Bringing GeoCities Back with Kyle Drake

Software Sessions

Kyle is the creator of Neocities a free web hosting site that encourages people to build creative personal websites in the spirit of GeoCities. He's currently working on restorativland where people interested in the history of the web can discover websites originally hosted at places like GeoCities and Myspace Music.

Kyle Drake

• Personal Site
• @kyledrake

Projects

• Neocities
• restorativland

Other Links

• Yahoo! Geocities - Wikipedia
• What is BGP?
• What is Anycast?
• Vultr (Neocities hosting provider)

Timestamps

• [00:00:50] What GeoCities was
• [00:06:45] Why the old web failed
• [00:15:06] Reasons to create Neocities
• [00:21:04] Fighting phishing, spam, and DMCA takedowns
• [00:27:17] Purchasing an IPv4 address block and building an Anycast CDN
• [00:43:28] Why create your own CDN? (Takedown requests come directly to you, reduced chances of hosting provider shutting you down)
• [00:51:09] The costs of running a CDN ($130 a month)
• [01:07:11] Restorativland (Curating and archiving old internet communities)
• [01:11:53] The staying power of HTML vs modern apps (You can still open sites from the 90s)
• [01:14:21] Categorizing old webpages and the problems with current recommendation algorithms

Music in this episode is VHS s k y l i n e by Crystal Cola.