FABLED // resources for the new web

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These are all resources centered around what I, personally like to call the new web. I call it that mostly just on my own. Most people call it the "indie web," I think. I like "new web" as a term, though. The old web died out, splitting away. The sites we used to like turned into social media (which still evolves, thrives, and disturbs).

Now, the "new web" is what rebuilt from the remnants, I guess? Maybe I'm waxing way too poetic about this. It's not like I don't call it the "indie web" too. Can't help it, excited to see personal websites again. I don't expect this new web thing (aka the "indie web" or "small web") to supplant the rest of cyberspace, and especially social media. Sites like that, if they don't survive, will just replace each other in a lineage of similar corporate spaces.

Even if "social media" as such doesn't stay, the mindset and values behind it aren't going away any time soon. In the meantime, I think it will feel as if we have two whole internets instead of one. The first of these? Those corporate, heavily shepherded spaces. The second? Everything else. People might fall into one or the other, entirely based on the happenstance of life circumstance. In other words, there will be more of a gap (online) between the more native digital folks and those moving into existing spaces, I guess?

Anyways! Here are some beautiful links for you! Sites like neocities and nekoweb allow people to balance out the algorithmic holding pens with some time running free. Hopefully, they'll instpire you to start that process. It's not for everyone, admittedly. There are plenty of other awesome ways to participate in the new web half of the digital world, but here's some places to start if you want to get into webbing itself! Click around to jump to the sections.

Please keep in mind that some (but not all, nor most) of these resources may not work with all neocities accounts. This is because neocities controls how you can reference external scripts if you're not a supporter.

New Web Introductory

Penny’s Pages Wiki is very out-of-date, but still fascinating, wiki focused on neocities and related sites, culture, and events.
Rediscovering the Small Web, absolute best and shiniest guide to the “small web” that I’ve found thus far, and guaranteed to spark shivers of nostalgia in even the most jaded of us.
The Small Web is Beautiful, where Ben Hoyt explains different approaches to the concept and, IMHO, takes things to some pretty hardcore extremes.
Smallweb.page is a small guide to the “small web” which, rather poetically, describes websites as “multiple shrines dedicated to different gods, not competing or crowding each other out.”
You Must Make a Website, a post by Tumblr user @Spiders-Around providing a brief guide with links to making your own, as described by the post “webbed site.”
Browsing the World Wide Web, where a Tumblr user explains both how sites on services like neocities work, tips for creating them, and advice for browsing and getting the most out of your “small web” experience.”
Neocities: an Underrated Online Gem is an article where Study Break magazine provides a very brief introduction to neocities specifically, the site’s history and purpose, and offers encouragement.

Layouts, Themes

My Pillow Fort provides whimsical resources, including fonts, templates, and emojis, with a cheery ethereal vibe. The introduction and the way one journeys through the site is very clever, and also reminiscent of the metaphor-heavy web design of the early-2000s, while employing modern techniques.
Foollovers provides a large array of premade layouts. If your site is primarily about showcasing your writing, fanfic, a comic, or something similar, a premade layout is an ideal timesaver. Will save an immense amount of time for someone looking to create a quick and content-rich site on the new web.
Wishglows has some really cool, readily responsive (mostly) layouts. Almost all of them feature large, gorgeous images of anime scenes and characters (up to and including eevolutions!) which is wonderful, don’t you think? It really aligns more with what I remember of the aesthetics from 2002-2004 than earlier, and brings back many memories of poking at Photoshop myself (no longer a hobby, but Wishglows is good at it).
Flower&Clover gives us a nice array of vintage-inspired layouts and graphics, some of which were apparently taken from actual antique magazines and other similar resources. This is an unusual treasure on the small web, and ought to be kept in anyone’s file - you never know when a little vintage frill might be needed.
Repth features premade layouts, both optimized for responsiveness and more static. They run the gamut of aesthetics from the first decade of the 21st century. Not a ton of them, but very diverse choices, some anime, some cute, some of the flat corporate style, etc. The site itself hasn’t been updated in a while.

