📞 1997 Called

They want their website back. I said no — this is where I put my thoughts now.

A deliberately ugly personal blog in the spirit of GeoCities, built with raw HTML, Comic Sans, and absolutely zero good taste. Hand-crafted by Johnny.

What is this?

This is a personal site where I share thoughts on modern technology, building a business online, art, engineering, retro vibes, and keeping the web wonderfully weird. It looks like 1997 because it should.

No JavaScript frameworks were harmed in the making of this site.

Tech stack

• Eleventy — static site generator
• Nunjucks — templating (layouts, includes, loops)
• Markdown + raw HTML — content authoring
• Neocities — hosting
• GitHub Actions — auto-deploy on push
• Comic Sans MS — the only font that matters

How it works

1. Write blog posts in Markdown with frontmatter (tags: post, date: YYYY-MM-DD)
2. Templates use Nunjucks for layouts, includes, and loops
3. Eleventy builds everything into static HTML in the _site/ folder
4. GitHub Actions deploys to Neocities automatically on every git push
5. Neocities serves the site — no backend, no database, no problems

Getting started locally

git clone https://github.com/johnnycommits/1997-called cd 1997-called npm install npx @11ty/eleventy --serve

Site runs at http://localhost:8080.

Deploying

Push to main and GitHub Actions handles the rest:

git add . git commit -m "Some changes" git push

The workflow builds the site with Eleventy and deploys the _site/ folder to Neocities. Takes about 60 seconds.

Key features

• Dynamic sidebar navigation with aria-current for accessibility
• Blog post collections sorted by date, filtered with reverse and custom itemLimit
• Custom filters for readable dates (readableDate, isoDate)
• Google Sheets guestbook (fully styled, manual spam moderation) - IN PROGRESS
• Comic Sans across all devices via @font-face with proper bold weight
• Deliberately ugly — because the old web was fun

License

Do whatever you want. Copy it, remix it, make it uglier. Just don't make it look good.

Best viewed in Netscape Navigator 4.0 at 800×600.