When gURL author Esther Drill was asked to explain her desire for creating a feminist website, she kept it short and sweet: “there wasn’t much for teenage girls on the Web at the time” (1999). After fingering the pulse of our contemporary Net in the previous chapter, conditions have proven parallel. Worse, even. Compared to the immense creative output from users in the heyday 1990s - as Chapter One details - this so-called superhighway has rapidly degraded to dump status. Once high-traffic locales, now ghost towns. Where have all the good gURLs gone?
This is a manual manifesto. Handcoding digital space radically reclaims a craft practice long-lost to neoliberal machines and machinations. The prefix of ‘hand-’ roots an immaterial process in a storied material history. I have peppered this terminology throughout. TLDR; In 2015, net artist J.R. Carpenter published a manifesto urging human emphasis as a combat against corporatization. Creating “provisional…temporary” pages “to draw attention to the human body…to suggest slowness and smallness as forms of resistance…” frees ‘users’ from the crutch of usership (2015). We are tangibly reengaged with implicit infrastructures. The ‘handmade web’ makes explicit that bone-deep connection between print and digital. It is deeper than our mutual dialect, more than ‘document’. It is integral to the computer itself. As is femme history - but I tread carefully against a sex-based barrier. TodaygURL is for girls. I began this thesis ruminating on its misty etymological origins. Notably, ‘girl’ is considered to have been a diminutive term for “all kinds of creatures considered immature, worthless, or past their prime” (Etymonline). In our contemporary virtual reality, that definition can (will) stretch. Especially the last descriptor; what could be more ‘past its prime’ than the infant Internet?
Tim Berners-Lee, father of the World Wide Web, often claims the Internet for everybody. Still, the message has yet to make an impact (Berners-Lee, 2025). My most frequent tools - feminism and computer programming - are fields steeped in exclusion. Often built directly upon, as I’ve extrapolated. I discovered The Cyberfeminism Index my sophomore year of college while taking Digital Studio. Dually print encyclopedia and online archive, the project curates all cyberfeminist actions in a single list for the first time. Mindy Sue, artist and academic behind The Index, describes it as a “forever institution" where activism occurs within as “workers reflect…often at the cost of creating and dispersing a productive tension with someone higher up at the institution” (Ryan, 2024). TodaygURL is a direct example of inter-institutional revolution. I am actively rebelling within two institutions: The Internet and The University. This is not an unmediated ramble; this is a senior thesis. Even its source material is complicit. Digital Studio is an advanced studio course split in two self-motivated projects. For my first, I hand-coded a site - and christened it ‘Today Girl’.
The Cyberfeminism Index led me down a rabbithole of femme-centric interventions. I went searching for a way out and stumbled upon gURL.com. The site began in 1996 as a graduate school project; the first full gURL URL was “http://www.tsoa.nyu.edu/gURL/.html”, as in New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Three young women my age, perhaps a year behind, cracked their knuckles and dedicated a hand-coded site to systemically dismantling the rapid misrepresentations of how tween/teen girls did/did not surf the web. The most revolutionary act a person can do is exist without compromise. I might be a mere undergrad purporting to program a universe, but so was Mark Zuckerberg.
Reconstructing the past with present technologies requires tact. Not only has web dev dogma been broadband sterilized, but the machinery has as well. Modern websites would be unrecognizable to an early-netizen. ‘Making a website’ now brings to mind a myriad of ‘site builders’ like SquareSpace or Wix. Their interfaces are little more than a point-and-click and their monthly subscription rates are through the roof. Not all is doom and gloom. Now, sites can stream 4K without skipping a beat. Your eyeballs will never have to be alone again. Clearly, the possibilities are exciting and the potential pitfalls innumerable. I have chosen to house TodaygURL on NeoCities, the open-source platform previously cited in Chapter Two. As a frequent contributor to ‘Indie Web’ projects, NeoCities comes with a dedicated base of netizens eager to collaborate and constructively critique fellow developers. Each site is accompanied by a personal message board. There is a neighborly feel to living in NeoCities. A friend leaves me a song recommendation they feel is related to the TodaygURL ethos. We have and never will meet in-person. Here, the Internet is a commune. The alternative would be getting lost in a solitary feedback loop, abandoned by search engines to stumble alone through Dark Forests. It’s a grim image.
