I've Built a Damn Website!
So having written a little about how I've built this site, I thought I'd write about why I've started this site.
Over the last year or so I've built a handful of websites for family and others. These have been built in established website builders like Wix and Squarespace, and honestly those things don't require a great deal of technical knowledge. I mean, setting up the domain name and hosting and so forth can be a complete ball-ache, but building the sites themselves is pretty straightforward. I guess that's the whole raison d'être of those sites.
Secondly, my partner works in digital marketing and social media management. On a number of occasions with her work, she had turned to me for some technical support on sites that she was managing content on for clients. These sites were built across a range of services, Wix again, WordPress using Elementor, and others. Increasingly I was running up against issues that I was finding hard to resolve due to custom code sitting under those sites, and quickly running up against the limits of my minimal knowledge.
So what all of this began to pique my interest in how to build (or even just fix) what lies beneath those structures. To find out what are the bones that the flesh of these sites hangs off? (slightly macabre analogy ,sorry).
Its's been a long time since I dived in to trying to learn a wholly new skill set from scratch, and this seemed an ideal skill to try and tackle. It doesn't require much financial cost or investment, I can approach it at my own pace, as and when free time allows, and hopefully had a learning curve that wasn't too steep initially so as to seem overwhelming.
On a broader basis I've increasingly been put off by the big social media sites out there. I've never really got anything particularly worthwhile out of Facebook, Twitter, Instagram et al. The companies themselves have become increasingly toxic, especially Twitter/X in recent years, and even though they are places where I find myself wasting lots of time, more and more they are not places where I particularly (strong>want to waste time. Nevertheless I find myself maintaining a presence there - some of this is unavailable. My kids scouting group communicate through their Facebook page. I need an X account for my professional day-job needs. So in some ways they're unescapable.
But there does seem to be another way. The first prompter of this was making the move to Mastodon. I have neither a large following there, nor follow a huge amount of people. But increasingly that's where I'm finding things that interest me, from interesting people. And maybe steadily that's where I'll share stuff too, interesting or not.
From there I've picked up loads of discussion and articles about the growth of the 'indie-web', and the resurgence of personal websites. It's odd really, but as a nearly-50 year old, I came of age during the first great wave of personal websites, of the popular boom of the internet, of Geocities, and blogging on and so on. But largely let them was over me without getting involved. But maybe not this time. Discovering this flourishing community of personal sites of blogs, of people just posting what they want to post, and most importantly doing this on a site they own, even if that means posting to a smaller audience has been really enjoyable. The idea of owning what you create and who you are on the internet - not letting someone else own it, is really appealing. I guess that's the drive behind the POSSE movement too.
So all of that was just sort of marinading away in my head, as a thing I maybe, sorta, oughta get round to.
And all this was finally given some impetus by a blog post from Louie Mantia. That blog post was 'How to make a Damn Website'. Published back in March, I think I found It around mid-May. In that post Louie only talks a little about why you should build a website, but really helpfully to me, talks at length, and simply, about how to build a damn website. And it seemed, from how Louie described it, as something that I could actually do.
It's easy to forget how simple a website can be. A website can be just one page. It doesn't even need CSS. You don't need a content management system like Wordpress. All you have to do is write some HTML and drag that file to a server over FTP.
For years people have tried to convince us that this is the "hard" way of making a website, but in reality, it may be the easiest.
And so I started to do it. I followed Louie's instructions and built a website.
Well, not of all his instructions, and not all at once. I played around with it in unpublished html files for a while before registering this domain and actually
But the important thing about that post was that it got me started. It really is just a great post. So Mr. Mantia, if you ever happen to read this, thank you
Since then I've realised just how much there is to learn, how many place there are to learn this stuff, and how many people there are willing to share what they know to help others learn. Were I to start doing this all over, or giving advice to someone else doing the same, I would certainly point them towards the newly published web-book 'HTML for People' by Blake Watson. This takes the themes from Louis post, and runs with them, delivering a beautifully presented, detailed and easy to follow guide to anyone wanting to learn some HTML and build a webpage. It's free, it appears to be an absolute labour of love and I don't think I could recommend it highly enough.
The response to the book seems to have been really positive, and rightfully so. It's been fun seeing people react to it the same way and use it as their springboard to start doing this too. In the spirit of the web as a place built on links, I'll shout a fellow Steve (of sorts) doing the same thing, Estebantxo. It's heartening to know there are others just starting out doing this, when so many other seem to have been doing it for half a lifetime.
So that's it really, that's kind of why and how I'm doing this. I'm literally just typing this up in Apple Notes, pasting it into a HTML file, and uploading it to a server. And in doing so I've built a damn website.