In this second part of my ‘Building an IndieWeb house’ series, on the whys and hows of this blog, I’m going to go over the very basics of using the static site generator (SSG) Hugo to make a website, how to get that on the internet and the ‘syndicate elsewhere’ element of the ‘Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere’ (POSSE) concept.
This will be the post that’s the most techy of this series, and one where I do also mention specific platforms, software or companies, and, yep, sometimes they have been chosen because of how we align with their or their owners’ policies.
I’m indeed actually writing this a few days after Mozilla did an absolute shocker with some truly bad terms being added to FireFox, and although those have partly been rolled back, I’m reminded in many cases all we have for tech is least-worst options. Because while Mozilla did its self-inflicted damage, almost to the day, Google pivoted to permit fingerprinting, as well as disabling Manifest V2 in Chrome and hence tracking blockers, such as uBlock Origin.
For browsers, we have Chrom(ium) and its derivatives (i.e. those running on the blink engine), and FireFox and its derivatives (gecko engine), that’s it.
For blogs, thankfully we do have quite a plethora of good options… and a few I personally wouldn’t use, such as the proprietary platform Substack (which charges $50 to use with your own domain anyway). I even would have concerns right now with WordPress, despite its core being open source. [Why is too much to get into here, but there are some links in the ‘extra shots’ section for further reading.]
With regards to techy stuff [oh, yes, I do say techy, not the more-common form techie; I think it’s a valid alternative, so my blog, my rules!], my intention is to show that once something is familiar, with practice it becomes less intimidating.