Getting My Own Site

The second step to getting on the IndieWeb is to have your own site.

This is easier said than done, and there are lots of different ways of doing it.

This is what I did.

As a web developer

There are three paths to getting your own site.

Service

You could use an existing service like Micro.blog to host your site.

I already do this for my microblog because it comes with a bunch of features out of the box and gets me onto the IndieWeb, even while I don’t yet support all the IndieWeb features on my main site.

CMS

An alternative path is to use an existing content management system and add on IndieWeb features with plugins.

I’ve done this in the past with WordPress but I moved on from the WordPress world a while ago.

Self-starter

I decided I was more comfortable writing and doing it myself.

What it needs to do

Before I wrote any code I made sure to cover the basics.

Information about me

The homepage of my site needs to include a h-card with my name, an icon, and rel-me links to my social network profiles.

This is not only useful for humans but I can also use it to sign in to other sites using IndieAuth.

I used IndieWebify.me to check I’d done it correctly.

Publish content

My posts should be marked up using h-entry so that others can understand my content.

The original site design had words with titles, which makes them technically “articles”, although that could change in the fture.

How the site works

There are lots of different ways to do this.

In fact there are too many, so I kept it as simple as I could.

Static site generator

I want to write my content in Markdown, I would prefer doing that on my laptop instead of my phone, and I’m ok running commands to publish things.

Which means I can use a static site generator like Hugo to turn my markdown files into HTML.

Hosting

One of the best parts about using a static site generator is that it makes hosting simpler.

Once you have generated a static site you can upload the files to a web host and you’re done.

And you can automate it, so all you do is update it and it gets deployed automatically.

GitHub pages

I host copies of my code on GitHub so that others can view the source and I was planning on doing the same with my site.

This meant I could use one of GitHub’s other features, which is free hosting for static content.

All I would need to do is add a workflow for GitHub Actions to perform each time the code gets updated and the site gets deployed automatically.

IndieMark

There’s no official measure of a site’s “IndieWebness” but the closest right now is the still-in-development IndieMark which would score me a level 1.

Level 0 involves owning your own domain, something I have written about before, and having a personal site at that domain.

Level 1 involves:

• identity, I’ll be using this at my primary domain
• authentication using rel-me links to my external social network profiles
• posts with permalinks, h-entry markup and other microformats
• searchable by allowing robots to index my site, my content is written in HTML and no JavaScript is required to read it

View source

You can view the source code to see how I’ve abused Hugo and TailwindCSS into creating my own site, hosted on GitHub Pages.