Playing With Static Sites
Earlier this week I read a blog post about the Indieweb; it was on a blog by Mike Grindle that I believe is hosted on Neocities.1 The general gist of it, if you don't want to click through, is that there's a subset of people online that are moving away from centralized social media (Twitter, Facebook, Reddit) and BACK to hosting their own material on the web.2
I don't know how I stumbled upon this next link, because I don't see it in Grindle's blog post, but I discovered a three-year-old guide to setting up a static site blog on Neocities:
The Actual Guide to Being Really Annoying On the Internet
I could have done with a little bit of toned down snark, but it made for a fun guide to read through. Some of the details are slightly out of date3, but I got it to work and set up a local WordPress blog on my computer. I'm no stranger to setting up local servers, thought it's been several years since the last time I did.
The end result was a sort of simple mirror to this blog: https://lwgrs.neocities.org. It was a bumpy road getting there; at one point my site got deactivated (according to Neocities' TOS, they can do so at any time for no reason)4, but a quick support email got me back up and running again.
At this point, I honestly don't know what I'm going to do with this site. It's pretty much a plaything; the downside to setting up a static site like this is that the blog lives on a single computer. I guess in a way that's not a bad thing. It could help me be a little bit more "intentional" when writing a blog post when I can't upload it right away. A little more thoughtful, I guess.
In the long term? I don't mind this as an option for creating my own space apart from a centralized place like even WordPress.com. Although Grindle's Indieweb essay doesn't negate the idea of using a blogging platform for that purpose, he suggests that it's a better idea to have your own domain name and server. I've done that, and I don't really want to go that route again. Not worth the hassle (for me).
In the meantime, playing around with this static site concept and uploading via API is kind of fun, so I'm going to see what else I can do with it.
One last link: There are a ton of cool things on Neocities (seriously...check it out) but here's a cool page my friend put together: https://trish.neocities.org
...I think that's enough links in one paragraph.↩
Okay, one more. To be honest I'm also adding these footnotes because I'm using markdown, and I can.↩
For example, WP2Static doesn't work exactly the same and doesn't show up as a searchable plugin. So I found "Simply Static" - it works well.↩
See in particular the section "At-Will Termination"↩