Category: a comprehensive guide to being really annoying on the internet

This is the second part of ‘a comprehensive guide to being really annoying on the internet’, an attempt to explain how this blog works. This is mainly just a technical explanation so I’d recommend reading the first part before getting mad at how boring this is.

The Basics

This website is hosted on Neocities, a free Webhosting service for cool internet people. Neocities is a static hosting service, essentially meaning that you’re only able to upload websites that consist of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. In normal person terms this essentially just means that you’re unable to directly run a typical content management system (or CMS) such as WordPress or Ghost, leading to the necessity of this blog post. I ended up choosing Neocities for three reasons – it offers a respectable free tier, it has a massive in-built community of scarily friendly people, and it’s currently really easy to claim a relatively short subdomain. If you have the money to spend on upgrading beyond the free tier you can use your own domain, but I’m always broke. By default you’re given 1GB of storage space, which seems relatively small until you realize how tiny static websites end up being (this blog is currently 13.7mb, which is probably quite bloated by Neocities standards). In order to set up a blog using Neocities you’re only really given two options – either code something by hand using HTML and CSS or use a piece of software called a static site generator. A static site generator essentially builds your website for you, collecting all of your posts and compiling them into a bunch of HTML and CSS files. This differs from typical CMSes as the whole website is generated at once as opposed to on-demand, making your blog significantly faster and lighter (which is why Neocities can let people host their sites for free). Typical examples of static site generators would be Jekyll or Hugo – both of which I’m too dense to be able to use properly.

The following was intended as the first half of a Thursday post in which I planned on combining a narcissistic spiel about my past experiences writing online with a little how-to guide explaining how my Neocities page worked. I nearly had said post finished to go up on time, but my Notion client decided to shit the bed – leading to me losing half of the original post, giving up on the concept, and just lazily copy/pasting an unreleased zine piece minutes before my deadline. Due to the length of this recreation I’ve been working on, I decided to split it into two posts – with this one serving as the narcissistic spiel and next week’s one serving as the actual tutorial. Apologies in advance!

A few years back I started writing a really embarrassing zine for reasons that still elude me. At the time I was obsessed with this vague idea of forming some form of community or collective, essentially treating my local arts scene like every socialist sect treats the notion of a mass party – I just assumed that by making things people would eventually follow, magically seeking me out due to how correct I was about everything. This (unsurprisingly) went nowhere and nobody ended up reading the final product, which was probably a good thing in hindsight – I feel like someone will dig it up at some stage in the future to discredit my opinions on music and that’s perfectly understandable. I’ve been thinking about that era of my life scarily frequently as of late, mainly due to the final scramble to get the thing out before the end of the year. I’d asked a friend to help me set up a small website for the collective, hoping that working together on this would lead to collaborating on some larger projects at some stage in the future. The friend said they’d put something together, did out a “framework” (read: one CSS stylesheet), and then completely forgot about it due to (understandably) having better things to be doing. This meant that the last week of December was spent frantically trying to work out how to use CSS and trying to secure cheap (if not free) hosting – those seven days were spent solely on Google and I’m oddly nostalgic for that.