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Hey, I'm the creator of this. Feel free to tear it apart or give me whatever criticism you want. Email me at dan [at] danturkel [dot] com if you want and check

Hey, I'm the creator of this. Feel free to tear it apart or give me whatever criticism you want. Email me at dan [at] danturkel [dot] com if you want and check it out on github [0] [0]: https://github.com/daturkel/10mbmanifesto https://github.com/daturkel/10mbmanifesto edit: The basic idea here is sort of twofold. A) You can make a really great website that can still be hosted on Neocities. B) Sometimes that's a better idea than a site that requires things other than the basics. I want to add a section on lightweight frameworks and tools for building sites that could be put on Neocities (skeleton, foundation, etc.) but I'm hoping that the creator will add subdirectory support so I don't have to write instructions on how to mod all these frameworks. Also thinking about designing a little widget/button to put on your site's about/colophon page to advertise that your site is 10-m-m compliant. Thought that would be kitschy but cute. second edit: Another section I'd like to add is tools for slimming your site down. Things like HTML/CSS/JS minifiers, PNG/JPEG optimizers, etc. I pretty much wrote this thing up in a day so there's plenty to do.

quchen 13y ago
This sounds like someone trying to sell me a Turing tarpit of 1995's internet. "You can still create beautiful, functional, and compelling web content" - beautiful sure, compelling maybe if a static site is what you want, but functional - not really, unless you abuse the permission of JS to reinvent the wheel enough.
- daturkel 13y ago
  My goal here is not to try to convince people to build in 20k lines of JS what they could've done with a simpler Rails implementation or something of the sort, but to take a moment to self-examine whenever starting a new project if there's not a minimal approach to doing what one wants. For many people, sites which will ultimately be static or very simple, people insist on installing a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress and end up bogging down the user experience and their own usage experience. The idea here is: look at all the tools that you can use to make great content that could still fit these seemingly harsh limitations. Instead of Wordpress, maybe a static blog-generator a la Jekyll (though, again, currently there's the limitation in Neocities of subdirectories).
eksith 13y ago
Thank you for writing this and the original manifesto. I'm reminded of my first website project (which called with ambition a "Portal"). It was called Ghostnetworks and, at the time as I was running between the school library and my home computer which I didn't have at the time, I managed to fit all of it on a floppy. I feel "frameworks" by and large are contrary to the spirit of DIY and shoestring-budget construction, but to each is own. Hosted frameworks do substantially lower the cost to NeoCities as well, and subdirectories will certainly add to the flexibility. However you should be cautious of feature creep. I've used Thingamablog ( http://thingamablog.com http://thingamablog.com ) which enables static site/blog publishing, however it works via FTP. An API could be greatly beneficial to upload a site created with a tool like Thingamablog. I do NOT believe FTP access is a good idea. I feel the subdirectory, minfy, sorting problems can be greatly reduced with the introduction of an API. A desktop or mobile application that can upload content quickly will offload the burden of arranging the site away from you.
- lwf 13y ago
  An API. ... like FTP? I guess I'm confused why reinventing the wheel here is necessary when you're going to end up with a HTTP tool with the same semantics.
  - eksith 13y ago
    Authentication is easier. Application access becomes simpler as well, since even a JS tool running on a browser can connect and check your site. That also means not running an additional S/FTP server, which frees up resources to serve content (which would include responses to API requests). Plus you get more fine-grained control of exactly which features are displayed to applications and this could include number of hits and other statistics (if they chose to implement it).
- daturkel 13y ago
  Hey, thanks for the response. As far as frameworks, I discuss in my post that I used a stripped down version of Foundation, but I don't feel this should be a requirement for anyone (I don't use a framework on my personal site, for instance)—it just lets you deploy quickly and is good for people who don't want to worry much about responsive-ness, they just want it to work. I agree that FTP access would not be a good move on the part of neocities, I think they should just allow multi-file upload and directory support.
JulianMorrison 13y ago
Why is it hard to offer directory creation? What would be wrong with giving people a chrooted slice of noexec filesystem with a usage quota set, that they could manipulate as they pleased?
- eksith 13y ago
  That would require more resources than is possible with a limited budget for the number of people the creators intended. And far more than is needed for hosting a site. What you ask for is already possible for a few bucks a month with countless VPS hosts. This is free, remember? Also, the OP isn't part of the NeoCities team. He's merely an advocate for it.
  - Dylan16807 13y ago
    Don't just say it takes resources, give a plausible mechanism. I can't think of any way for subdirectories to take more load than normal files in one directory. Am I not being creative enough?
    - trotsky 13y ago
      I have no idea how neocities is implemented, but my first thought as far as implementing something like that wouldn't be to give users actual filesystem access, but rather to put everything in an object store. Typically that'd be flat until you bolt on something to simulate a hierarchy.
      - Dylan16807 13y ago
        If you're doing that you can allow object names to have "/" and get directory simulation for free.
      - johnchristopher 13y ago
        That would require more resources on the server side than simply storing flat files in directories.