As evidenced, the first draft included TodaygURL message board. Centrally locating a message board on a static site is impossible. The ‘rudimentary’ infrastructure could not support the database required to store user input. I cycled through a few third-party hosts. After all, majority of gURL sites with live chats used plug-ins (think of Cybergrrlz’s separate dialogue window). None felt comfortable. Most cost money. If they were free, their compensation could easily come at the cost of my readership. That is the exact dynamic I am seeking to avoid. Although all purported to focus solely on streamlining conversation, not collecting advertising data, there is an insidiousness festering below modern forum platforms. TodaygURL does not ask anything of its readerbase other than their attention. That is, the site does not track users’ names, emails, addresses, etc. Collecting data for communication is a slippery slope to collecting information on “consumer habits” (Duncan & Leander, 2000).
What are other ways of breaking down the superficial boundary between reader and writer? Again, I took a cue from the Cybergrrlz blueprint. Their chatboards were constructed through email submissions, with an editor respective to each section. Further on, they did begin promoting specific submission forms that eliminated any non-native interaction. I attempted to direct-copy their JavaScript code onto TodaygURL. The skeleton exists easily. Unfortunately, there was still the issue of where the user-submitted information would end up. Without blood, the body cannot live. Neocities does not allow data files. Cybergrrlz employed a .pi file for collection purposes.
Often, I found the most popular work-around to be embedding a Google Form. A .css file can easily disguise the otherwise ugly architecture of the archetype, taking in user information and adding it to a Drive-based Sheets file. Either this, or revert to a snail mail email-based exchange. Inevitably, I had to involve Google as a mediator. Both methods bed the conglomerate. However, the latter does not rely on a spreadsheet full of critical user information. The idea of that existing on my computer - on my ‘drive’ - twists my stomach. So, I went with email - the blue pill.
Despite the built-in barriers, I consider static site-hosting to be a crucial scaffold for TodaygURL. Static sites are ‘prebuilt’ sites, meaning the browser keeps a version stored without user interference. The early net knew nothing but static sites. Dynamic sites only rose in popularity following the ‘dot-com bubble’ burst, relying on server-side scripting to create personalized versions for each reader or reload. This ‘on demand’ model projects an air of cocky capability, a ploy to press as hard on the pedal as you want. Beneath the allure of customization is a frayed network of anti-commune and anti-eco code. First, dynamic sites run up against collaborative ambitions because they are active contributors to what Eli Pariser calls the ‘filter bubble’. Our content deluge has led us to solely rely on software-based curators - the mythic algorithm - for advice on consumption rather than exploring independently (2011). Second, dynamic sites are absolute resource drains. Adjacent to the ‘Indie Web’ is a burgeoning ‘Sustainable Web’ movement. Developers are eager to close carbon leaks and slow Internet consumption to a more contemplative pace. Static sites are one in an arsenal of environmentally-focused tools (LACMA 2025).
TodaygURL is static but by no means fixed. The project is multi-faceted and multi-dimensional. Though animations and colorful imagery, a rainbow range of file types, might somewhat contradict the sustainable approach, their inclusion is necessary. TodaygURL tributes past projects whilst avoiding clearcut nostalgia. By combining past images with present, I pedestal this tension. This tension is what makes TodaygURL uniquely suited for our contemporary Internet. Specific elements of TodaygURL deserve explanation. As we delve further into creative dissection, it is necessary to restate that this project is ongoing and unfinished. TodaygURL will continue to evolve; this chapter is a progress report, not a final reflection. Its liminal, ill-defined existence is the direct impact of gURL agency.
There is a promotional photograph of the Spice Girls prominently featured on the front page. It has been included in some form or filter since my fledging first site. On May 14th, 1997, the girls dropped by AOL’s Manhattan headquarters to participate in a live web-chat with fans (Tumblr). The picture was taken by professional David Corio. The five are posed in front of three oversized computer monitors, gripping each other affectionately and grinning broadly at the camera.
