Owlrooster

Owlrooster

@Owlrooster

Hoot Hoot Gazooks

Any pronouns (bonus points for creativity).

Queer polymorph (ΘΔ) trying to make the most of internet time and enjoy life where it matters. Adult enough to do taxes.

My writing goes on my website; I'm here to enjoy what others make, pass along what I like, and occasionally leave a comment. Think of me as the creature in your closet giving you a thumbs-up out of the corner of your eye.

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Website
owlsroost.xyz/
Profile picture credit
cohost.org/bachelorsoft
Owlrooster
@Owlrooster
vogon
@vogon
invis
@invis
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fruitbat
@fruitbat

you could also join a tilde! theres tons of them out there and it does give u a free homepage!
they're very fun and u learn some basic linux or bsd which is nice

jasm1nii
@jasm1nii
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vogon
@vogon

one note about this thread, which is very good and I approve of in general

I don't even know if it's profitable. Hopefully it is? $1,000/mo isn't that much in the grand scheme of things, so long as there's at least a few hundred Neocities Supporter subscribers.

kyle lives in palo alto, CA according to linkedin1, where the median rent is $3,250 a month -- so, to keep him from being rent-burdened, he would need to be making at least $9,000 a month -- and market salary for a software developer is approaching $200k. the single largest contributor to the expenses of a software company is pretty much always paying for people to have shelter, food, and (in the US) healthcare -- without giving anything away that I think I need to talk to other members of @staff before disclosing, all of our expenses other than salary add up to less than one employee, and we're working a lot (like 50%) cheaper than market salary.

this is actually good news for the indie web! compute resources and bandwidth are cheap; the problem is connecting people with ideas that they want to publish, with a web server to publish them on. (and, unfortunately, because of this, there's plenty of money to be made keeping that gate.)

  1. linkedin also lists him as a software engineer at Protocol Labs, a cryptocurrency startup which works on IPFS and Filecoin, so he may just be doing neocities as a side gig, which is even more amazing. and I'm pretty sure this is the right kyle, since one of the posts linked on his personal web site is about bringing neocities to IPFS.

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in reply to @invis's post:

Jama
@Jama

incredibly naive question: Is there a way to host a website off your own machine instead of needing some remote server, or does not that not put it "on the internet" for people outside your network to access?

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loni
@loni

IANAWebmaster, its feasible, ive tried to do it, but practical...hardly, its possible to do it by port forwarding yourself, cooperating with a domain registrar, setting up the server software on your end, etc etc
i have friends whove done it, but its a lot of work

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flurry
@flurry

You (usually) can, in a technical sense! Back In The Day(tm) I hosted a website off an old laptop using a few port forwards on my router and a Dynamic DNS service. You still need some technical know-how to at least understand what to do with those terms, but it's possible.

In a more general sense, hosting off your own Internet connection can be a privacy and security concern. GeoIP services make it easy to get a very rough idea of where you are maybe—this is flakier and more vague than people make it out to be, but it can sometimes be enough. And it can give attackers a potential way into your home network if something's not configured right. The likelihood of either those things happening of course is different from person to person, but it's always worth considering.

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ann-arcana
@ann-arcana

ISPs hate it. They often actively block the necessary ports unless you pony up for a business rate, which will mean paying way more for a fraction of the bandwidth. I've tried multiple times before but I've given up every time, 'cause even with dyndns it's flaky as hell.

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fruitbat
@fruitbat

i think you should do it if it's fun for you! i like to do it and it's not THAT hard to learn if u know how to use linux already :)

my isp doesn't care also, but i think american isps are worse lol

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flurry
@flurry

I'd love to do something like this, and I feel like I'd have the know-how to get something off the ground, but moderation and legal requirements (okay, I do have a fax machine, but not for DMCA requests!?) are the biggest issues for me. I can't imagine how one person is able to moderate all of Neocities.

A compromise could be something with the ease of Neocities, but the "scale" of a tilde box. Which isn't nothing! But a "roll your own mini web service" that isn't cPanel would be something I'd be more willing to run, and I imagine less intimidating for others too.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

is the neocities editor actually... good?

or do people just write stuff and then drag it into neocities? If this one, you can do that with most hosting websites for cheap, or probably easily make a front-end to do it on something like a hetzner cloud vps that you can upgrade as you go.

I like your idea of the editor, but it might be one level of abstraction too low for the entry level webdev -- if someone can know html, they can hack their way to copying a template at least.

Consider: two pane view, one side is the html/css editor, the other is the web page, but also WYSIWYG editor. Both update the other, live previews of each other.

I've been thinking a lot about how much obsidian having live preview has made my markdown much faster because it lets you see your mistakes/results instantly.

