Returning to my roots: building a platform-agnostic site with a minimalist design.

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 16:06:55 +0100

Yesterday, I wrote about the Micro.blog Paradox, and that ended up triggering so many questions. Why am I even using a platform to host my site and blog? Why not build something the way I want? What if I try it by first going back to the basics, just like when I began sharing content online in 1997?

Back then, we would write all the code on our computers and upload the files to a server. It’s a lot of work to do it yourself and many extra details to pay attention to. But once the main structure is built and running, it’s just a matter of incremental changes.

So, I started looking for places where I could host a site like that, and there are actually many places available: GitHub, Netlify, and Neocities, just to name a few. I chose Neocities for now as a testing bed and as an homage to where my online presence started: GeoCities. Which is also an irony in itself. The mess Yahoo did to GeoCities can easily be classified as one of the first enshittification processes of the Internet era.

In the end, it doesn’t really matter where I keep my site. The files on my computer can be easily uploaded to a different place, and in no time, everything will be running as if nothing ever changed.

It took me a few hours, but the first draft is already live using the free Neocities tier. The plan is to start publishing on both sites and keep tweaking things to make sure I can build this the way I want to.

I guess the Digital Caveman project is more like a never-ending path.

Neocities on Vladimir Campos

Returning to my roots: building a platform-agnostic site with a minimalist design.