Link tags: hosting

My solar-powered and self-hosted website | Dries Buytaert

This is a neat project form Dries:

This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.

At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.

Creating Your Own Website

Building a website can seem difficult, but half the battle is just getting started! We wanted to put this guide together as an easy compilation of tutorials and places to learn exactly what you need to get started.

This is a really useful guide for beginners!

We hope this guide helps make everything feel more accessible to you, because it is! The internet belongs to all of us, so be sure to stake your claim in it.

CSS { In Real Life } | Choosing a Green Web Host

Earlier this month, Jeremy Keith posed the question: “How green is my server?”. As Jeremy notes, it’s surprisingly hard to get that information! So how do you ensure that you’re hosting your website on a green server?

Mastodon is just blogs

Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!

A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.

I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:

A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.

Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.

This is spot-on:

Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.

Nelson’s Weblog: Goodreads lost all of my reviews

Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.

Ouch! Lesson learned:

My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does.

Using Google Fonts Breaches GDPR – Interdependent Thoughts

Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?

Meet the Self-Hosters, Taking Back the Internet One Server at a Time

Taking the indie web to the next level—self-hosting on your own hardware.

Tired of Big Tech monopolies, a community of hobbyists is taking their digital lives off the cloud and onto DIY hardware that they control.

Robin Rendle ･ Inheritance

My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.

Is my host fast yet?

This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:

Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.

I’m Taking Ownership of My Tweets—zachleat.com

I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.

JAMstack? More like SHAMstack. | CSS-Tricks

Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.

I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:

MAJstack!

This is my maj.

Self-Host Your Static Assets – CSS Wizardry

Trust no one! Harry enumerates the reason why you should be self-hosting your assets (and busts some myths along the way).

There really is very little reason to leave your static assets on anyone else’s infrastructure. The perceived benefits are often a myth, and even if they weren’t, the trade-offs simply aren’t worth it. Loading assets from multiple origins is demonstrably slower.

Manton Reece - Anchor on free podcasting

Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.

Distributed and syndicated content: what’s wrong with this picture? | Technical Architecture Group

Hadley points to the serious security concerns with AMP:

Fundamentally, we think that it’s crucial to the web ecosystem for you to understand where content comes from and for the browser to protect you from harm. We are seriously concerned about publication strategies that undermine them.

Andrew goes into more detail:

The anchor element is designed to allow one website to refer visitors to content on another website, whilst retaining all the features of the web platform. We encourage distribution platforms to use this mechanism where appropriate. We encourage the loading of pages from original source origins, rather than re-hosted, non-canonical locations.

That last sentence there? That’s what I’m talking about!

Beaker | Peer-to-peer Web browser. No blockchain required.

Here’s an intriguing project—peer-to-peer browser and hosting. I thought it might be using the InterPlanetary File System under the hood, but it’s using something called Dat instead.

It’s all very admirable, but it also feels a little bit 927.

Installing Letsencrypt on Ubuntu 14.04 and nginx | gablaxian.com

If you’re planning the move to TLS and your server is on Digital Ocean running Nginx, Graham’s here to run you through the (surprisingly simple) process.

IndieHosters

Sorting out hosting is a big stumbling block for people who want to go down the Indie Web route. Frankly it’s much easier to just use a third-party silo like Facebook or Twitter. I’ve been saying for a while now that I’d really like to see “concierge” services for hosting—”here, you take care of all this hassle!”

Well, this initiative looks like exactly that.

What Do We Own?, From the Notebook of Aaron Gustafson

Aaron raises a point that I’ve discussed before in regards to the indie web (and indeed, the web in general): we don’t buy domain names; we rent them.

It strikes me that all the good things about the web are decentralised (one-way linking, no central authority required to add a node), but all the sticking points are centralised: ICANN, DNS.

Aaron also points out that we are beholden to our hosting companies, although—having moved hosts a number of times myself—that’s an issue that DNS (and URLs in general) helps alleviate. And there’s now some interesting work going on in literally owning your own website: a web server in the home.

Kirby – Let’s build a better web

A rallying cry for the Indie Web.

Let’s build this.

‘Kitten kitten kitten kittens’, Medium & TED(x) and RSSing since 2003.

Dan’s blog is rapidly turning into one of my favourite destinations on the web.

I hope he comes to an Indie Web Camp.