The Spice Girls and the grrrls/gURLs had a complex relationship. Their tense dynamic was domineered by an overhead pressure to commercialize and commodify. Jo Freeman diagnoses this with her Second-Wave text “The Tyranny of Structurelessness”. I briefly cited Freeman in the first chapter; “The public is conditioned to look for spokespeople…whether they want to or not, whether the movement likes it or not, women of public note are put in the role of spokespeople by default” (1972). The Spice Girls never claimed sole responsibility for shouldering the survival of a modern-day feminist movement. By the time their first album was released, no member was more than 25 years-old. Barely adults, they sky-rocketed to a level of international fame then completely unprecedented. Simultaneously lauded and criticized for their pop sound and bare midriffs, the band continues to earn political scorn from more radical feminists - despite having disbanded in 2000.
The Spice Girls deserve to be interpreted as individuals, not thought leaders. My relationship to them is complex but ultimately forgiving. I think this photograph - five good girl friends having fun online - is an accurate representation of what TodaygURL should aspire to. I return continuously to a The Face cover story written early on in their musical careers. British journalist Miranda Sawyer followed their antics around London. When watching Geri Halliwell sign autographs, Sawyer observes that “she says little slogans to them, like ‘Girl Power!’ and ‘Be who you wanna be!’.” After the younger girls leave, Geri admits “I always bang on about Girl Power and half the time I wonder if they know what I mean” (1996). But they did; they do. Pamela Tayakoshi mentions the Spice Girls in her article interviewing femme tweens about their experiences online. Girls often dedicated digital elegies to their favorite spice-esses. Regardless of “however problematic the Spice Girls seem to adults…the phenomenon…may indicate how hungry young girls are for affirmation that they are powerful” (98). Diminishing the Spice Girls for being complex individuals is a waste of time. Instead, let’s consider why they were so popular. Clearly, girls were - and still are - hungry for representation of unabashed, unapologetic women.
Guest books are traditional features of hotels, weddings - any private institution routinely open to the public. Guestbooks are pseudo-replications of a printed ledger. Early-net websites often featured guestbooks as the primary way for user feedback and interactivity. Considering a majority of other input-based services are not available on static sites (ex. forum hosting), the guestbook is an essential element of any collaborative cyberwork. In a particularly feminist context, Jacqueline Rhodes highlights guestbooks as prime location for “reader-construction textualities” to “realize their radical potential” (133). Users are encouraged to interact with a multivocal structure without hierarchy. Readers reply to one another or promote their personal pages. On TodaygURL, the guestbook has already been a site for constructive feedback. One user enters their URL as their name - yepyep.neocities.org - and writes “the spirit this site embues…reminds me of the articles I edited for high school journalism”. Given my primary audience is teenagers/young adults, this comment is highly motivating. Especially interesting is the reference to their older Internet-based work; clearly, the guestbook conjures both nostalgia and novel conversation. As TodaygURL ages, its guestbook persists. Even if I cease to exist as its primary editor, the guestbook will “continue to be read and written…making the Web site itself a truly generative text” (134).
I approach hypertext documents based upon Laura Sullivan’s feminist theorization of the medium. Her 1999 essay analyzed then-contemporary anecdotes on the potential benefits and harms a link-loaded dialogue might incur on textual production. From Wired Women Writing I take three key concepts. One: that hypertext transcends binaristic thinking (33). Two: that hypertext connects writing to the material that prompted response, peeling away the boundary of coherence expected from traditional narrative structure (36). Three: that hypertext admits subjectivity and rebukes any claim to expertise (39). Although Sullivan directed her study towards hypertext works more adjacent to memoir, my writings for TodaygURL are equally impacted by my personal beliefs and experiences. Hypertext comes automatically when coding with HTML; as the acronym for Hypertext Markup Language, it’s in the name. However, my utilization is an intentional, political decision. In “HACKTIVISM”, an article intended as an civilian introduction to technological activism, the hypertext is dually a bibliography and a mind map. I quote Michael Roszak, VP of finance at Google, from an internal document released as evidence during the company’s 2023-24 antitrust trial. Rather than opt for standard MLA in-text citation, I link the words “court-released document” to a PDF copy of the document. I have bridged reader and researcher; the article “allows readers to compare these versions of reality for themselves” by democratizing context (39). As for the mind map, I also use hypertext in a multivocal fashion. The article opens with a reference taken originally from Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises in which a character justifies his going bankrupt as “gradually, then suddenly”. Instead of linking the quote back to Hemingway, my hypertext takes a reader to a .jpg of Elizabeth Wurtzel. The text beside her is taken from her 1994 memoir Prozac Nation. She turns the reference inward. Suddenly, the quote origin is layered and distorted. Both novels (Prozac and The Sun) were criticized for their explicitness. Only one has entered the so-called American Canon. By linking to Wurtzel, I am referencing a legacy of obscurant quotation. “Multiple connections are possible simultaneously” as opposed to an expected binary obfuscation (33).
