Heyo, I don't think this is going to be a blog post that satisfies my standards, but I've gotten rusty not writing for a while, and need to get back into the groove.
So... 88x31 buttons. These are such an odd thing. Why do so many people on the indie web use them? Why those specific dimensions? What was the first 88x31? There are answers to these questions, but this post isn't about answering them.
Don't quote me on this, but the lore I've seen was that it was a Netscape Now! advertising button that was made back in the 90s that had these dimensions. It was styled to look like an actual button you click in Internet Explorer I think? And it ended up getting parodied by people advertising their own sites instead of Netscape. From that point onward it became a meme, and people just kept using these specifically-sized images to link to or show off whatever. It just kept sustaining itself as the indie web "declined", and then came back to life.
When I came on to Neocities I was kind of confused by these buttons, and felt ambivalent about them. It took me like half a year to actually warm up to them and add them to my site. And it wasn't just me adding one or two little buttons, no, it was like I was bit by a bug and I went all-in. I linked to every site I enjoyed or was mutuals with, and went to 88x31 collection sites to grab whatever buttons I thought were cool. Also... I started making my own buttons that I wish existed.
Above are many of the buttons I've made over the years (or just converted stuff into the 88x31 size). I've at some point made buttons for other people. Some of my buttons are even lost media?? Spooky! My favourite image editor right now is Paint.NET, but most of the buttons I've made were done in Photoshop if it was a still image, or using Ezgif if it was animated. Pro tip: if you need tiny text that isn't a pixel font, use Segoe UI. Microsoft used some witchcraft when they made it so it looks great at very small sizes, and it is the only font I like to use when I need to have some smol text inside a smol image.
Remember how I said I linked to every site I liked? I kind of went too far with that. At one point I realized some of the people I was linking to I really did not vibe with, whether it was my fault not really noticing everything they have on their site, or whether their sites evolved to have stuff I did not like. And also... over a period of time that didn't feel that long, my button list partially became a graveyard of sites that were either deleted or had goodbye messages put up. So I kind of swung in the other direction, and became too cautious with who I linked to (sorry if I don't link you, it's probably nothing personal). Right now it's pretty much either a small pool of mutuals or people who have passed the vibe check. And so far on within my short list only like 2 people disappeared.
And it kind of sucks I don't really link to that many people because there's so much insane creativity with this humble little 88x31 image that people use. I can just google something like "button wall site:neocities.org", and find sites full of cool button collections like this one.
With their buttons, often people just take up the whole rectangle with a pretty image that has their name and something that represents themselves. However, some people quite literally break the boundaries of such a tight medium by using transparent pixels to make their buttons have weird shapes, or use animation to put in more content that what could fit within such a small image. It's honestly so beautiful to see what people come up with.
Of the buttons I made myself I consider the "right to repair" and the Bad Apple ones to be bangers. The R2R button is very straightforward and just distills the message well. There is nothing to add, and nothing to take away. Whereas the Bad Apple button is just me putting the entire Bad Apple into yet another medium like most weirdos do. Although I do not consider it perfect, and plan to one day remake it to be as flawless as it can be.
Now I would like to get to the reason I wrote this blog post in the first place... other people using my buttons. No, no, I'm not asking for credit or want people to take stuff down. I'm totally fine with anonymously forging some arbitrarily-sized images that people copy for eternity. Personally, I don't really care where many of the buttons I use come from, so I'm cool with people doing whatever they want with mine.
No, the thing is... very often I see my buttons on other sites, and it's just so weird seeing them pop up in random and unexpected places. Just today I was browsing Mastodon, and found this site, which used my "programming socks" button. I've literally never seen that button used anywhere outside of my site even though it's 3 years old, and yet here it was on some random site that's well outside the Neocities-verse. And it seems like the creator has probably never seen my site. How the heck did it end up there? I can't help but imagine some epic journey of the image being copied from site to site, and then finally tickling this person's fancy enough for them to put it on their own site. Perhaps they may have just grabbed it from one of those big button collection sites, or maybe they actually have come across this site, but an epic journey is more fun to imagine.
And also, what the heck, that site links to so many other weird sites that have their own 88x31 buttons, that all have a unique design flavour that is completely different from the sites I typically see on Neocities. Knowing that many of these people are serious Mastodon/Fediverse enjoyers, they probably host their sites on their own VPS or maybe even on a Raspberry Pi that they have kicking around. It is just so thrilling to get hit with the fact that a world I thought was vast (the Neocities-adjacent sphere) is but a tiny sliver of a vast indie web universe. All because of some silly little 88x31 buttons.
What are your thoughts? Have you made any buttons other than the one for your own site? Have you seen them end up in interesting places?