It's the WWW, get it??
WiFi Password: ABrandNewEMS!
6:00-7:00 PM -> write new content for your website
7:00-8:00 PM -> Demos: show how your website works, talk about your favorite page, etc
8:00 onward -> breakout in to discussions and wind down
Why write a website?
A website is where you can put whatever you are excited about in one place, and if you take good care of it you can build it up over years. The old content will never expire, never get advertisements injected in it, never cost marginally more than the site itself. You have one, stable, place and a URL that you can use to refer to that work for as long as you can keep the server running and the domain alive.
HTML is fast, cheap, and easy.
There's no algorithm to cater to, no viral mobs, no AI moderation. You might think those things are bad, or the lack of them are bad, but it's just different.
You can organize the information however you like. You can still share URLs with your friends and family. You can build a long-term corpus of personal insights and organize them how you like. You can write whatever you want within the confines of our free-speech and libel laws.
Go Make a Website
Anything is possible with fingers, eyes, a mouse, and a screen.
neocities HTML & CSS tutorials
Buy a web domain! They're like 20$ a year and it's so cool to have your own! I have a couple! You're reading this on one of them, isn't that cool?
IndieWeb's Getting Started page
Web Logs and Markdown
markdown is easy to write, and there's a bunch of software that turns it in to html that is easy to host.
You could use Wordpress or Ghost or Squarespace or some other platform and it's quick to get something "out there", but a platform needs to be kept up to date, it becomes toil. HTML just sits there. Markdown is plain text and it just sits there, you can move it on to a different system, or open it in a desktop tool like Obsidian.md...
I recommend starting with HTML and Markdown and hosting it on GitHub Pages, and configuring it to use your own domain instead of the github.io thingy. Eventually you could host it yourself for very cheap.
self-host your site with an old laptop,
python -m http.server&tailscale serve, zerotier, etc
Put stuff on it!
collect and list your favorite links, books, blogs, bugs
I have pages with my Rare Bibendums and my Rare Supercar Prius, My Blog Roll, My Plotter Art, etc
write about your personal niche obsession
The Complete Computing Environment is mine! it gets its own website!
what's yours?
slashpages.net here's some more prompts
User-input and Storage
HTML is Hypertext, the HyperText Markup Language, part of a World Wide Web of Hypertext documents. When you add media it becomes Hypermedia. It is delivered with the HyperText Transfer Protocol (HTTP) or HyperText Transfer Protocol (SECURE!!) (HTTPS).
A web browser says "I would like to GET a document at the specified URL", and the server says "here you go."
But what if you want a comment form or a guestbook or a place for random passers by to upload unseemly images? you want a server that can respond to messages like POST and PUT and DELETE. none of the options above give you that, you need to do some Actual Programming. This is left as an exercise to the reader. You could use JavaScript, or Python, or PHP, or even BASh.
Everyone has some sort of opinion on this eventually, but put this off for as long as you can if you're just getting started. put an obfuscated email address in the bottom of the page if you want people to talk to you about the things you write. Post the URLs to the things you write in your group chats instead of a comment box.
You usually end up writing JavaScript to drive the browser-side interactions, so nowadays many people will use JavaScript for the server-side as well. But you don't need to write JavaScript in the browser, you could use something like HTMX. If that excites you, the idea of interactive documents with little programming, read HyperMedia Systems.