Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day
24 points by algernon
24 points by algernon
100% independently
You are always dependent on some provider (Hoster, registar, ISP…).
However I totally support the fact that you should make sure that you can switch providers easily (a static site is likely the best bet in this regard).
For domain names, check the authority of the TLD (country TLD might be better than ICANN if you live in Europe for instance)
This is also a good time to consider another benefit of Hardcore IndieWeb. When your posts are individual HTML files (not Markdown files or database entries), they can finally be seen as the individual web pages that they truly are.
It's not that I don't respect the whimsy of a website where all the page are unique, but the moment you start having a reasonable amount of subpages (say, 10, but YMMV), it'll start being a real headache, if you want to make uniform changes everywhere. And since this petition is aimed largely at people who may not even have really written HTML before, it's only a matter of time until they realize "Hm, it'd be much nicer if my header/footer/figures/etc. looked like this". And at that point you either take out sed or awk or whatever line processor you have and do a fragile search and replace over your entire website... or just use an SSG (hell, pandoc alone might be enough for simpler stuff) and make tinkering actually fast and fun.
Also I'd posit that it's not so different to use a git forge with hosting capabilities and I think it'd still fit the 'hardcore' criteria of this post. Sure, you're not conveying your files with FTP, but you still own your content and generate/write it locally. And if the forge goes down or changes into something that displeases you, it's very easy to move your entire repo elsewhere. And as an added bonus, you get all the benefits of havng your files checked into VCS, making it even easier to experiment frivolously and throw away stuff you realize doesn't work as nicely as you thought.
Honestly, this is where I rediscovered php a while back, it is still offered by default by most hosting parties and is in itself a templating language.
I had my domain linked to a shared webhoster with your classic lamp stack but no website actually running on it. So, I found myself looking at static site generators, workflows from github to my host, etc. Eventually I realized I don't update things nearly enough, don't blog, etc. I didn't want to go completely static as that is just too much hassle when doing multiple pages. So I decided to utilize that good old lamp stack to basically do something like this.
<?php
$pages = json_decode(file_get_contents('pages.json'), true);
$page = $_GET['page'] ?? 'home';
if (!isset($pages[$page])) {
$page = 'home';
}
$pageData = $pages[$page];
$contentFile = basename($pageData['file']);
$contentFilePath = "content/{$contentFile}";
?>
<html>
<head>
<title><?= htmlspecialchars($pageData['title']) ?></title>
</head>
<body>
<main>
<?php include $contentFilePath; ?>
</main>
</body>
</html>
Slightly more, but the base principle is the same. Just 10 lines of php code, and now I can just add pages by uploading their contents and adding them to the json file for whitelisting.
I might be giving away my age, but doesn't dynamically generating your pages mess with stuff like caching and search indexing? Cool concept otherwise.
Not really, it is all server side rendering. As far as any browser or crawler is concerned it is exactly the same as a single html pages. Even more so if you do some apache mod_rewrite rules to give your pages automatically their own path.
As note, dynamically generated pages usually refers to front-end javascript stuff, not server side rendering.
Edit:
In case you are thinking about get parameters being troublesome to index then yes, you really are showing your age ;) That hasn't been a concern in a while for crawlers/indexing, maybe caching still in some cases. Anyway, as I said, even back then with an apache mod_rewrite you could already make clean urls that would be indexed fine.
I think you're tugging on the bit of the piece I was having issue with, but struggling to express. Not all complexity or dependency is without purpose; it is a choice as to which we commit ourselves to. Also, this doesn't consider that some folks may be forced into dependency of a service, either by skill, time, energy, or some other factor (see: bandcamp migration attempts). I think the way out of this is better governance, more alternatives, and more accountability in service providers, not to exclude ourselves from dependency everywhere (which, as pointed out by others, this already doesn't do).
This is also a good time to consider another benefit of Hardcore IndieWeb. When your posts are individual HTML files (not Markdown files or database entries), they can finally be seen as the individual web pages that they truly are.
It's not that I don't respect the whimsy of a website where all the page are unique, but the moment you start having a reasonable amount of subpages (say, 10, but YMMV), it'll start being a real headache, if you want to make uniform changes everywhere.
Both the "individual HTML files" comment you quoted, plus your quote instantly triggered my memory of Jeff Huang's excellent blog post titled "This Page is Designed to Last": https://jeffhuang.com/designed_to_last/
I will admit that my OCD tends to get in the way of me "letting go" of too much consistency for the headers, footers, etc. But, I have at least evolved a tiny little bit, and instead of obsessing too much, i tend to simply my header, footers...so that allows less need to go back to keep updating them. This in turn has helped me focus on the writing and less on the style. But, i do beleive if many of us were to adopt some of what Jeff Huang suggests - especially treating each web page as an individual html file that can stand alone - i think at least a few things would manifest:
Don't get me wrong a smooth flow, look-and-feel and overall digital experience is good to have (to avoid jarring things for the visitor), but i also think there should be balance for the owner/author of the blog website. Especially being Indie web-related, why not have a little less than perfect aspect to our sites?
Is there a German word or sociological term for the phenomenon of humans inventing purity tests for every possible cultural endeavor ?
Maybe Distinktionsgewinn ?
Edit: Freud actually went deeper: Narcissism of small differences though don't take this serious - just my curiosity.
Yeah I found that too, so let’s use the original German: der Narzissmus der kleinen Differenzen.
Reinheitsgebot (purity order) springs to mind. Not what you are looking for but fitting in a humorous way.
Can't you host static websites for free on Cloudflare, Firebase, Netlify and many other places?
Neocities if you'd like to keep your soul. :-)
I wish there was a cheap alternative, but every "indie" static site hosting I see charges more than the price of a full-blown VPS.
I think there the economies of scale hit hard. But I think their free offer is very reasonable and I'd imagine their overall focus.
OpenBSD Amsterdam might be a vserver option of a 6 EUR offer where a part goes into an important (OpenSSH, etc.) open source project. Would really love to see similar projects where the income partly and transparently goes into underlying tech. Seems like a perfect fit for indie hosting.
Yep. I have a website with thousands of blog posts, hosted for free on netlify. You do get limited build minutes but I've never hit that.