For many people, sites which will ultimately be static or very simple, people insist on installing a CMS like Drupal or Wordpress and end up bogging down the user experience and their own usage experience. The idea here is: look at all the tools that you can use to make great content that could still fit these seemingly harsh limitations. Instead of Wordpress, maybe a static blog-generator a la Jekyll (though, again, currently there's the limitation in Neocities of subdirectories).

What would be wrong with giving people a chrooted slice of noexec filesystem with a usage quota set, that they could manipulate as they pleased?

What you ask for is already possible for a few bucks a month with countless VPS hosts. This is free, remember?

Also, the OP isn't part of the NeoCities team. He's merely an advocate for it.

I've run forums even on rickety DIY PHP + Postgres that's held up very nicely to several hundred logins and even more sessions per day on very modest hardware (1.5Ghz Core 2 duo, 2Gb memory).

It doesn't take a boatload of resources for a simple login and static content if it's just static content. Sites can be separated (or "sharded" if you like that term) on Nginx with very little effort for static content.

E.G. https://gist.github.com/perusio/2154289

There are more elegant solutions for that which still don't require blob objects.

Then make a noexec chroot which has just a /home for them all.

I'm not sure how you'd translate a http request with an authenticated session into a handler running as a particular user, but I don't doubt that it is possible with some fork(), setuid() arrangement.

I'm reminded of my first website project (which called with ambition a "Portal"). It was called Ghostnetworks and, at the time as I was running between the school library and my home computer which I didn't have at the time, I managed to fit all of it on a floppy.

I feel "frameworks" by and large are contrary to the spirit of DIY and shoestring-budget construction, but to each is own. Hosted frameworks do substantially lower the cost to NeoCities as well, and subdirectories will certainly add to the flexibility. However you should be cautious of feature creep.

I've used Thingamablog ( http://thingamablog.com ) which enables static site/blog publishing, however it works via FTP. An API could be greatly beneficial to upload a site created with a tool like Thingamablog.

I do NOT believe FTP access is a good idea.

I feel the subdirectory, minfy, sorting problems can be greatly reduced with the introduction of an API. A desktop or mobile application that can upload content quickly will offload the burden of arranging the site away from you.

I agree that FTP access would not be a good move on the part of neocities, I think they should just allow multi-file upload and directory support.

... like FTP?

I guess I'm confused why reinventing the wheel here is necessary when you're going to end up with a HTTP tool with the same semantics.

Plus you get more fine-grained control of exactly which features are displayed to applications and this could include number of hits and other statistics (if they chose to implement it).