Graphical Assets

Whimsical primarily deals in animated gifs, but not the irritating kind. These are subtle and beautiful, vibrantly-colored, yet with a certain gentleness. Perfect for sites that want to collect such things on one page, or website creators who just love animation in general and love to incorporate it in their designs.
This Honeycomb Badge Grid by Mooeena is a cute and creative way of displaying hexagon-shaped pixel stamps on your site. You can collect hexagons that relate to the topic of your site, or to the message you wish to convey to your readership. I’ve used it to create a talisman (of sorts) on one of my sites - perhaps you’ll run across it there.
Foollovers again provides a (quite vast) collection of material (images, animated gifs, etc, often paired with codes to copy for frames and such). Again, this site is in Japanese, but not difficult to auto-translate passably - us English-speakers often act like we rule the web, but we really ought to get over it and make some room.
Fine is a Japanese sozai site featuring sketchy (in the good way) artwork that you can easily include in your own pages, a little different from the usual pixel art. It’s sweet, soft, and above all, unique and creative. You’ll find the site hard to navigate if you don’t speak Japanese (I don’t), but clicking random links works, too. Google Translate was no help?
Mazewan features a variety of sozai artwork, but really shines when it comes to cute animal images. A lot of them would make great site mascots, but you might also collect them or use them in other ways. The images are rather minimalist, and that’s unusual in sozai, but useful if it fits your aesthetic
Asterism is a site offering fonts and image resources. It leans heavily on the cute and pink side of things, with lots of lace. I haven’t used the fonts, but the images look amazing, small, and easily adaptable. The site, like Foollovers, is entirely in Japanese, and slightly harder to navigate if you can’t read that, but still doable. Definitely worth a look if you want a “cute” site.
Blinkies.cafe features a generator for the old school “blinkie” animated gifs we used to splash all over our Geocities websites back in the late 1990s and early 2000s, promoting causes we cared about, and linking to each other’s sites. You can also download blinkies generated by other people, but either way, there’s a lot of, ahem, blinking going on.
Pixel Garo is exactly what you’d expect - a collection of pixel icons. A very large collection in fact. Really, a pixel icon depicting or representing almost anything can be found on this site. You can really use this resource for many things, and it is up to you whether it will be used for good, or for awesome.
Patorjk’s ASCII Text Generator will produce stunning, complex graphical text just from ASCII. I include this here because it can be fun to generate a message (your name, perhaps, or the date of creation, who knows) in a fancy font, then paste it as a comment into your HTML code. It won’t be visible to the usual site visitors, but anyone who views the source code of your page will see it, and to me, that’s amusing and charming. This was something we did back in the early 2000s occasionally, and also used in emails.
ImageColorPicker is old and plastered in advertisements nowadays, but it still works, allowing you to load an image, any image, into the site, generate a color palette from it. Useful for choosing complimentary hexadecimal color codes to match images with text and other features of your site, and for building color palettes directly.
Color Hex allows you to build and save small hexadecimal-coded color palettes under various names and tags. Useful for keeping track of your own aesthetics for various sites/layouts, as well as picking up new inspiration from other people. The site itself is a little messy and features many spelling errors, timeout. Still worth it.
EzGif sucks. It really is quite awful, but it is the most useful weird browser stuff for editing gifs on mobile (or desktop, if one hasn’t got a designated utility or is in a pinch). Can also help to achieve a retro look and feel, and does make the process much easier than constantly being stabbed in the back by Canva.

