May 11, 2026
Blink and you’re back in 1996
Create a 90s GeoCities style website in seconds (Python)
A one-click trip to 1996 has commenters cheering, nitpicking, and demanding slower internet
TLDR: This tool lets people generate a cheesy 90s-style personal website in seconds, complete with blinking text and fake visitor counters. Commenters loved the nostalgia, but a loud faction argued it’s too slick to be real GeoCities and that true authenticity should be slower, uglier, and harder.
A new tool called geocities-boilerplate promises to build you a full-on 1990s personal website in seconds: loud colors, blinking words, fake visitor counters, guestbooks, cheesy music, and all the glorious chaos of the early web. In plain English, it lets anyone make an old-school homepage almost instantly, no serious setup required. But the real show started when the community piled into the comments with a mix of nostalgia, gatekeeping, and comedy.
Some people were instantly emotional. One commenter said clicking the demo felt like being thrown back into middle school, desperately trying to figure out scrolling text. Another went full hearts-and-minds, arguing that the old internet felt more personal and creative, unlike today’s web, which they say is obsessed with selling you stuff. That vibe hit hard: for a lot of readers, this wasn’t just a goofy website maker, it was a tiny rebellion against the polished, corporate internet.
But the nostalgia party got heckled. One old-school web veteran basically yelled, "Fake fan!" They argued these pages are too fancy to be truly authentic, saying real 90s sites were rougher, messier, and built by hand with questionable design choices. Another joked that real GeoCities should require hours of typing tags, not a few seconds. And in perhaps the most extra flex of all, one commenter shared a dial-up speed website just to make people suffer properly. The verdict? Everyone loves the idea — they just can’t agree whether it’s a faithful time machine or a polished nostalgia cosplay.
Key Points
- •geocities-boilerplate is a CLI scaffold that generates a self-contained 1990s GeoCities-style static website.
- •The generated site uses only static HTML, CSS, and vanilla JavaScript, with no frameworks, build tools, or external dependencies.
- •The tool can be run from multiple ecosystems including Python, Node.js, Ruby, Rust, PHP, Deno, and Go, with all variants producing the same site.
- •A live demo is available and is automatically rebuilt and deployed to GitHub Pages on every push to the main branch.
- •The setup process includes prompts for site title, name, theme, extra pages, cursor and falling effects, welcome alert, music, and visitor counter options.