Buttons
December 13, 2024
buttons are the staple of independent websites. you can't go through a rudimentary neocities or nekoweb website without finding an 88x31 button. they're almost everywhere, and you can find them very easily in large collections like a.n. lucas' 88x31 button collection, yesterweb's 88x31 buttons, and the largest 88x31 collection hosting hundreds and thousands of buttons either from early or modern web.
they trace back to early independent web, when the internet was still being introduced to the mainstream, all the way back to Geocities. i don't think geocities needs that much of an introduction, it was a free web hosting site that ran from 1994 to 2009. in its 15 year run it was pretty much marked in internet culture, and part of its footprint are the 88x31 buttons.
it's not clear where these buttons originate from, some say it stemmed from geocities requiring all free users to have a link back to geocities in their website, and that link happened to be through a 88x31 image. others say it was from netscape, they introduced html tags exclusive to their own browser and the only way to view them was through netscape, to inform the user that this was the case the host put a netscape 88x31 button in their website, which is what you've come to know as "Netscape Now!"
since then, users began to make their own custom 88x31 buttons that link back to their web page. and here we are. you can find any button that coincides with your interests, or you can make your own with existing button makers like sadgrl.online's 88x31 button maker or hekate's 88x31 web button maker. i have my own button too, which you can find at the bottom of this page. i find buttons to be important because they practically work as a micro ad, they're the first impression someone can get from your website so you can try making it stand out as much as possible.
i personally like collecting buttons too, you might have seen that i recently updated the miscellaneous page to include a link to my own button collection so feel free to download any from it! given that there's a lot of them, i found a way to work all of them conveniently that doesn't involve manually pasting and shuffling them to each subpage.
each button you see scrolling through is kept in a .json file that works as a database that keeps all 178 buttons (at the time of writing this), and each page has a javascript that fetches from this .json file and makes them into the looping marquee in the topbar. the same for this web page too, except that each blog entry uses a different javascript, one that only grabs the buttons that have hyper-links in the database and displays them in the same way the regular javascript does. with a different speed, of course. AND the collection page has another javascript that fetches from the database, except that it sorts them alphabetically by filename and displays them continously through the page.
the JSON database makes it significantly more convenient each time i want to add new buttons to my website, and trust me, i REALLY want to keep adding more. this is what i call my "button system" as referred to in the main page's changelog. though it wasn't always like this, i originally had all the buttons manually pasted into each webpage and had them scroll through with someone else's (admittedly jank) js marquee. then i implement the buttons.js which was more convenient, but i had to paste all the buttons with hyper-links to the buttonfriends.js (the one made for the blog entries) which was kind of a hassle in case i wanted to add more external websites to the marquee.
everytime i do a "button haul" i keep finding really awesome ones so it's why i want to keep adding more to my collection. recently, i downloaded approximately 6500 buttons from another collection and ive worked myself a script that grabs 20 random buttons for me so that if i want more, i can very easily get 20 more rather than looking for each one individually.
i don't think there's anything left for me to say, if you want to make a similar button system like mine feel free to grab it and put in your website! of course, a little credit would be very much appreciated. although don't add too many buttons! this is more of a suggestion on the performance of your website, but if you reaaally want to go for it. thanks for reading!