I agree! I’ve been trying to understand what makes this a “hardcore IndieWeb” approach because to me it doesn’t seem particularly different from having a neocities account or whatever – you’d still be uploading content of your own choosing to a server that ultimately belongs to somebody else. Sure, it’s a hard approach in the sense of difficulty because you have to be able to SSH into the server if you want to do anything, but that seems to be a different matter.
I started out on NearlyFreeSpeech before moving most things to a VPS once I started wanting to run things that NFS was too locked down for. Still get my domain names from them though, they’re good lads.
the point is that the source of truth still lies on your hardware, so if your host becomes unavailable to you without warning, you lose nothing. That is not true of neocities et al
Right, got it! Thanks for explaining. In that case I guess it’s just sad that the state of the internet has got to a point where keeping a copy of one’s own data is regarded as “hardcore”
One thing I’ve learned running a blogging platform is that the vast majority of web traffic is bots, often harmless but plenty malicious. Serving static files on a web server is probably fine, but as soon as other server infrastructure is required it’s often a lot easier just to pay someone (ideally an indie dev!) to deal with all the pain of firefighting so you don’t have to :)
Totally. For my app I’ve been trying to push the idea of people keeping all their blog posts and images local (in markdown, normally, but HTML is fine) and then syncing to my platform. So you always have a copy of your blog locally which could easily be launched as a static site, for example. (You can also export the whole thing as HTML or markdown). This is the way it should be - it’s how I want to work at least!
I took it as more that you should have all your website/blog files stored locally on your own computer so it is transportable across anywhere, whether it’s a blogging platform, shared hosting, VPS, or dedicated server etc.
There is no way around the domain/DNS thing unless you’re on one of the alt-nets.
I’ve been blogging for a long time (like many people here) - over 20 years. When I used Moveable Type in the early 2000s I had everything on my computer, backed up. Once I started using Wordpress installations and other systems where the editing interface is all “on the cloud” as well I rarely back anything up, even though I can. It’s a bad habit, not backing up my sites.
Thinking more about this, I’ve had my main blog, concretelunch.info, running on Wordpress via my Dreamhost account for 20 years in October. Chances of me moving it are pretty slim at this point, but if I needed to I could.
I suppose this is a matter where static site generators have an advantage over CMS-based sites as the “raw materials” are usually plain text files and are more likely to live on someone’s own computer. The CMS route would make the data seem more abstract so it’s probably easier to overlook the need to back things up.
I’ve heard “notepad and a browser is all you need” for years, but this is bad advice that will make it harder to learn.
While learning, you need an environment that will highlight errors in your HTML and CSS. It’s also good if you can get live-reloading so you can see the effects of your changes a little bit faster.
