I've been browsing so many Neocities sites over the last wee while and I'm so endeared by all the shrines I've seen. Shrines were super popular back in the day, and it's really sweet to see them making a comeback. A webshrine is just a little site dedicated to something the person likes a lot, like a mini fanblog. The best way I found to discover new shrines was to click on random sites on the "Last Updated" page of Neocities' search function. Here are some fun ones I found:
I was having so much fun working on my own site that I was like should I try making my own shrines? Is that cringe??
The first shrine I made was for Jak & Daxter, one of my alltime favourite games. I was obsessed with this game growing up and played it over and over (alongside the original Crash Bandicoot and original Ratchet & Clank). I had a vision of a mini wiki, and with my new experience working in Javascript I had a clear image of how to lay out all the code. It's very exciting to have a better understanding of how to efficiently lay out a site without needing to clunkily import whole .html files (which is how my header and footer used to be set up on this site). The biggest lightbulb moment for me was understanding how to setup side menus on this site, and I had a grand vision of multiple sidebars linking to relevant pages depending on what page you were on. It was going to be so cool!
I spent four hours making that site then stopped when I started to fill in the actual information and images.
I'll go back to this one eventually when I need something to hyperfocus on for a few more hours. I need to make some nice little graphics like a proper header and proper menu buttons, and at the time I didn't want to do that. I wanted to flex my weak little coding muscles.
The next shrine I made was for jolteon. It's called jolteons and has one picture of jolteon and makes jolteon noises at you.
I was really just fucking around for this one - at first I wanted to see if the Neocities URL "jolteons" was taken, and when I saw that it wasn't I was like well I need to do something with that then. Found a background on Google, slapped a nice transparent jolteon png on there, and sent it to my partner like "haha look".
His exact response was "it should do its cry at me every time i click on it, imo" and because I love to Make Thing I immediately looked up how to do that.
I thought this was going to be some complicated Javascript thing but it turns out HTML just has a tag for audio? Oh my god I looked up the best way to display HTML without the code being used and I found the tag "class=notranslate" which you can use to mark sections of text that you don't want to be automatically translated if you're using some sort of auto-translation app on a page. That's so cool. Okay sorry, yeah the audio code is so simple it's just:
<input type="image" src="/media/jolteon.png" width="400px" onclick="document.getElementById('sound1').play();">
The "preload=auto" section preloads the sound so it's ready to immediately play when you click on the jolteon and there's no buffering. Pretty cool.
I was immediately so much more satisfied with this jolteon shrine than I was with all the work I'd done on the Jak & Daxter shrine, I guess mostly because I immediately had somthing to show people. I posted it everywhere and people loved it so huge success on Shrine #2.
I still wanted to do more though, so I decided to work on something that was a happy medium between the two I'd done so far. Time for BEASTS.
I really love animal collecting games; my earliest internet experiences were on things like Neopets, Marapets, and Herupets, and I obviously also love Pokemon. More recently I've played Temtem and even dabbled in Flight Rising a few years ago. I figured a site that was just a collection of fictional creatures I like would be in the true spirit of a shrine, and also gave me a good excuse to look at pictures of those creatures.
I definitely had the most fun putting this shrine together out of all three. It was much more lowstakes than the Jak & Daxter shrine because I wasn't trying to include information, I was just going down memory lane looking at pictures of neopets and Animal Crossing villagers. I remembered a little while ago a Pokemon archivist had pulled all the Pokemon Shirt designs from the now-defunct website, and I correctly thought one of those would make a nice background for my BEASTS - you can check out the design archive here! There's a lot of really cute stuff in there. I went through every single shirt design (look, I really like doing very long boring projects like this) and actually pulled twenty different designs with the intention of finding a script to randomly change the background on every refresh, but got tired of trying to look that up and went back to the important stuff: uploading pictures of little guys.
I even made a little custom cursor by cobbling together a manectric sprite from Bulbapedia and a cursor from Whimsical!. I ended up using the same cursor on this site because I loved it so much, so if you're reading this post on mobile you're missing out. I just love little guys!!
So what have I learned? I dunno, how to make audio work in HTML I guess. I really like the concept of shrines and the idea that people like a thing so much that they want to show it off. Something about shrines is so much more appealing to me than fanblogs or fan accounts, I think because they aren't meant to be followed and constantly updated. It's a little page or a couple of pages that someone put together and it sits there for people to stumble across and read and learn something. I adore that. I also love how much effort people have put into making their shrines look personalised, I really need to up my shrine game.
My jolteon and BEASTS shrines aren't as educational as lot of the shrines I've seen, but I'm happy with them. They were a lot of fun to work on. Sometimes it's nice to just make a thing for the sake of making a thing, without needing a reason. I'd like to work on BEASTS some more, and maybe finish up the Jak & Daxter one eventually.
I also learned that there is basically no evidence of Herupets' existence anywhere. Neopets obviously still exists in some horrible shambling form, and apparently Marapets is still a thing, but the only thing I could find for Herupets was a DeviantArt deviation where the person who coded the site layout uploaded a screenshot of what it looked like in 2007. Absolutely fascinating.