[HN Gopher] Neocities - Developers API
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Neocities - Developers API
Author : ulrischa
Score : 66 points
Date : 2023-12-24 09:56 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (neocities.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (neocities.org)
| ulrischa wrote:
| I do not know of other hosting providers that offer a REST API
| for Upload/Delete
| gkbrk wrote:
| BunnyCDN, DigitalOcean and AWS all offer REST APIs to
| Upload/Delete pages.
| ulrischa wrote:
| But they are not simple Webhosting providers
| gkbrk wrote:
| How is BunnyCDN not simple? You register, you top-up some
| money, you drag and drop your files on the web UI and it's
| live.
|
| They give you a free subdomain with HTTPS (Let's Encrypt).
| If you want, you can bring your own domain too.
| dragontamer wrote:
| I've found that REST Upload/Delete feels worse than FTP, or
| other similar protocols with like 45+ years of tool
| development.
|
| There was once a HTTP standard called WebDav IIRC but it
| seems rarely implemented. Why haven't these sites tried that
| direction if they wanted HTTP-Backed security measures?
|
| Upload/Delete as REST is usable though.
| cxr wrote:
| Neocities has WebDAV support, but it's limited to paid
| subscribers only (it's billed mainly as a way for you to
| "mount your Neocities [site]" as a virtual drive), and it's
| got a lot of the same annoyances that afflicts more or less
| every REST and quasi-REST service (where you have to tickle
| some URL over here in order to effect some resource over
| there).
| johnhenry wrote:
| I became a paid subscriber specifically to use their
| WebDAV features. I almost immediately unsubscribed as, at
| the time, I could not find a viable WebDAV client. I
| simply don't believe that this entire ecosystem supports
| it.
| mxuribe wrote:
| > ...There was once a HTTP standard called WebDav IIRC but
| it seems rarely implemented...
|
| WebDAV is still a valid thing, and used quite more often
| than most people know. Its not known because it lives
| deeply embedded within apps and systems, and not something
| that is often visible to users. Case in point, a little
| thing called Google Drive makes use of WebDAV, so does
| NextCloud, etc.
|
| WebDAV's not dead yet! (With apologies to Monty Python. ;-)
| cxr wrote:
| Fairly sure these docs are out of date wrt to the behavior of
| file extensions. Kyle infamously flipped an nginx switch last
| year to strip .html file extensions to give sites "clean URLs"
| (so if you have, for example, "/cyberspace/archive-the-web.html",
| it will give a 301 redirect to "/cyberspace/archive-the-web"),
| which is described in the latest Neocities blog post and
| unfortunately breaks the invariants that are expected by scripts
| and tools aimed at working with static sites.
|
| (And, of course, as it generally goes without saying when someone
| labels something a "REST API", this is not REST, but that's a
| different topic.)
| froggertoaster wrote:
| > this is not REST
|
| I feel like almost every API could have this footnote.
| Kiro wrote:
| What makes most APIs not REST?
| woodruffw wrote:
| When people are being pedantic, "REST" refers specifically
| to a set of architectural guidelines for application and
| API design, including things like statelessness and
| HATEOAS[1]. Most "REST" APIs don't adhere to these, and are
| just endpoints for shoving JSON around (sometimes with
| idiomatic HTTP verbs).
|
| But this is pedantry. REST has become a generic term for
| "shoving JSON around," for better or worse.
|
| [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HATEOAS
| giancarlostoro wrote:
| In the case of this one you have a POST to delete and a
| POST to upload. Instead of POST, PUT, and DELETE requests.
| Thats just from a quick glance.
| stonogo wrote:
| Most of them fail to meet one of the requirements in the
| "uniform interface" section; generally, in my experience,
| either "self-descriptive messages" or "HATEOAS".
| rco8786 wrote:
| REST is the "agile" of API design. Everyone says they do
| it, but everyone does it a little differently, and nobody
| adheres to the actual definition (because the actual
| definition is far too prescriptive to be fully applicable
| in reality)
| cxr wrote:
| What is REST?
