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Publishing on Neocities

To help you through this tutorial, we will start completely from scratch and show you how to create an account, upload your CYOA, and get it working.

Limits

Before committing to Neocities it's important that you understand its limitations in case it is not the right use case for you. If what you require falls outside of these limits, consider becoming a Neocities Supporter, or choosing another host.

Neocities's limits for a Free account are as follows:

  • 1 GB storage – Some CYOAs get as large as hundreds of megabytes if they aren't using external URLs
  • 200 GB bandwidth – How much traffic can visit your site (i.e., how much all visitors can download, including image files)

    Note

    This is a soft limit. Temporary surges are fine, [Neocities] won't take your site down automatically, and [they're] very flexible.

  • File Upload Type restrictions

    • You can only upload the following file types:

      • HTML (.html, .htm)
      • Image (.jpg, .png, .gif, .svg, .ico)
      • Markdown (.md, .markdown)
      • JavaScript (.js, .json, .geojson)
      • CSS (.css)
      • Text (.txt, .text, .csv, .tsv)
      • XML (.xml)
      • Web Fonts (.eot, .ttf, .woff, .woff2, .svg)
      Full list

      asc atom avif bin css csv dae eot epub geojson gif gltf gpg htm html ico jpeg jpg js json key kml knowl less manifest map markdown md mf mid midi mtl obj opml otf pdf pgp png rdf resolveHandle rss sass scss svg text tsv ttf txt webapp webmanifest webp woff woff2 xcf xml

    • More information is available here: https://neocities.org/site_files/allowed_types

  • Can only create a single website per account

    Note

    Creating multiple accounts isn't disallowed! Though it can be a pain to sign in and out

Using the Web

The easiest and most beginner-friendly way is to sign up and upload your site through Neocities in the browser.

First thing's first, navigate to the website: https://neocities.org/

You should see this screen:

Now sign up with your credentials, bearing in mind that your Username will be your subdomain. So if your username was "epicradcool", your site would be hosted at https://epicradcool.neocities.org/.

You will be asked to verify your email, make sure you do that.

Now you will come upon this page:

If you wanted to learn about HTML, feel free to peruse that tutorial. When you're done, come back to this page and continue where you left off.

Next, click Go to the Dashboard >>.

The Dashboard

The Dashboard is a place you will quickly become very familiar with. It is where you will edit, upload, and update the files containing your CYOA.

This is the Dashboard:

You are now in your root directory. This is the very top of your website. Any files you place in this folder is accessible by going to https://your-site.neocities.org/a_file.png.

As you can see from the image, you can create new files and folders by pressing the button. That's not what we're interested in; we're not looking to create files or folders (at least, not at this point in the tutorial), we're looking to upload our already created project.json.

Uploading your files

There are two ways you can upload from the browser:

  1. Press the Upload button – This cannot handle uploading files AND folders
  2. Drag and drop the files in

Now we're going to upload our files. First, upload your project.json:

Next, upload the Viewer here. This is the code that actually interprets your project.json and displays it to players.

Warning

Neocities is tricky in that it can only upload one directory at a time. You will have to check that both the css/ and js/ folders are there, and that all of the files are contained in them.

Also check that index.html was replaced if it previously existed.

After that, you're done! View your CYOA live at the link at the top of your Dashboard. Easy, right?

Using the CLI

Note

This is for more intermediate to advanced users who are familiar with the command line. You can learn, of course, but it may be difficult to begin with.

Please see the relevant information here: https://neocities.org/cli

Migrating from Neocities

At the bottom of the Dashboard there is a button entitled Download entire site. Use that to, well, download your site.


Last update: July 25, 2023
Created: June 17, 2023
Authors: upasadena

Comments

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