When Elon bought Twitter I stopped using it. I had been enjoying finding people doing cool art and making cool stuff on there, but enough was enough. I moved to a Mastodon instance, and while things were quiet to start with they’ve grown steadily and I now have more people I follow, more followers, and more interaction with posts than I ever had back on Twitter. And it’s not just about numbers. I have meaningful conversations with people on topics from photography to pinball to game development, where on Twitter it all just felt like a contest for engagement farming, and I could never just have a short exchange with someone about the content of their post because of all the noise. If you somehow found this post without being a follower of mine on Mastodon, follow me at @GandalfDG@indieweb.social if you’re interested in my sub-blog-post sized musings.
Beyond social media, the continuing enshittification of the internet encouraged me to put together this very website as a home-base for everything I put out into the world that I can link back to from my social media posts. It’s nice to have something that looks just as I want it to, that I can tinker with as I please, and that allows me to post content that doesn’t conform to a template or specific posting style that an existing platform encourages. It was and continues to be a learning experience, but I’m having a lot of fun with it and would like to share what I’ve learned.
Following the results of the US election becoming clear, I started thinking about ways to be a force for good in my local and online communities and thought that one way I could put my skills to use would be by putting together a workshop to help anyone set up a website. While it’s still a work in progress I’ve started developing a repository which will be a premade template for a development container-based Hugo site build environment. The template has Hugo and relevant VS Code extensions installed, has a skeleton Hugo project complete with a simple template, and has GitHub actions set up to build and deploy the site to GitHub pages for easy, free hosting. When I run the workshop I want the only prerequisites to be access to a computer with a modern web browser, through the use of GitHub Codespaces. Star and follow my Hugo Starter repository to follow my progress.
Next steps are to put together some presentation materials, find local places to run workshops and get the word out. I hope to create a course that anyone can follow to create something all their own out there on the internet, and I hope that it will be the catalyst for some folks to get deeper into web development. I will hopefully have more to post about regarding this idea soon.
Interested in this project? Send me a message on Mastodon or via email to connect.