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soll
@soll

as a neocities user, i personally prefer using an editor like atom, and only use the neocities editor for small fixes / adjustments on pages i've already published. i used it more frequently in the beginning but the font is so small that even notepad is better (despite the editor's syntax highlighting being handy)

but damn i've been dreaming of a html/css and wysiwyg hybrid ever since i started using figma for work, because writing markup is often faster than editing visually, and i'm a bit surprised there isn't really anything like this out there yet. maybe it's more technically complex than it seems. the classes and ids might become pretty unwieldy too, if inspect elementing generated sites has ever told me anything

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CosmicRot
@CosmicRot

The neocities editor is basically just.. nothing but text so the only thing nice about it is the color coding probably... but people [myself included] don't want to use most hosting services because neocities has a social aspect to it to make browsing websites easier, you can leave comments on people's profiles/websites, and even their edits and stuff, and you can talk to or browse through an editing feed almost.. I haven't seen anything else that includes some kind of social features like that.

I do like 90% of my editing for my neocities just straight up in a codepen page that I don't save to at all and then save the files to my computer and neocities lmao. I just go back through to check it actually works proper once I save it on neocities and then do inspect element editing if I need to then re-write some stuff.
most website/code editors i've tried don't have literal live editing and I have to constantly hit save/view/run of some kind, or open up a browser, so codepen while i'm pretty sure it's not meant at all for the scope i've been using it for especially cause I'm NEVER saving stuff in their editor lol.. it's just the easiest cause every time you type it updates.

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NireBryce
@NireBryce

the social features are probably provided by another package, and you could probably copy those and just have them be part of the template for the other thing, though auto-configuring that for others using it would take some work.

and while I haven't used it in ages, a lot of IDEs have live preview plugins, for example: https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=ms-vscode.live-server

I think this one even allows hot-reload.

and to a certain extent, even obsidian does, though iirc by default without plugins it only renders things markdown would.

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CosmicRot
@CosmicRot

i appreciate the link but like i'm good just using codepen cause i don't wanna have to install anything.
idk anything about this one but a lot of editors say they have live previews but they require extra effort for it to be actually live [like installing plugins] or require me to have multiple windows open[the editor, the browser, etc] to see it actually live so i'm not looking for anything different or 'better'

also yeah like idk how the social thing works i was just commenting on the fact that that's a big reason people like neocities over hosting stuff themselves [and the whole it being free thing ontop of having social features, i imagine having the social features would cost a decent chunk of money to make it as easily connected and constantly running]

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sirocyl
@sirocyl

as far as WYSIWYG editors go, what I want is somewhat like codepen, but not as heavy - the most barebones thing, with these features and functions:

  • left pane is code, right pane is preview, resizable separator
  • changes done to the left pane copy the code into a frame in the right pane and renders it, with one change: every tag is contenteditable
  • text changes can therefore be done on the right pane, and will reflect in like in the code
  • a few shortcuts sit on a toolbar above the html code editor, for quickly dropping in common tags; these shortcuts can be customized (so as to add specific common tags, classes, attributes and values)
  • the left pane can be split to show a single CSS window, if there's a style tag/link-rel-stylesheet in the main document
    • the style editor also updates the live view automatically
    • the style editor toolbar will have a picker for ID, class or tag selectors, taken from the HTML
    • the style editor toolbar will also have shortcut buttons like the HTML ones

the whole thing is implemented using the absolute minimum of CSS, HTML and JS necessary. nothing minified, nothing crunched, the editor is itself a canvas for the user to work in.

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bodycompany
@bodycompany

(Jumping in because I saw someone on Mastodon linked to this, sorry!)

The title of this filled me with anxiety, but you're right. I jumped into Neocities as a newb whose only knowledge was coding Neopets pages in high school, and over a year later I'm figuring out how to code offline and am considering making my offline copy of my site a partitioned drive so I can view images offline and jump hosts if needed. That said, I'm slightly optimistic that Neocities won't go down anytime soon. It's technically been around for a decade even though I only heard of it a few years ago, and Kyle Drake has a bunch of other projects still online. A spinoff called Nekoweb has been made and the userbase skews super young but it's a start for similar hosts of its kind. It is kind of sad how Neocities is the only accessible option for both beginners and experienced owners, though... I remember in the 2000s there were at least 5 free hosts to choose from. Before I discovered Neocities I thought you had to pay to have a domain or have a watermark free site like Weebly. It really is a game changer despite its flaws.

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in reply to @fruitbat's post:

in reply to @jasm1nii's post:

mellodillo
@mellodillo

This gave me a lot to consider...the suggestion of tildes caught my attention, but I doubt any of them would care for me dumping dozens of image files onto their server so I can host my webcomic there...so Neocities is probably my only reliable option outside of ponying up for an actual webhost. And even then I'd need to pay significantly more for a host that'll allow me to have art that contains even an inkling of adult content, since most of the hosts on the lower end of the price spectrum either have a very vague definition of what is considered "adult content" or just disallow it outright in their ToS. Neocities is so nice because they allow you to run an 18+ website, and at worst you're only paying 5 bucks a month if you upgrade.

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