rubycoloredglasses

I'm Jason, a web application developer in East Tennessee.

• on static neocities jekyll

Static Hosting with Neocities

I’ve been using a Wordpress site for my blog for years, but that has become cumbersome, especially when you have to deal with your website being exploited due to holes in one of the many plugins that your site is relying on.

I used to focus on LAMP stack development, and so running my own cPanel/WHM server was a no brainer. I more recently migrated my tech blog, Ruby Colored Glasses, from Wordpress to Github Pages. This is nice because the site is hosted for free by Github, however that’s limited to one site per each account.

So I’ve decided to try to find another cheap low-cost static website solution that works with Jekyll.

Neocities

Back in the 90’s there used to be a free hosting solution known as GeoCities that hosted many awesome websites for many people. This is where many people were able to express themselves in their own unique ways, while also learning HTML.

Neocities hopes to provide the same type of community. For $5 a month you can become a Supporter, which earns you the ability to create as many sites as you wish, use a custom domain with each site, and also use WebDAV to manage files. If you want the same for a lifetime, you can send them $100 via Bitcoin.

So my goal at the current moment is to explore if it’s possible to generate a website via Jekyll, and then upload it to one of the Neocities sites.

Import

One of the first steps for me is to import my Wordpress site. There is a plugin that one can use to import all of their Wordpress content into a Jekyll site, however it requires that you have direct MySQL access to your server.

Note: The importer only converts your posts and creates YAML front-matter. It does not import any layouts, styling, or external files (images, CSS, etc.).

Configure Server for Public Access

I had to go into my server and configure MySQLd to bind to more than just the local host address. This required that I edit /etc/mysql/mysql.conf.d/mysqld.cnf on the Ubuntu machine I’m currently hosting the site from and change the IP to 0.0.0.0.

# Instead of skip-networking the default is now to listen only on
# localhost which is more compatible and is not less secure.
# bind-address          = 127.0.0.1
bind-address            = 0.0.0.0

I was then able to connect directly to the server and authenticate. Luckily I didn’t have any sort of firewall blocking the ports. I tested the connection using this command:

mysql --host=123.321.123.5 --user=my_user --password=mySecr3tPaSS my_database_name

Install Gems

gem install jekyll-import unidecode sequel mysql2 htmlentities

Perform Import

I’m choosing to import all the files to md (Markdown) file extensions instead of ‘html’. This command worked just fine for me.

ruby -rubygems -e 'require "jekyll-import";
  JekyllImport::Importers::WordPress.run({
    "dbname"   => "my_db_name",
    "user"     => "my_db_username",
    "password" => "my_secret_password",
    "host"     => "192.123.193.12",
    "socket"   => "",
    "table_prefix"   => "wp_",
    "site_prefix"    => "",
    "clean_entities" => true,
    "comments"       => true,
    "categories"     => true,
    "tags"           => true,
    "more_excerpt"   => true,
    "more_anchor"    => true,
    "extension"      => "md",
    "status"         => ["publish"]
  })'

This resulted in all my pages and posted imported into the repository, and ready for a long cleanup.

Resources

Here are some various links I’ve explored in finding a low-cost Jekyll based hosting solution.

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