quchen 13y ago

This sounds like someone trying to sell me a Turing tarpit of 1995's internet. "You can still create beautiful, functional, and compelling web content" - beautiful sure, compelling maybe if a static site is what you want, but functional - not really, unless you abuse the permission of JS to reinvent the wheel enough.

daturkel 13y ago
My goal here is not to try to convince people to build in 20k lines of JS what they could've done with a simpler Rails implementation or something of the sort, but to take a moment to self-examine whenever starting a new project if there's not a minimal approach to doing what one wants. For many people, sites which will ultimately be static or very simple, people insist on installing a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress and end up bogging down the user experience and their own usage experience. The idea here is: look at all the tools that you can use to make great content that could still fit these seemingly harsh limitations. Instead of Wordpress, maybe a static blog-generator a la Jekyll (though, again, currently there's the limitation in Neocities of subdirectories).

eksith 13y ago

Thank you for writing this and the original manifesto. I'm reminded of my first website project (which called with ambition a "Portal"). It was called Ghostnetworks and, at the time as I was running between the school library and my home computer which I didn't have at the time, I managed to fit all of it on a floppy. I feel "frameworks" by and large are contrary to the spirit of DIY and shoestring-budget construction, but to each is own. Hosted frameworks do substantially lower the cost to NeoCities as well, and subdirectories will certainly add to the flexibility. However you should be cautious of feature creep. I've used Thingamablog ( http://thingamablog.com http://thingamablog.com ) which enables static site/blog publishing, however it works via FTP. An API could be greatly beneficial to upload a site created with a tool like Thingamablog. I do NOT believe FTP access is a good idea. I feel the subdirectory, minfy, sorting problems can be greatly reduced with the introduction of an API. A desktop or mobile application that can upload content quickly will offload the burden of arranging the site away from you.

lwf 13y ago
An API. ... like FTP? I guess I'm confused why reinventing the wheel here is necessary when you're going to end up with a HTTP tool with the same semantics.
- eksith 13y ago
  Authentication is easier. Application access becomes simpler as well, since even a JS tool running on a browser can connect and check your site. That also means not running an additional S/FTP server, which frees up resources to serve content (which would include responses to API requests). Plus you get more fine-grained control of exactly which features are displayed to applications and this could include number of hits and other statistics (if they chose to implement it).
daturkel 13y ago
Hey, thanks for the response. As far as frameworks, I discuss in my post that I used a stripped down version of Foundation, but I don't feel this should be a requirement for anyone (I don't use a framework on my personal site, for instance)—it just lets you deploy quickly and is good for people who don't want to worry much about responsive-ness, they just want it to work. I agree that FTP access would not be a good move on the part of neocities, I think they should just allow multi-file upload and directory support.

JulianMorrison 13y ago

Why is it hard to offer directory creation? What would be wrong with giving people a chrooted slice of noexec filesystem with a usage quota set, that they could manipulate as they pleased?

eksith 13y ago
That would require more resources than is possible with a limited budget for the number of people the creators intended. And far more than is needed for hosting a site. What you ask for is already possible for a few bucks a month with countless VPS hosts. This is free, remember? Also, the OP isn't part of the NeoCities team. He's merely an advocate for it.
- Dylan16807 13y ago
  Don't just say it takes resources, give a plausible mechanism. I can't think of any way for subdirectories to take more load than normal files in one directory. Am I not being creative enough?
  - trotsky 13y ago
    I have no idea how neocities is implemented, but my first thought as far as implementing something like that wouldn't be to give users actual filesystem access, but rather to put everything in an object store. Typically that'd be flat until you bolt on something to simulate a hierarchy.
    - Dylan16807 13y ago
      If you're doing that you can allow object names to have "/" and get directory simulation for free.
    - johnchristopher 13y ago
      That would require more resources on the server side than simply storing flat files in directories.