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Comment by skrebbel | Hacker News Reader

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!

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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.

With Cloudflare pages, you can upload a .zip file via the web interface and that becomes your website. No git required.

Compare the copy on the landing pages and it’s pretty obvious

https://pages.cloudflare.com/

https://neocities.org/

But now you need to understand what files are, what zip is, what “upload” means and how it matters whether a file is on your computer or on a server, and so on. With neocities you can just type HTML into a box.

ok, that makes sense I guess.

Once you know how git/hub works, it seems much easier to me to use github, but I understand that not all people do; while all the other sites (squarespace, wix etc) are too much of "website builders". Fine thanks

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