| jjgreen wrote:
| It's the think that killed SOAP (and thank goodness it
| did).
| jon-wood wrote:
| Getting into deep pedantry here but I'm amused by the
| suggestion that the following is "too prescriptive":
|
| Individuals and interactions over processes and tools
|
| Working software over comprehensive documentation
|
| Customer collaboration over contract negotiation
|
| Responding to change over following a plan
|
| That is, while there is value in the items on the right,
| we value the items on the left more.
| ksjskskskkk wrote:
| how do you deal with id changes/renames in actual rest?
| diggan wrote:
| Have an internal ID and one "public" ID. The public one can
| be mutated with PUT/PATCH calls that are idempotent, the
| internal ID never ever changes.
| ulrischa wrote:
| Seems like neocities is not very popular. Are there any other
| good free alternatives with similar features - except from git
| based solutions?
| paulddraper wrote:
| Why the git exclusion?
| skrebbel wrote:
| You weren't responding to me, but my guess it's because git
| is 10x harder to learn than basic HTML and CSS.
| hhh wrote:
| I wouldn't consider basic git usage 10x that for most
| people
| skrebbel wrote:
| You can learn enough HTML to make a website without even
| properly understanding what files and directories are,
| let alone how to use a terminal.
|
| And with Neocities, you also don't need to understand
| what it means for files to be "local" or "on a server"
| because you just get a textarea that you can type your
| HTML into. (until you get to stuff like using your own
| images that is)
|
| To do "basic git usage" you need to pretty deeply grok
| all of that before you can even begin to learn git
| itself. Just to publish a website!
| yallpendantools wrote:
| Git and HTML both deal with the (let's face it)
| complicated data structure we all know as trees.
|
| The difference: You can fuck up an HTML tree and most
| browsers can still display your page[1], you can still
| get your message across. You fuck up a git history tree
| and you can somehow summon Cthulhu.
|
| Not to mention, even if you can manage to stay away from
| branch confusion, just dealing with diffs is already a
| huge barrier for newbies.
|
| [1] See "Where HTML 'beats' C" - Computerphile
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-csXdj4WVwA
| ulrischa wrote:
| What I like is the possibility to send a file to the API from
| a single board computer. Just a http call - no need to
| install git or webdav or ftp
| surprisetalk wrote:
| I've been maintaining a list on the sidebar here:
|
| [1] https://potato.cheap
|
| The following are also cool projects, but not included in my
| "cheap" web list due to too much javascript:
|
| [2] https://univer.se
|
| [3] https://mmm.page
| marginalia_nu wrote:
| Neocities is popular but only within a particular niche.
| There's a strikingly consistent topic and vibe among neocities-
| hosted sites compared to e.g. squarespace.
|
| Neocities (sans neocities.org-subdomains):
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=as%3Aneocities+-si...
|
| c.f. Squarespace:
|
| https://search.marginalia.nu/search?query=as%3Asquarespace&p...
|
| (disclosure: I built this search engine)
| victorbjorklund wrote:
| Netlify doesnt require git. You can also just upload a folder.
| pard68 wrote:
| I paid for Neocites but had to cancel and move elsewhere
| (Cloudflare atm) because it wasn't always updating files. I
| forget the exact issue but I went to report it on their Github
| and found a one or two year old issue opened already with no dev
| response, so I moved on.
| grimgrin wrote:
| I tossed em $100 of btc a while back cuz it gave you supporter
| access for life. Worth it even if you are the self hosted type.
| Imo
|
| I've spun up so many one offs
| makeworld wrote:
| What makes it good even for self-hosters? I have a lot of
| respect for Neocities but haven't used it since I have a VPS.
| shp0ngle wrote:
| I never understood the appeal of neocities. What's the upside vs
| just dumping it on github pages?
| popcar2 wrote:
| It's more of a platform than just a website dumping ground. You
| can tag your site and browse other people's websites, and most
| people on neocities have the same goal of making websites that
| are more old-school and less modern.
