Having your own website is not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism - but it's making a political statement nonetheless. It says "I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations". I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.
https://localghost.dev/blog/this-page-is-under-construction/
@sophie I’ll get around to doing my website, but there have been so many other “making the world you want to live in” things that I would recommend to anyone.
Buying an audiophile CD player from Oxfam and going shopping for pre-owned CDs. Buying a foldable bike I can take on the tram, so I can cycle for utility more. Expanding the things we cook at home.
It really makes a difference.
@sophie thanks for this amazing article. 😍
Im currently building my personal Site in WordPress and find it quite challenging to avoid JavaScript. After reading your article I want to try that.
Also im focusing on accessibility and making it accessible for slow internet connections and not focus on only wealthy western web. Its so much fun building it.
@sophie thanks for your expertise on that 🙂
Yes I learned about progessive enhancement here in the comment sections and will put my attention on that. So the indie web taught me some stuff for the corporate web as well. Thats nice :)
@AngelaScholder @sophie You want a website in the fediverse?
I've got setting up a gemini pod high on my want list, kinda done with the web.
@gmc @sophie The sites are on the Web indeed, but I want to get something set up fully under my own control.
So, if you have suggestiond as you clearly already have experience with it, I'm curious.
I've got a Thin Client (HP) here that I need to check out, but I'm pretty sure would well be up for the job.
@AngelaScholder @sophie Fully under your own control is going to be difficult, you're always relying on someone for the uplink to the internet.
If you want to host a website at home, your biggest challenge is potentially DNS. Do you have a static IP or a dynamic IP? If it's dynamic, you'll need to set up dynamic DNS to update your DNS records as soon as your uplink IP changes.
If you don't have a public IP at all but are behind carrier-grade NAT, you'll need to figure out how to route traffic to a public IP to your home server. My internet connection at home has this. The IP address I get assigned is not a publically routable IP, so I have set up a tunnel from my home router to my server in a datacenter and expose my home servers to the internet through the tunnel.
Not sure what you would want to host at home. If it's just a simple static site, something like lighttpd would be perfect. Even if you want something dynamic, lighttpd can work well.
@gmc @sophie Well, we do have a public Static IP and have had so most of the time we had DSL. Half a year it was cable when we moved here as there only was one pair of wires from the Telco.
I've had a webserver here at home until I switched-off the system as the power supply fan was making a lot of noise, and in the end just never replaced it. The system also didn't support HTTPS.
Same for a mail server. All running in JNOS on top of DR-DOS.
Currently some NAS systems can be connected to >2
@gmc 2) from the net if you have the right name and ports.
But indeed, I still need the fibre operator, my ISP, and the company providing the DNS.
At the moment a NAS also works as mail server, but I still need to figure out how to connect to that one from Thunderbird.
I want preferably move my Mastodon presence to a server at home, and I need to look at Friendica and other things.
@sophie I just (finally) launched my first personal site in decades last week. It was a good time. Keeping it fun and kind of chaotic
Great blog on it!
Just remember, Dot com, net, org, info, us, and edu are domain extensions governed by the United States. Dot Social, for example, like many word-based domain extensions, are managed by corporations in the United States.
You can host your dot com, for example, in Germany, and while your site files would be safe, technically they could pull your domain name.
Admittedly, that's rare, but we are dealing with a Government Regime that is threatening their own allies. What is normal anymore!?
The safe bet when starting a new website would be to pick a country level domain.
Woah... It took me some time, but i... I made my very first tileset! From scratch! Ever! A tileset! From me! Made with my OWN hands! :DThe archive includes a sample map for the Tiled editor with predefined brushes, so you can easily play around with the tileset. You can download Tiled here: http://www.mapeditor.org/
@sophie I made this one when I left university and the hosted website they gave me disappeared. I’m
Sure no one visits, and I have no analytics, but it makes me happy to tinker on it.
@sophie Also: creating content for a website that you own can be extremely therapeutic in these trying times.
Yes, the world is on fire and there's lots of bad news and such.
But creating things gives me something positive to look forward to. It gives me a past to be proud of. And that is all too important in an era of doomscrolling.
I couldn’t agree more. Excellent post thanks.
ive kept my own website for about 10 years now and it’s gone through a bunch of migrations to different platforms / frameworks.
Settled on wordpress for now but have a laravel one I’ve built with wordpress importers ready to go. 🤣
kind of obsessed with my website.
Having your own website is not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism - but it's making a political statement nonetheless. It says "I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations". I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today. https://localghost.dev/blog/this-page-is-under-construction/
@sophie I realize I'm late to discovering this (stumbled upon it thanks to a delightful web surfing rabbit hole via @rolle )...
But just wanted to say *thank you* for writing this.
It's easy to think that posting on a small personal website is insignificant given the state of the world (and web) today. But, as you've highlighted so powerfully, it's precisely because of the state of the world (and web) today that it is a truly radical act.
I plan to re-read this post on a regular basis; it is a much-needed cognitive reset from the brain-warping of social-media/striving-culture/SEO-optimization/preemptive-defensiveness/etc...
Thank you again for putting this into the world!
But websites are for business... right?
It’s sad that even small to medium sized businesses rarely have a website these days, just settling for instagram accounts. I’m always happy when I see a local business having their own website bc it’s so rare these days.
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