One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Some fun discussion about adding special elements to your website on your birthday, holidays, or special dates: balloons, weather, special color themes, letters to your future self, future predictions from a year ago, photos from the past year. The idea of celebrating other people’s birthdays on your website turned into discussion of permissions for posting, and tagging, photos of others online.
In talking about how to get the word out about events to more people, we threw out possible cross-audiences who might be interested — I suggested writers and artists, especially folks whose only current web presence is on Instagram and could really benefit from their own web home base that’s something better than LinkTree.
Discussed the idea to team up with a webhost to create a one-click Indie Web website install — buy your domain and webhosting in one spot, and it comes with a basic IndieWeb website installed, ready for you to personalize. Something simple that could be an IndieWeb alternative to LinkTree, Squarespace, About.me, etc — no blogging / posting, just a simple static site, a basic home base on the web.
I didn’t bring it up, but could also see offering a pre-packed IndieWeb WordPress install bundle so you didn’t have to go download and install all the plugins, they’re all ready to go for you. Then they’d have access to all of WordPress’s themes and plugins for a lot more potential power.
Explored using GitHub as free hosting for your website. All you’d need is a domain name, then could use a free theme at GitHub. I think the lack of a WYSIWYG editor would rule this out as an option for a lot of people but could be a nice free solution for the right person — someone with a little HTML savvy but not enough to want to code their own site.
I’ve always been intimidated by GitHub so everyone gave me a rundown of how it works and what it’s good for. If I was still doing HTML / CSS work seems like the changelog / commit features could be really useful. Right now I’m not working on anything it seems worth the fuss for.