|
| https://neocities.org/browse
| mxuribe wrote:
| I'm not a user of neocities, but I know plenty of people who do
| use it..and they all use it for reasons having to do with
| principles as well as fun, and less so about technology. The
| people i know who use neocities might consider github and other
| similar offerings as the continued centralization of all the
| things, where neocities would be considered "the alternative".
| Of course, if enough users also populate neocities and github,
| then we have less decentralization, and more of a duopoly...but
| still the folks i know who use it, just think of neocities as
| the scrappy offering alternative to the "big powers" - so not
| just against github but also other big web hosting powerrs who
| behave more centralized. In addition, and beyond the principles
| aspect, they often like neocities because its a bit nostalgic
| back when the web was weird, quirky, and more fun - and not so
| bland and corporate-like as it often seems to be these days.
| Final note, the people - that i know - that are neocities users
| are actually quite tech-savvy enough to use github, so its not
| that they lack the competency to use github, its just that they
| *choose* not to.
| skrebbel wrote:
| Not having to learn Git to make a website, for one. Both my
| kids have a neocities website, github pages has an enormous
| barrier to entry compared to it.
|
| Just google around, read some w3schools, type it into a
| textarea at neocities and woa, your own site.
|
| Obviously this is only interesting for relatively nerdy types,
| but i don't at all understand all the "why don't people just
| <twenty cumbersome steps and tools>" comments that are here
| currently.
|
| I know no place that makes having your own, self-built website,
| easier. And it's free!
| yallpendantools wrote:
| THIS! I've been maintaining a Neocities website for almost
| three years now. While, being a software engineer at heart, I
| still ultimately versioned the offline copy of my website via
| Git(lab), it's liberating to not have to wrestle with a git
| workflow just so I can hide my works-in-progress.
|
| Also, in my case, a matter of branding. While I'm not trying
| to promote my content (a bunch of short stories and
| illustrations) so heavily, it just felt _wrong_ for them to
| reside in Github /Gitlab subdomain. The closest I would've
| considered Git* pages is if I was doing sci-fi stories and
| that is _still_ a "maybe". At the time I started my project,
| I was also worried I might run afoul of some content policy
| these Git platforms might have given that my website is not
| exactly for their demographic.
| creatonez wrote:
| With Cloudflare pages, you can upload a .zip file via the web
| interface and that becomes your website. No git required.
| blueflow wrote:
| Neocities is not about to lock out a segment of the users by
| requiring 2FA.
|
| https://docs.github.com/en/authentication/securing-your-acco...
| josephcsible wrote:
| Who is this going to lock out? Aren't TOTP apps available for
| every platform that can access GitHub?
| blueflow wrote:
| Everyone not willing to carry around a device with them
| that can run arbitrary apps.
| josephcsible wrote:
| My point is, don't you already have a device that can run
| a TOTP app, namely the one you're using to access GitHub?
| You don't need a separate one. For example, KeePassXC can
| generate the codes on Windows, macOS, and Linux.
| 123yawaworht456 wrote:
| github now engages in same bullshit that all big platform do
| with gaslighting/shadowbanning upon account creation. if it
| doesn't like you, for any reason or no reason at all, it
| doesn't actually prevent you from signing up, but your account
| is blacklisted and severely limited. in particular, your github
| pages won't work - you can do all the steps, but it never comes
| online, and it won't tell you shit.
| 101008 wrote:
| Is there market for a Neocities or alternatives? I feel people
| who still believe in websites want to build them themselves and
| host them in a CDN. It is not (unfortauntely) the 90s or 2000s
| anymore, when people and teens wanted to have their own website.
| Now they want to have their own TikTok, Instagram and YouTube
| channel.
| vasco wrote:
| > Neocities is a social network of 700,800 web sites
| echelon wrote:
| > It is not (unfortauntely) the 90s or 2000s anymore, when
| people and teens wanted to have their own website. Now they
| want to have their own TikTok, Instagram and YouTube channel.
|
| And in another generation, it'll be something else.
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(page generated 2023-12-25 23:01 UTC)