As for the resource page - otherwise known as the TodaygURL Library - links are not explicitly relational. A crucial component of most gURL projects was open-source information. Tools considered useful have been sorted into three categories: pizzazz (visual attributes), people (significant Internet persons/publications), and papers (key cyber-centric texts). Each is represented by a Windows 95-inspired folder ‘rollovers’. When a user rolls their mouse over a category, the folder reveals a related object. For example, the ‘pizzazz’ folder opens to reveal a paint brush and roller. ‘Rollovers’ were frequent implemented for subversion and satire by gURLs. The e-zine Disgruntled Housewife linked to each of its published sections via a shape-shifting icon: ‘Confessions’ changed from angel to devil, and ‘Naked Ladies’ removes the bra of a headless torso (2000). My rollovers are not as provocative. Still, “the second image brings something new to the first” (Ladendorf 134). The folders are meant to abstractly represent what interesting pathways might be followed through the resources contained within.
Beside the more specific citations is a subpage devoted to “The TodaygURL Gallery”. The gallery is a visual bibliography of every archived webpage I have explored for this project. Highlighting the unique aesthetics of each previous gURL project, a plethora of possibilities are opened. The user is not restricted to my independent expression. I have not removed TodaygURL from the context of its genealogical history. Instead, the gallery allows a user to peruse these now-defunct sites at their leisure. The lauded position of researcher is made communal; the past is made present.
TodaygURL is split into four categories: Pop Off, Pop Culture, PopLitics, and Pop Corn. The kitchy, alliterative titles are meant to satirize/tribute typically ‘girl-ified’ journalism. Majority of gURL projects textually aligned each section. Riotgrrl frequently incorporated ‘riot’: ‘MediaRiot’ for their film reviews, ‘TrueRiot’ for their embarrassing personal stories , ‘X-Riot’ for their explicit personal stories (1997). Teengrrl implemented a similar pattern with ‘grrl’: ‘Grrl Politico’ for politics, ‘That Grrl’ for editor Carol’s “unique observations” (1999).
Pop Off is a rage room. Pop Culture is for fangirling. PopLitics is a briefing room. Pop Corn is my senatus consultum. The header designs of each pay tribute to the webring icon that housed a majority of gURL projects. Webrings were the friendship bracelets of the early net. Sites could link together despite disparate creators and ambitions, rallied behind the gURL banner. At the height of gURL, search engines were still in their infancy. Webrings would promote other sites with ‘next’ and ‘last’ hyperlinks, a JavaScript tying each together (2015: Ray). They were volatile algorithms based off personal affirmation and decided solidarities. The gURLnet webring provided “temporary stability of identification” in a community otherwise intentionally ill-defined, simultaneously challenging and complying with anarchist print incoherence (Rhodes 128). In the future, I plan to create a gURL-focused webring. For now, its memory lives on in the section icons.
