How did I make this website?

March 6, 2024

Step 1: Neocities #

Neocities is a cool project to revive the “Internet of old”, a continuation of free web hosting like Geocities was.

Many people write the pages by hand. It didn’t fit me, because I already had the short guides written in the Markdown format. I wanted something quick, but quick it wasn’t :/

Step 2: Hugo #

Hugo is a static site generator. You give it simple text files that are written in the same format like Reddit or Discord messages. It makes a website out of it.

Just follow Hugo’s quick start guide.

Step 3: Hugo Theme #

I looked at themes and chose the hugo-book. The design perfectly fits what I wanted, but the author doesn’t tell you how anything about this theme works. A lot of trial and error ensued, but you can look up the examples. Still, I wasted quite some time to get it working. Choose something else and more popular if you want fewer issues.

Step 4: Uploading #

After running hugo you have your website files ready in the public/ folder. I used the official neocities tool to upload these files to the website. I assume it’s possible to login on Neocities and just drop files there to upload.

Step 0: Privacy #

Neocities probably has to combat a lot of spam, so there are some roadblocks:

It doesn’t allow temporary e-mail addresses. To some extent, knowing what a DNS root is, helps. Anyway, I used it. But the list of e-mail addresses it uses to block is publicly available.
It blocks you from registration if you use a VPN or proxy IP. BlackBox in code, well it really is. You can probably find your way around.

I am not intending to post something bad here, I just want no strings attached. I am a good citizen, so why should I give up my data?