Considering Leaving Neocities
I really have been enjoying the barebones approach of Neocities. The ability to sit here and work with the HTML has been a godsend to me and has re-invigorated my love of building websites. Something that I haven't really dealt with in a very long time for real. Early with Wordpress I would heavily modify it to do what I wanted, but after several updates of their updates breaking my site, I kinda gave up and just use base themes.
Here, I know, for the most part, that this is my site and I can do what I want and it won't get broken by some random update, and it's not overly complicated because of the thousands of scripts needed to run wordpress that you have to navigate around in order to get your site working.
There's a couple major problems I have. The first is probably the biggest. I've been struggling with comments. I've tried several alternatives. I was pretty ecxited by Virtual Observer's solution which allowed me to store my own comment system and someone had even created some basic moderation tools for it. It wasn't much but it did what I needed it to do. The only problem is she quit on it, and it seems like Neocities did too. She did note shortly before she left that old sites work fine, but new sites need supporter. I am a supporter and it doesn't submit for me so I had to ditch it. I am currently switching to HTML Commentbox which seems really good as well, but I have a consistent nagging feeling in the back of my head of "what happens if they start requiring payment?" or "What if they go out of business?" and in either case, all my comments are lost because I have to switch to a new system.
Ironically, I have considered paying for hosting for something like phpbb. I say ironically because, somehow I am not willing to pay for my own hosting, but apparently not for a more professional solution. I think it is partly control, but it's also price. Like most of these services are around $5 a month for a comment box. A commment box?!?!? I can buy hosting for around $6 a month and host my own website, host a forum, host images, and you want almost the same for just a comment box? Modern subscription culture is crazy.
I keep going back to the idea of doing my RPG Playing blog on Blogger though. I actually really like blogger. It does everything I want, has some customization and is super simple. I think I could even build my somewhat complex design from RPG Playing blog on it, it'll just take more work. The problem is that it's Google. I used to love Google, but lately I've been wanting to get out of their ecosystem. They are doing too much distasteful stuff for me. There's also a side problem of, they really don't update blogger often, it's a system that's been around forever and kinda looks like it too. Their official blogger blog ended with COVID it looks like (last blog on 5-20-20), and that update was "give the new blogger a spin". On the surface that seems positive, they had a big update which changed the interface some. But it has been nearly 5 years now and whiLe I know they have put out some other updates since then and just not talked about it, it feels worrisome to me. It smells like Animal Crossing putting out one last big update before shutting down. And Google has a habit of killing popular apps if they just don't make a ton of money off it. They used to have a Reader app that everyone loved, no longer around because it wasn't profitable. There's tons of great services like this that had the same fate. With blogging not as popular as it once was, I do worry that blogger will suffer this fate eventually and at this point may just be on autopilot until that fate arrives. Still, I am fairly confident that if they did shut it down, they'd give time to download everything to migrate elsewhere...
Idk. I may be over-reacting. I am just frustrated by the difficulty in dealing with the comment box. No option seems great here, honestly same for guest books. So few people make websites anymore that even though storage is super cheap now compared to before, companies still can't make money off of simple services that have been around for 30 years. It's probably worth dealing with this frustration rather than succumbing to the Google ecology.
On the bright side, html comment box seems decent, it does have export so I could move services if they shut down, but I suspect that'd be tricky even so. I also have a lot more processes going to make using NeoCities easier, like using Visual Studio, and I've also been starting to use grammarly to help check my work (didn't on this entry, you are welcome). So I do feel like I'm making progress here. I guess we'll stick it out.