Now that I’ve settled into my new Neocities home I’ve been poking around to see how things work and what I can do with my space. I had to fix some minor issues with my Jekyll templates (specifying character encoding and adding file extensions to the links, which is likely best practice anyway).
Neocities integrates social and sharing mechanisms. Each site profile includes the view count, follower list, comments, and sharing links, as well as feeds and tags to sort and find sites. It’s a more modern version of the webrings and guestbooks many personal silo sites utilized years ago.
I deliberately omitted all of these types of features when I built the page for GitHub. Partly because I wanted to be left alone (sorry, I’m grumpy and disaffected right now) and partly because the idea of readership at this early stage made me a little anxious. Is that funny? I can’t really explain it, to be honest.
You can mostly avoid these features by changing your email notification settings and visiting your dashboard directly. The view count will still be there. The alternative to the dash is the command line.
Python is my preferred language, so I was happy to find a Neocities Python API. It is documented, but it took a few tries to get the path format right so here’s a working example.
import neocities
from os import getcwd
nc = neocities.NeoCities('sitename', 'password')
nc.upload(('./test_folder/test_upload.html', getcwd() + '\\' + 'test.html'))