Last week my fourth grader came home and said him and his friends wanted to build a web site for trading a certain type of collectible card. They had been doing some Scratch in school so he had that background. I pointed him at neocities, he signed up and worked though their html tutorial on his own. After that he asked ok now how do I do other stuff? I started talking about apis and databases and when his eyes glazed over after a couple of minutes I stopped. Seems like a lot of work doesn't it? I asked. Yeah he said. I advised him to work on small parts at a time, learn a little at a time. Like a page that shows his most valuable cards. I'm waiting to see if he goes back to it before I push it anymore.

I personally think geo/neocities are awesome, I used geocities to learn some frontend stuff back then. I really miss the days when self publishing was more common.