Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day
Adam Newbold of omg.lol, blogging at Neatnik:
The key aspects of Hardcore IndieWeb are control over your content and portability of your website:
- If your content doesn’t primarily exist on your own hard drive, you don’t fully control your content.
- If you don’t have a copy of your published HTML and web assets on your own hard drive, it’s not truly portable.
If this position sounds a bit hardcore, it is, but that’s the kind of person this guide was made for. It’s worth mentioning that the principles are hardcore, not the skills needed—in many ways, the instructions Adam lays out here are even easier than other methods of creating a website.
The process looks like this:
- Author your web content on your hard drive.
- Preview it in your web browser.
- When you’re happy with what you have, upload it to your web host. Repeat as often as you’d like.
That’s it. It really is that simple.
The rest of this guide walks you through this process in more detail. It celebrates being close to the actual code of your website as opposed to layering on dozens of abstractions.
It’s a very similar ethos to HTML for People (and indeed, he links out to it several times), but with a focus on ensuring control of your data at every point in the process.
My own website follows most of these principles, except for I am using a static site generator, at the time of this writing, and a somewhat complex templating system. But most of my website is previewable locally, lives in a repository, and gets deployed to my server at NearlyFreeSpeech.NET. I say “most of my website” because, at this point, my website has become its own organism with various sub-pages and things that aren’t tracked in the main project. The website as it lives on my server is the only complete representation of the website, but I do weekly backups just in case.
I also immediately thought of my brother’s website. His website is a simple blog that he made with vanilla, handwritten PHP, including the RSS feed!
I enjoyed this guide, and even though I think it’s totally fine to use a blog service if that’s what works for you, it’s always good to remember that layers of services and tooling aren’t actually needed to make a website. A website is just a collection of files. When I learned this fact over 20 years ago, it was eye-opening for me, and it’s what immediately drew me in to making websites.