First Experience with Neocities

So far, exploring the sites people have made is really cool! Not only can I explore the pages through the default listing on Neocities.org, but the page "districts" acts as a nice pathfinder for the same purpose, with an emphasis on the cream of the crop. Of course, I'm also down to check out the less refined on the platform- that's where you get some real fun stuff- but these make for a great introduction.

Oddly enough, I've found myself being linked to pages outside of Neocities. Well, I guess that's not too odd; this is a website hosting service, not a biodome. But I've found some good stuff outside of the platform by using it, and that's always a fun time.

In terms of actually producing my own website, I do appreciate the beginner's guide that Neocities provides themselves. It makes a fine enough introduction to HTML, and I bet anyone can get the gist of it easily. It isn't enough to get too complex, but websites such as w3schools.org have helped me a bundle in college. If you're having trouble with HTML, give their tutorials a shot!

My current gripe is how slow updating a page is after the first time. For instance, I will save this file and click the 'view' button in the page editor. Okay, now I'm typing this after hitting view. I'll save again and hit view. And there we go. The page doesn't immediately update from second saves onward. Now, I haven't taken any networking classes, so my best bet is that it has to do with the limited bandwidth that free users have. I'm not certain or confident in this, but it's my best guess. Either way, I can't use this; my method of coding involves typing a thing, running it, letting it break, and then fixing it based on the error I get. But I can't do that if the page doesn't update!

I think I'll use an IDE to make my pages, and you probably should too. If you don't know what an IDE is, it's essentiallt a program designed for coding in a given language. Since you can load pages saved on your local computer in your browser, I can rely on that to test for changes in the browser much faster. Oh, wait, actually, you can just use Notepad++ It's like Notepad, but with features to help make coding easier- like how tags are highlighted in the Neocities editor. Yeah, that'll probably be easier than installing an IDE, maybe try that first.

Well, that seems like a good stopping point. Thanks for reading, and I hope you stick around!