Hey, so I've been on Neocities for almost two years now, and it's been a great experience so far. Like everyone else here I have to update my site, and there are a bunch of ways I could do this. Now the two options that many people assume are the only way to do this is either to use the built in Neocities code editor, or to pay to be a Neocities supporter and get the ability to mount your Neocities site files as a drive on your computer so you can edit your site locally and have it be updated instantly. There is also the more obscure option to use the Neocities API and use it to push updates to Neocities through programs that can use it. All the above options are a no-go for me. The Neocities editor sucks compared to the code editor I prefer, I don't want to pay for the drive mount option, and the API option isn't worth my patience to figure out. I realized this problem early on, and figured out a way to edit things that's convenient for me and does not require me to pay anything: having a complete local copy of my site on my computer, and just manually drag & dropping any files I update to my Neocities dashboard. Here is what my site files look like on my computer:

Thanks to the fact that HTML has relative links, I can have the same code running locally as the code I have running live and can browse my own site locally like I would on the web. The code editor I use is Sublime Text, which may not be the best editor in the world for everyone, but it has a bunch of features that make my life easier when editing. It's kind of hard for me to explain in words these features to any readers who may not know how code editors can make code editing very efficient, so here's a tutorial about Sublime Text that explains some of the features it has. Here's what my code editor looks like:

After I finish editing my site code and verify everything is how I want it, I just go drag and drop the files I updated into my Neocities dashboard and everything is done. Often I only realize a mistake I made after I push updates live, which makes me feel dumb. Not sure how many people have noticed this, but in the social feed your updated page thumbnails are shown in the order that you updated the pages in, with the biggest thumbnail being the page you updated last. I always use this quirk to have the page I want shown to everyone as the biggest thumbnail. Another quirk of the social feed is that "site was updated" posts are only put up with 24 hour breaks in between. This isn't a terrible thing for me, but it's a little annoying when I want to update a page within that 24 hour period and don't want the big thumbnail to be changed, so I have to wait.

One other thing I should mention is that I try to optimize all the images I put up on my site so pages aren't huge and load fast. I mainly use Paint.NET for editing images, and save most images as JPEG and adjust the quality slider to get images to certain size targets. Because of this, my whole site is currently only 85MB large, and I could reduce that by deleting some unused images.

So that's how I edit my site. How do you edit yours? Do you have any secret knowledge about editing sites on Neocities?