Original post is here: eklausmeier.goip.de
I wrote about hosting static sites on various platforms:
- Hosting Static Content with surge.sh
- Hosting Static Content with now.sh, now.sh renamed themself to vercel.app
- Hosting Static Content with netlify.app
- Hosting Static Content with Cloudflare
This short post documents how to upload static content to Neocities. A Wiki article on Neocities is here. Neocities currently hosts more than 600,000 websites, as of July 2023. There are two plans in Neocities: a free one with 1 GB of storage and 200MB of bandwidth. A paid one with 50 GB storage and bandwith of 3,000 GB, see supporter.
For the installation process see The Neocities CLI. Certain file types are not allowed in Neocities, see Currently Allowed File Types. For example, you cannot upload C program texts or mp4-files, see below for an example in the log-output.
1. Ruby. First install Ruby, if you haven't done so before.
1pacman -S ruby
This will install roughly 25 MB including a number of dependencies.
Then install neocities Ruby script via
1gem install neocities
This will install the Ruby neocities script in ~/.local/share/gem/ruby/3.0.0/bin.
The neocities command line provides below subcommands:
1 |\---/|
2 | ~_O | Neocities
3 \_o_/
4
5 Subcommands:
6 push Recursively upload a local directory to your site
7 upload Upload individual files to your Neocities site
8 delete Delete files from your Neocities site
9 list List files from your Neocities site
10 info Information and stats for your site
11 logout Remove the site api key from the config
12 version Unceremoniously display version and self destruct
13 pizza Order a free pizza
2. Login. The first time you access Neocities you are asked for sitename and password. The api key for your site is stored in ~/.config/neocities/config. For example, the first time you issue
1neocities list /
you will be prompted for your credentials.
3. Upload. Assume all your files are located in /tmp/build including images, PDFs, JavaScript and CSS, then run
1$ cd /tmp/build
2$ time neocities push .
3 . . .
4Uploading pdf/mb3_d6-4-report-on-application-tuning-and-optimization-on-arm-platform.pdf ... SUCCESS
5Uploading pdf/md4c.c ...
6ERROR: pdf/md4c.c is not a valid file type (or contains not allowed content) for this site, files have not been uploaded (invalid_file_type)
7Uploading pdf/meijaard2007.pdf ... SUCCESS
8Uploading pdf/ms-oxoab.pdf ... SUCCESS
9Uploading pdf/peerj-preprints-826.pdf ... SUCCESS
10Uploading pdf/sc11-unrolling-parallel-loops.pdf ... SUCCESS
11Uploading pdf/shuttle_primary_computer_system.pdf ... SUCCESS
12Uploading sitemap.html ... SUCCESS
13Uploading sitemap.xml ... SUCCESS
14 real 1184.54s
15 user 4.18s
16 sys 0
17 swapped 0
18 total space 0
So uploading my entire website excluding content from Koehntopp, Dr. Vonhoff, Paternoster, Mobility, and Dr.-Ing. Humpich took almost 20 minutes. There is no parallelism in uploading the data. It takes almost 3 minutes to check whether all files are transferred, without actually transferring anything.
Uploading a single file goes like this:
1$ neocities upload index.html
2Uploading index.html to /index.html ...
3SUCCESS: your file(s) have been successfully uploaded
It seems you cannot upload a symbolic link. My blog uses a couple of symbolic links, some for correcting misspellings, some for providing older content which has moved in the meantime.
4. Statistics. You can inquire usage statistics with the info subcommand.
1$ neocities info eklausmeier
2sitename eklausmeier
3views 408
4hits 485
5created_at 2019-09-28 11:25:17 +0200
6last_updated 2019-09-28 19:02:34 +0200
7domain
8tags ["computer", "math", "programming"]
9latest_ipfs_hash
My Neocities account was created in September 2019, and since then it was viewed 400-times. That is no wonder, as it only contained a single index.html, which was uninteresting.
Stats on a Neocities account can be viewed at eklausmeier. Anyone can see these stats. There is no further information what these stats include, so I assume that they also include access from bots. As we know from Filtering Bots and Crawlers from Access.log 90% of the accesses are bots.