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.