Two years ago, busy trawling the World Wide Web, Amélie O. ’29 first encountered Neocities: a free and highly-accessible social network website. But her first foray into the platform wasn’t to the website’s real ‘main page’. Neocities, Amélie explained, is a hosting platform: a large and interconnected web of websites, made by different people, all collectively hosted under the same banner. “I found one website, and then another,” Amélie recalled. “I kept seeing all these cool websites, which all had ‘Neocities’ in the url. And so I was like, ‘What is Neocities?’”
And so Amélie found her way into the heart of the site: a sprawling “library,” she called it, “of really cool small-scale websites.” The freedom and personalization of the thousands of personal pages appealed to her immediately., she said. Curiosity led her to the Neocities informational page, where she was promptly informed that she had to learn HTML and CSS in order to create on the platform. Amélie wasn’t perturbed: “It was kind of a trade-off,” she said, “But if I learn something new and also get to design a really cool website, that’s a win.”
That “something new” started as learning to code a website — one of the very first hurdles she would encounter. “I was never much of a coder,” Amélie said. “At the start of the project, my coding skills were not where I would have loved them to be.” She chose two languages — HTML and CSS — and dove right in. Websites, courses, and the internet all offered avenues to explore. “It’s self-moderated, so I’m teaching myself,” she explained, “but I also have resources which I can consult.” Coding, she said, is simultaneously challenging and incredibly rewarding: “When I code something and it works exactly how I wanted it to the first time — there’s nothing more beautiful than that… it really encourages me to keep going.”
That passion would eventually blossom into the website Amiland: an immense synthesis of many distinct interests and inspirations, including writing, design, coding, psychology, Dungeons & Dragons, Neocities, podcasting, and more. But Amélie makes her many inspirations her own, tied together cohesively under her own personal brand and banner.
The name of the blog, “Amiland,” is the result of an inside joke, she said: “My friend Mia and I refer to our thoughts as existing in ‘Amiland’ and ‘Mimiland,’ and Amiland as the name of the website… represented my intentions for the website as a place to share my thoughts and knowledge.” The main theme of her blog, Amélie said, is psychology, but she aims to branch out into pop culture, all while maintaining a “kind of academic quality.” The final site, she said, is planned to be released on the day of her birthday, December 21 — but the countdown to release is currently available at amiland.neocities.com.
One of Amelie’s very first articles was written on a bit of a whim. After walking by a shop called Mox Boarding House, located in Ballard, inspiration struck: “[The shop] had tabletop games and Dungeons & Dragons,” Amélie recalled, walking through her thought process. “I was curious — I feel like I hear a lot about Dungeons & Dragons, but I hardly ever see people playing it nowadays.”
But an idea is only the first part of the lengthy process of creating a blog post, Amélie said, which involves idea-finding, research, and writing. First, the question: for the Dungeons & Dragons article, she started off curious about the popularity of the game. From there, she considers the angle of the article: “Whether I want to answer [the question] through my research; is there an opinion I want to share, or a greater significance?” After the conception of an angle, she said, she begins sorting through her knowledge base, methodically noting evidence she is confident in and searching for any gaps. Research is the very last step: finding direct quotes or paraphrasing information.
The process of creating, she said, is rewarding in its creation of tangible and rewarding outputs: “I feel like being able to show what I’m working on to my friends, and my parents is sort of cool,” she explained. “I’m a very visual learner, so being able to see things and visualize them is helpful for me.”
And indeed, the endlessly customizable nature of a personal website has always been a draw, Amélie said. “I love when things match and have a consistent aesthetic,” she explained. This is the backbone of what she calls her blog’s “gimmick” — to “make each article have its own design, an aesthetic, in some way.” For example, the Dungeons & Dragons article she was working on has a design “based off of 90s fan websites.”
But despite each article having a personalized design, the website still maintains a unifying theme: a personalized and retro style. Amelie’s philosophy is written into the mission statement on the site: “the idea of being able to customize the internet and totally make it yours. She recalls it to be one of the best qualities of the ‘old’ internet — a phrase describing the world wide web before today’s modern internet era.
“I can’t talk about how the Internet was pre-2020, because I was literally nine years old,” she said. “But from the archives I’ve been able to find… it was a lot less commercial.” She cited MySpace as an example: “You [could] customize so much of your profile and how you present to others… nowadays, with an Instagram account, you can’t have that level of customization.”
One of the other main issues of the modern internet, she said, is that everything is so centralized: that people only use the same three websites. “I feel like there’s so much more out [on the internet] to explore, you know?” Amélie said. To her, that’s the ultimate draw of Neocities: a personalized site evoking a less-centralized older era. Amelie said she aims for her website to be “a place where I can be me, but not necessarily with a huge audience… I feel like [getting large] brings a lot of pressure.” She also carries a similarly strict stance around monetization: “I feel like monetization kills the motivation of creators… I don’t want it to ever come down to, you know, ‘I’m doing this so I can get a paycheck.’”
In the end, the only real way to fight the centralization of the internet is to make things, Amélie said. “Use all the resources at your disposal — they’re all out there,” she advises students who might be interested in making their own personal website or any other form of digital creative expression. “Google is my holy grail. It’s unfathomable how much you can find there. And find someone in real life that you can talk to — talk to me; I can be that person for you.”
But Amélie’s main piece of advice, beyond the practicalities and mechanisms of creating a website, recalls her driving philosophy — that urge towards the beauty of customization and decentralization: “treat it like a creative project, as opposed to a chore. Do it yourself, and make it your own.”
