live in Franklin, TN which isn’t exactly known for its happenin’ college yikyak scene.

The Vanderbilt campus and Downtown Nashville? Probably a lot more engagement there.

I do think there is a stronger case for YikYak now than there was a few years ago. Today people are way more privacy conscious - and everything seems to be heading to the land of Telegram, Whatsapp, Signal, and other chat apps.

Hopping on YikYak is a great way to find out stuff about the local scene and interact without sharing your identity.

Here’s some of the vision straight from the new founders.

We're bringing Yik Yak back because we believe the global community deserves a place to be authentic, a place to be equal, and a place to connect with people nearby. We're committed to making Yik Yak a fun place free of bullying, threats, and all sort of negativity . . . Yik Yak is a radically private network connecting you with the people around you. No strings (or labels) attached. (Source)

I wish them the best!

What do you think? Do you think YikYak is back for good this time? Go download it and see how your local area is doing!

Yikyak

🐶Website Pets

Popups are an extremely useful tool in any web creators toolchest, but sometimes you gotta spice things up and make them FUN.

That’s the goal with Minymon, the cute little website pet you can adopt and use on your website.

You see that cute little frog? It goes right in the corner of your website - where it can answer questions and “chat” with your visitors. I don’t know about you - but i’m more likely to take action and give my email address to a cute little frog.

I want one on my site - and I’m gonna spend whatever time i need to to adopt one of these cute cats an put it on my website.

Theres a pretty good amount of customization you can do for your pet too - so you can make plenty of questions or FAQ’s to occupy visitors. My favorite feature is the theme song you can upload!

MY VERY OWN THEME SONG. Hmmmmm.

I’ll be building out my Minymon when I get a chance - and you should too!

Minymon

🐙The Land of Random

Your favorite links of randomness

Subscription Earbuds

No. Stop making everything subscriptions. No

Stop it

The Pied Piper is REAL??!?

Apparently the Pied Piper may have been a real person. I’m shook, to say the least.

I must know

Share the Page

Never in all my life have I seen this many sharing options. There’s even a MEME option.

The page must be shared

Scare Skips

Don’t be scared of all those horror movie jumpscares. Skip em’ - right from ya browser.

Skip the Scares

Star Wars Visions

The first trailer was epic. This one is literally out of this world. I do wonder though - how will all these Gen X and Boomer hard core Star Wars fans react?

Password Panic!

This really nifty password authentication module enables a panic mode once a particular password has been entered. While the attacker logs in successfully, a lot of background work can exectute - like deleting everything.

Password Panic