Google Fonts only lets you download .ttf files meaning that if you want to self-host your fonts (and you should), you have to first convert them to .woff2 files.
Luckily this tool has been online for over a decade, doing what Google Fonts should be doing by default.
This is a neat project form Dries:
This project is driven by my curiosity about making websites and web hosting more environmentally friendly, even on a small scale. It’s also a chance to explore a local-first approach: to show that hosting a personal website on your own internet connection at home can often be enough for small sites. This aligns with my commitment to both the Open Web and the IndieWeb.
At its heart, this project is about learning and contributing to a conversation on a greener, local-first future for the web.
Building a website can seem difficult, but half the battle is just getting started! We wanted to put this guide together as an easy compilation of tutorials and places to learn exactly what you need to get started.
This is a really useful guide for beginners!
We hope this guide helps make everything feel more accessible to you, because it is! The internet belongs to all of us, so be sure to stake your claim in it.
This is a handy little tool for spinning up a local web server when you don’t all the features of something like MAMP.
Earlier this month, Jeremy Keith posed the question: “How green is my server?”. As Jeremy notes, it’s surprisingly hard to get that information! So how do you ensure that you’re hosting your website on a green server?
Do you still miss Google Reader, almost a decade after it was shut down? It’s back!
A Mastodon server is a feed reader, shared by everyone who uses that server.
I really like Simon’s description of the fediverse:
A Mastodon server (often called an instance) is just a shared blog host. Kind of like putting your personal blog in a folder on a domain on shared hosting with some of your friends.
Want to go it alone? You can do that: run your own dedicated Mastodon instance on your own domain.
This is spot-on:
Mastodon is just blogs and Google Reader, skinned to look like Twitter.
Goodreads lost my entire account last week. Nine years as a user, some 600 books and 250 carefully written reviews all deleted and unrecoverable. Their support has not been helpful. In 35 years of being online I’ve never encountered a company with such callous disregard for their users’ data.
Ouch! Lesson learned:
My plan now is to host my own blog-like collection of all my reading notes like Tom does.
Remember when I said you should avoid third-party dependencies?
Taking the indie web to the next level—self-hosting on your own hardware.
Tired of Big Tech monopolies, a community of hobbyists is taking their digital lives off the cloud and onto DIY hardware that they control.
My work shouldn’t be presented in the Smithsonian behind glass or anything, I’m just pointing at this enormous flaw in the architecture of the web itself: you’re renting servers and renting URLs. Nothing is permanent because on the web we don’t really own any space, we’re just borrowing land temporarily.
This is an interesting project to try to rank web hosts by performance:
Real-world server response (Time to First Byte) latencies, as experienced by real-world users navigating the web.
If you add another advertisement to your pages, you generate more revenue. If you track your users better, now you can deliver tailored ads and your conversion rates are higher. If you restrict users from leaving your walled garden ecosystem, now you get all the juice from whatever attention they have.
The question is: At which point do we reach the breaking point?
And I think the answer is: We are very close.
Facebook. Twitter. Medium. All desparate to withhold content they didn’t even create until you cough up your personal details.
I fully expect my personal website to outlive Twitter and as such have decided to take full ownership of the content I’ve posted there. In true IndieWeb fashion, I’m taking ownership of my data.
Chris makes the very good point that the J in JAMstack isn’t nearly as important as the static hosting part.
I also pointed out to Phil recently that the M (markup) is far more important than the J (JavaScript), which is there to enhance the M. So I suggested that the acronym be updated accordingly:
MAJstack!
This is my maj.
Trust no one! Harry enumerates the reason why you should be self-hosting your assets (and busts some myths along the way).
There really is very little reason to leave your static assets on anyone else’s infrastructure. The perceived benefits are often a myth, and even if they weren’t, the trade-offs simply aren’t worth it. Loading assets from multiple origins is demonstrably slower.
Okay, I knew about the Python shortcut—I mentioned it in Going Offline—but I had no idea it was so easy to do the same thing for PHP. This is a bit of a revelation for me!
Once in the desired directory, run:
php -S localhost:2222Now you can go to “localhost:2222” in your browser, and if you have an index.html or .php file in your root directory, you’re in business.
Anchor seems to be going for the YouTube model. They want a huge number of people to use their platform. But the concentration of so much media in one place is one of the problems with today’s web. Massive social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube have too much power over writers, photographers, and video creators. We do not want that for podcasts.
Well, I guess it’s time to change all my locally-hosted sites from .dev domains to .test. Thanks, Google.
Hadley points to the serious security concerns with AMP:
Fundamentally, we think that it’s crucial to the web ecosystem for you to understand where content comes from and for the browser to protect you from harm. We are seriously concerned about publication strategies that undermine them.
The anchor element is designed to allow one website to refer visitors to content on another website, whilst retaining all the features of the web platform. We encourage distribution platforms to use this mechanism where appropriate. We encourage the loading of pages from original source origins, rather than re-hosted, non-canonical locations.
That last sentence there? That’s what I’m talking about!
Here’s an intriguing project—peer-to-peer browser and hosting. I thought it might be using the InterPlanetary File System under the hood, but it’s using something called Dat instead.
It’s all very admirable, but it also feels a little bit 927.