Assorted Useful Sites

Many resources from Sadgrl are useful for beginners, or so I’ve been told. I haven’t used much of those yet, myself. I include them here nonetheless because their popularity and tenacity speaks to their appeal and quality, I think.
Petrapixel is a site with lots of topics in there, and there’s a large section on making websites. The resources section is also worth visiting, featuring links to gems that not everyone knows about.
Native neocities visitor counter and update tracker by Dannarchy While it extends beyond, neocities itself has become quite central to the small web. If you use neocities, this will show you how to display (on your site) how many visitors your site has received alongside the date it was last updated, automatically. This doesn’t track hits (times an item from your site was loaded), but rather, represents neocities’s best attempt to track how many times people have visited the site, based on IP address.
Goatcounter seems to be the default free hit counter, allowing you to track the traffic coming to your site, where it is originating, and matters of your users’ locations, etc. Be mindful: many adblockers (used primarily on desktop devices, as far as I can tell) tend to block this script, and thus won’t give you information about those visits. It can still be somewhat helpful.
Status.cafe provides a small, lightweight widget of sorts that you can embed in your website to display a short message from you that, ideally, you'll update frequently to let people know what you're doing, or any other short quip that you'd like to share. Sign up quickly, because accounts must be verified manually, and it takes a few days!
Cbox.ws allows you to put a small, free chatroom on your site. It has (limited but colorful) customization of the little room’s boxy appearance (almost anywhere) on your page. I don’t recommend using it for major gatherings or serious discussion, but rather for small chitchat and snippets of messages between guests on your page. Be sure to register your own name as an administrator account and follow the site’s (rather byzantine) instructions.
Code Pen isn’t much in use on neocities, but I find it very useful for demonstrative purposes and previewing small snippets of code. It is also good to browse what other people have made in order to learn more about the languages.
Goofonts organizes existing Google fonts into useful categories and allows users to add tags to them. This is way more helpful than Google's own system for sorting them. If you don't hate Google enough to stop using Google fonts, try this to find some new, beautiful ones.
Zoho has one of the worst user interfaces I’ve ever seen on a web-based service. Still, it also offers budget email that can be connected to a domain name quite easily with no hassle. Useful and affordable if you’ve got a domain name hooked up with neocities or another service, and want a matching email.
Atabook seeks to fill the void left by the closing of 123guestbook as simply as possible. It does not have as many features or customizable aspects as 123 did, but is otherwise a worthy successor. I look forward to future options it might provide?
Meadow.cafe Guestbooks provides ad-free, extremely-customizable guestbooks easily inserted into any existing theme if you try hard enough. It’s what I’m using as of September 2025, and I like it well enough.
Font Awesome is a cute little way to insert symbols, emoji-like unicolor images, and similar things into your sites as a font. Free, though there’s a premium version I’ve not tried. A little Web 3.0-ish, and does assume you’re some kind of marketer at times. Not hard to work around …

11ty Resources

11ty happens to be my static site generator of choice, so I’m listing it in case you’ve never heard of it, are looking for a new one, and want to try one. I got help from ReduxFlakes of Surfscape setting it up. Here are some sites out there on the wide open web that provide helpful guides to it in various forms, just in case you feel like trying it for your site. I might write more of my honest thoughts on 11ty later…

Discord Servers

r/neocities Discord is a large server about neocities, with channels for coding help, general chatter, and unrelated fun stuff. I am less active here than in smaller servers, but this is a great place if you'd like to make friends, too.
Neozones.club Discord, an extremely large server with a simple focus on chilling. There is a channel about neocities (not very active), and quite a few about related tech topics. It is very much aligned with the values of the small web, regardless.
The 32-Bit Cafe, a structured server with many (highly active) channels and activities to go with them. Lots of meaningful conversation, particularly about aesthetics and web design itself.
Nekoweb Discord is a large server, very active, very streamlined, mostly very focused on webbing and related topics. It’s named for Neocities’s twin site, Nekoweb, but can be helpful for all kinds. Cool server tag.
Mine is about writing and art, not web design, so it goes elsewhere.
Let me know if these Discord links stop functioning, and, if you know of others related to the New Web, please contact me!

This page was last updated on September 15th, 2025.