Reclaiming Territory in Cyberspace: #7 Your website
Site generators are really useful tools to get started.
Do I need a website?
The more people who control their own web presence, the less vulnerable we are to information suppression from large institutions. In many ways we are very lucky to be alive in a time where it is so simple, and so inexpensive to distribute important information so widely.
A simple website, is really just a folder with different text and media. In most cases it is outright trivial to serve basic websites out of one’s home, but many public hosts exist. By keeping it simple, the web can be more free and accessible for all.
Introducing: The site generator
While learning CSS, Javascript & HTML is worth doing, there are tools that will transform markdown formatting into a usable website. This is a fantastic way to save effort, and allows you to focus solely on the content.
Two great ones are:
I use hugo, so this will be written with hugo in mind. You’re welcome to take a look at the Jekyll documentation to see if it suits your needs better. These tools use the command-line, if that sounds out-of-reach I’d recommend re-visiting #2.
Themes
Themes lay out the overall look and layout of the website. Depending on the theme you use they can change things a great deal, or only a little. Thankfully everything about the theme can be overridden.
As Libre Solutions Network improves, so will these themes:
These themes are being developed partially as a learning exercise, but also to create an easy way for someone to be able to build a social-media like presence without relying on other platforms.
Multimedia embeds are a high priority, and so are social media previews. If you’re interested in using these themes your feedback is greatly appreciated!
Using hugo
Once you’ve installed hugo, the process is very simple:
Create your site with hugo new site mysite “mysite” is a placeholder name here.
Move into your the project root with cd mysite
Start the temporary webserver with hugo server
Open the page with the link provided by hugo (usually http://localhost:1313)
As you stare into the blank page, imagine the possibilities.
Making Changes
First you’ll want to create the index page. Open mysite/content/_index.md with your favourite text editor and add whatever you’d like.
Download a theme and place it inside mysite/themes/
Open mysite/config.toml and add theme = “freedom” (or the name of a different theme you downloaded)
If you’re using freedom theme you may want to change title, subtitle, & default_img while you’re there
You’ll see your changes refresh in real-time, once you hit save the page will reload immediately. Once you’re done making your changes you’ll want to run hugo once and copy the contents of the mysite/public folder to your webserver.
Building up your infrastructure
Building the website is really only the start. Ideally you’ll want to make sure your website is on hardware you control.