Making Our Own Websites at Nottinghack
Websites. We love ’em. Hypertext documents sailing across the ether, criss-crossing the globe down gossamer strands of glass and copper. Websites allow us to present ourselves to the world on our own terms, no more and no less. Having your own home on the web is a wonderful thing, and should be no luxury. This early May bank holiday, a dozen members got together to craft a basic website, over half for the first time. Busy hackers making light work of HTML and CSS. Whilst the big four websites fill with screenshots of the other three, a parallel movement works to develop a personal, hand-built web for and by people. Whereas Instagram would confine you to a grid and the whims of an advertiser, a person who can program their own website can put their own photos there, in whatever shape they like, with whatever content they desire (subject to government overreach). What’s more? Anyone can do it! HTML and CSS are simple (not necessarily easy) languages that can be written using in-browser editors and viewers on anything from Windows 11 laptops to Arch-running Thinkpads to an Android tablet. The aim of this workshop was to get people started making their own websites, understanding the basic concepts behind the web, HTML and CSS. Participant websites ranged from a directory of battle-bots, a 1990s style homepage, to facts about spaceflight, and information about government grants, to bag-oodles. It was wonderful to see how enthusiastically everyone got involved with creating their own website which was not like any of the others. I was really pleased to see how comfortable people got with HTML after a couple hours too. The author celebrates an afternoon well spent! The proof of this whole exercise will be in a few months’ time… we shall see how many of the websites have been independently updated since today My aims for the future are to repeat this workshop at Electromagnetic Field, and to perhaps run a follow-up workshop introducing participants to POSIX and how they might go about hosting their website themselves (we used neocities.org to abstract away this problem for today). You can see the websites people created below: mooped kamiahkamiah scrugglebug skateuk mnmnmn owltown douglascreek drpigeon paulabel mdhollo aerospace-past-and-future hb403880 Aren’t they all cool?