The meaning of ‘pop off’ is slippery. Recently, our cultural lexicon has turned towards using it to describe the moment when someone is incensed or passionate enough to rant about a particular topic. Popping off, more often than not, does not ask for critical thought. The rise of rage-baiting clearly demonstrates how profitable an angry ramble can be. By titling the section ‘Pop Off’, I reference the slang term without submitting to expected affectation. I am angry; I am also an author. The premiere article is adapted from a print zine I made about ‘hacktivism’. Hacktivism, or hack activism, is when a person disrupts computer systems to achieve a specific political or social action. The term often carries a negative connotation, as it has become associated with mass data leaks that wound everyday users more than any elite. I believe original hacktivism is a complimentary practice to the handmade web. A hand-coded site like TodaygURL recontextualizes everyday machinery; it is a form of hacktivism. Discussing the practice in Pop Off’s first entry felt native to my overall ethos. The site itself is a direct rebuke against constructed social networks and barriered Internet existence. A full break from our current trajectory requires subversion of these so-called casual dynamics, transgressions that can come from programming or protest (or, best: both combined). The resulting zine is half-explanation and half-how-to. Readers are provided brief historical context as to the how and why of our moment, justified with specific examples of ways to rebuke technocracy. The first part resembles a TLDR of the second chapter, acting as an extension/introduction into more rigorous exploration. The second narrows in on the particular characteristics of our contemporary moment. I tried to reference touchpoints any range of viewers would recognize.
Pop Off will be a place for discussion about tech-infused sociopolitical issues. Given that this publication is digital and is political, there is no reason why not to have a category singularly devoted.
Political discourse is the most crucial feature of a gURL production. The first article focuses on cyberfeminism, a movement largely disparate from the gURLs. Although they were contemporaries, the groups moved asynchronously through the developing online space. The former has garnered its own encyclopedic archival project. The latter, as I have elaborated on in-depth, has been larger forgotten. Is this because the gURLs were young women discussing topics important to young women and thus considered less academically valuable? Uh, duh. While the thesis itself will hopefully increase their visibility in the feminist canon, a combination of the two branches for a TodaygURL audience can’t hurt. Their commonalities are more apparent than their dissimilarities. Especially now, as feminism on a general scale once again faces a drastic cultural backlash.
The term ‘cyberfeminism’ was originated by theorist Sadie Plant in 1994, although its core concepts date back a few years prior (2012: Consalvo). Donna Haraway’s aforementioned Cyborg Manifesto urged women to integrate with “informatics of domination”, disassembling and reassembling their sociocultural positions in “polymorphous ways” via computer systems (1991: Haraway, 163). Virtual reality could free women from physical gender binaries; new technologies could translate “a common language in which all resistance to instrumental control disappears” (164). Plant took the concept a step further by arguing that computers were essentially female given in part to its emergence from “the history of weaving, the process so often said to be the quintessence of women’s work. The loom is the vanguard of software development” (1995: 46). Since then, cyberfeminism has split into a multitude of offshoots, predominantly separated by their stance on binary gender theory. I am not interested in perpetuating mythology about male/female archetypes. What I am interested in is technological liberation; this, above all else, is what lies at the core of cyberfeminism.
gURL.com featured ‘Paper Doll Psychology’ on their site for at least a decade. Although it was subject to the same serialization/sanitization as the rest, the original column was incredibly subversive. I briefly cite it as an example in my first chapter. By the end of its lifespan, ‘Paper Doll Psychology’ was more focused on reaffirming "relentless self-scrutiny" through cheeky, celebrity-mobbed armchair therapy than acknowledging “being regarded…as a sight causes other psychological damage” (Gerrard 38). For my own paper doll, I tried to remedy this commodification through combining both approaches. Rather than mentally analyze the reader, the paper doll is intended as a call to action.
I hand-drew a pocket copy of Alysa Liu. Liu is a twenty-year-old figure skating phenomenon. After winning gold at the 2026 Winter Olympics, her notoriety exploded. Specifically, her public persona as an alternative, unapologetic young woman. Not only does Liu subvert the traditional expectations of her sport, but of her demographic identity. She wears her hair racoon-style, bleach streaks running up against a more natural dark. She speaks out against the restrictive expectations placed on women in her position. “Things gotta change, 100 percent. I think the whole system’s got to scrap it and start over,” Liu declared in a New York Times article, unabashed about her opinions (2026). Figure skating is notably restrictive and penalizing; as its new international spokesperson, Liu is drastically changing its cultural perception. Using her likeness aligns the paper doll with its later gURL iterations whilst maintaining a subversion of its traditionally commercial applications.