we are officially on Neocities!!

This is so exciting. This site is now officially hosted on Neocities.org, one of the new main hosting hubs for the personal web. I’m so glad to be apart of Neocities as a supporter and user.

I changed to Neocities because I really love the minimal social media aspect of it. I’ve been feeling isolated on my little corner, and despite participating in incredible online communities like the 32-Bit Cafe, I wanted to improve my site’s discoverability. Plus, I want to follow sites I love that are hosted there too!

I’m so pleased with how it handles Astro. I’m using the Neocities CLI to push the dist directory to my site folder. It’s sooo easy to update and ugh, I love this workflow.

issues I had

Ugh, i fucking hate ruby on os x. I had so many issues with simply installing the CLI tool. I had to:

  1. Install rvm and deal with SO many weird SSL issues
  2. Finally get rvm to work, install many versions of ruby
  3. Update gem, fine
  4. SSL STILL NOT WORKING
  5. Then finally find this GitHub issue that I barely understand
  6. WEEEEEEE it works

going forward

My only lingering concern is to see if the Neocities activity algorithm is smart enough to show diffs correctly. Like, will Neocities report to my followers’ activity dashboards that I’ve updated every page on my site every time I use neocities push to update the entire dist directory? I’m guessing it will have diffs, but we’ll see. Either way, that’s not a big deal at all. I’ll see when I upload this post! weeeeeee

my updated workflow

Now, my workflow looks like this:

  1. Edit local copy of my site
    • This is connected to my remote private git repository, and completely managed with git for version control
    • So basically, before editing, create feature branch (or edit on main if I’m just making a new blog post or something)
  2. Use Astro’s dev server for previewing/etc
  3. Once satisfied, commit changes to git
  4. Merge in feature branch to main if applicable, push to remote
  5. Run npm run build to update my dist folder
  6. cd into dist, run neocities push
  7. Done ✨

I could set up some sort of CI/CD pipeline, but it’s not important and I don’t care to. This works for me and is quite enjoyable!

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