Right, the formatting of this blog post is a bit broken. More on that later
Yes! I created an MCP server for Neocities!
With the help of VS Code, Github Copilot, and Claude Sonnet 4, it only took me half an hour to have an MCP server that teaches an LLM how to work with Neocities.
This is a strange and funny experiment. I'm currently writing a prompt about the page that Gemini CLI is supposed to create with this MCP server. If everything worked out, you can read this little blog entry in German and English as part of my blog. That would be cool. In the worst case, Gemini messes everything up and my blog is dead.
The suspense is killing me.
The Result
| Task |
Time |
| Have Claude 4 build the MCP server |
30 min |
| Introduce the MCP server to Gemini CLI |
10 min |
| Write a prompt to create and post a blog entry |
10 min |
| Get Gemini CLI to actually perform the task |
2 hours |
| Clean up my index pages after Gemini "expanded" them |
1 hour |
Compared to "writing the blog post myself" (30 min) that’s a time saving of -700%. Not quite that good.
What happened? The MCP server was quickly written by AI, and after a short while Gemini CLI also claimed that it now knew this server and its tools. Nice. I was euphoric.
Then came the actual task: I wrote a prompt for: read a sample blog entry, write a new blog entry with different content but the same formatting, translate it into English, upload both files, update index_de and index_en. Nothing too complicated, one would think. But Gemini CLI acted incredibly dumb. Several times in a session it didn’t understand that the files weren’t local but on Neocities, accessible via said MCP server. Several times it just replied to my request with long "thinking" followed by "What can I do for you?"
Eventually it did everything it was supposed to do and reported success. It even showed me a JSON confirming the upload success of my blog files.
Only there was nothing. And — joys of agenthood — I have no idea where Gemini uploaded the files. If anywhere at all.
So I tried again, pushed harder, and the AI uploaded. But it used the miserable styling you see here, dear reader, and similarly wrecked my two index files — styling broken, headings changed. But hey, better to try out MCP and fix a few things afterwards than (insert horrified facial expression here) write HTML by hand. Anyway, I didn’t get much closer to my distant goal of writing a little app that lets you, with the help of an LLM and a Neocities MCP server, comfortably maintain your websites by "just writing a bit of text and letting the AI handle styling and other small tasks."
But, sort of as a goodie for you, dear reader, I didn’t fix the messed-up formatting. If you want to navigate back, please use the unexpected links "Home" and "Blog" above. Sure. Where else.