Getting Started on the IndieWeb
Perhaps you relate to all the reasons why you should be on the indie web but you're not sure how.
Here are a few simple steps you can take to get you on your way to being on the indie web. Each of these steps is a just a bit more challenging and will make you a bit more indie.
Connect
First, and perhaps most importantly, connect with indie web experts and pioneers by:
Personal Domain
Second, you need your own personal online identity:
- get your own personal domain name (ask a friend or colleague for a domain name registrar that they use and like/trust/respect etc.)
- get your own personal short URL domain name (again, ask for advice on specifics)
Redirect
Third, create a redirect from your personal domain to whereever you're currently publishing most of your textual content.
- These days Tumblr.com (preferred due to free domain mapping) or Wordpress.com are popular content hosting choices for easily getting started with publishing content publicly on the web. Get an account at one of those or a personal wiki site like pbworks.com if you don't already have one.
- Setup a redirect from your domain name provider's control panel from your personal domain to your Tumblr, Wordpress or PBWorks account.
- This will allow you to share URLs with your personal domain that redirect to those hosted services. This is better than simply sharing URLs directly to those hosted services because in the future you can setup your site to serve those URLs directly rather than having them handled by a hosted service.
- A redirect still has the disadvantage though that when people click on your URLs with your personal domain name, their browser will redirect them (and show them) the hosting service URL (e.g. user-example.tumblr.com rather than user-example.com), thus if they reshare this URL by copy/pasting they won't be using your personal domain.
Hosted Solution
Fourth, change from a redirect to a hosted domain solution
- Both Tumblr (and Wordpress.com) can be setup to serve your personal domain for you.
- The advantage of using a hosted domain solution over a redirect is that when people click on your personal domain URLs that you share, that's the URL they'll see in their browser, and reshare with their friends. This is perhaps the best stopgap indieweb solution short of actually hosting your own content on your own domain. It's not quite indieweb however, as you're still vulnerable to all the same content-hosting-service problems (downtime, ToS, content ownership, sharecropping, etc.)
Web Hosting
Fifth, sign up for web hosting
- Sign up with a web hosting provider (ask friends and colleagues who they use for their personal websites that they're happy with)
- Setup your domain name to be served by your web hosting provider
- Upload a simple HTML index.html home page to get started with your hCard and rel="me" links to all your other social network profiles.
- Set it up with web sign-in so you can log-in to this wiki.
- Advantage: while you're not sharing your content on your own site (yet), you've staked your claim on the indie web, and taken a small but important step to declaring your independence from content silos.
Setup Content Publishing
Sixth, setup content publishing on your domain.
- Take a look at indie web Projects, pick one, and install it or set it up (e.g. your web hosting provider may have a "cPanel" control panel (or Fantastico) which can setup a WordPress install in a few clicks).
Setup Personal Shortlinks
Seventh, setup your personal URL shortener.
Post Once Syndicate Everywhere
Eighth, setup syndication so copies of your Indie Web content are published (semi-automatically) to social silos whenever you wish them to be, along with a personal permashortlink or citation identifier back to the original on your own site.
Share and Join Us
Next steps:
- Share what you did / discovered in the process of building your indie web site, even if it is only a single page, with a simple design.
- Ask what you can/should do next in the IRC channel.
- Sign-up and join us at the next IndieWebCamp!
Setup another indiewebcamp wiki
All the content of Indiewebcamp.com is CC0 so you may copy it and setup a mirror.
