2020-12-01

how i update this website

This website is hosted on neocities.org, a web host that attempts to revive the spirit of 90s amateur personal websites. It's pretty easy to use, but for some reason it does not support uploading content via FTP. However, it does provide WebDAV which is supported by a bunch of web authoring tools. Here's how I use WebDAV to update this website.

You can directly mount WebDAV as a virtual filesystem ("How to mount WebDAV share") but I am not a big fan of this approach because 1. it requires sudo and 2. it consists of two steps - mounting the drive and syncing the data. I'd rather just use a single command to sync my local copy with neocities. Fortunately, there exists a handy tool to do this - rclone. rclone is a command line program for managing files on cloud storage that supports a wide range of platforms and protocols, including WebDAV.

To connect to neocities with rclone, I followed this guide and this page to view the necessary config files for accessing neocities with WebDAV. One thing to note is that you should really have a backup of the data on neocities in case you use the wrong command. I almost deleted all of my files, but I had downloaded a zip file copy of my site before trying this out. Another warning is that using rclone in this way is very slow.