Craft your own website
Craft your own website
"My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously."
Laure Schwulst, 2018
MORNING
Intro
- Who we are? Gossip round about websites.
Lucas and Balint graduated from ArtEZ Graphic Design. This is where we learned about coding website from scratch. We believe that sharing knowledge about technology empowers people who use these technologies. Knowing how to build a website can be a starting point to understand the internet as systems of infrastructures.
- We keen on to know why did you sign up and what do you know about websites? Where do you learnd about it?
Neocities.org
History
The spirit of neocities.org comes from the 90's/2000's Geocities, which was a platform where people could craft their own website and share it with eachother. We can think of it neighbourhoods of websites link together in a loose manner, very much community oriented organisation.
Geocities was the third most visited website back then -> yahoo.com buys them -> death of Geocities in 2009 -> revive the spirit of geocities in 2013 as neocities.org initiated by Kyle Drake.
The spirit:
- Indie web principals # own your own data
- commercialised and AI drivven web today lacks web autonomy
- POSSE - Publish your own Wbsite and Syndicate Elsewhere
Cultural significance
It is not a coincidence that we are hosting this workshop at De Kurk - the local queer bar in Arnhem. There is an interestin connection to explore between physical queer places and neocities.org as a queer place for personal/individual websites.
"Building a site involves coding, but also creative strategy for page layout, image use, focal points, colour motifs and other decisions not too far off from curating a show, or designing a visual arts magazine, the difference being that no one decides how things look except for you."
" personalised sites, many users have used Neocities to house different parts of the art industry digitally, often promoting their zines, curating art in cyber galleries and sharing their portfolios"
" users are brought together through community ‘webrings’, small hyperlinked widgets attached to their pages."
- Olia Liliana net artist works with saved Geocities websites
- One Terrabyte of Kilobyte
- search on Netart tag on neocities.org
- melonking.net
Webrings
Before google's search engine there was a very different way to browes the internet. Webrings are a very apparent method of connecting websites together, like a ringroad in the neighbourhood.
"pre-Google days, search kind of sucked"
Commercialazation of the web creates certain ways of interctin with the web.
"users decided to self-organize their pages through lightly-organized “rings” that would lead users to pages on a similar topic. Having a link somewhere on your site that ensured users that your page was a way station in a series of pages on a similar theme."
"when the ring gets big enough—it becomes more and more difficult to keep the ring ‘intact’ when pages go down.”"
"Web ring is like sharing a cup of tea with a group of strangers who are batty about a favorite hobby"
Let's break for lunch and browse neocities in the meantime.
AFTERNOON
Let's craft
Register a User
- go to [1]
- Fill in:
- Your-Site-Name
- Password
- e-mail adress
- confirm e-mail
HTML
CSS
- Basics of CSS
- Craft Your Own Website - CSS tutorial work in progress
- cards.declarations.style
Inspect element Take some time to browes and look around on other websites and try to apply CSS to your website.
WEBRING
Technical rider
Hardware
- Laptops
- HDMI Cable
- Screen
- Extension chord
- Table for at least 10 people
- Maybe separate extention for Display + our laptops
- 1 shared laptop to type code on + to show
- Internet connection
Software
Tutorials:
- wiki documentation of the plan <3
- HTML tutorial
- [ CSS tutorial]
- [ webring tutorial]
Resources:
- neocities.org
- https://cards.declarations.style
- https://declarations.style/pages/references.html
- https://garlic.garden/onionring/
- https://www.eventbrite.nl/
- https://www.w3schools.com/
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML
Situating articles:
- https://tedium.co/2020/11/20/webring-history/
- https://plastermagazine.com/features/neocities-internet-art/
- https://laurelschwulst.com/e/my-website-is-a-shifting-house/
Net art examples:
- https://oneterabyteofkilobyteage.tumblr.com/
- https://art.teleportacia.org/exhibition/give_me_time__this_page_is_no_more/
- https://thehtml.review/04/
- https://lucasorigami.github.io/manifesto/
- https://www.blairs.computer/
SUMMARY
Hello here is the promised summary of our workshop from Saturday, reflections, next steps, and links for references , articles and help for coding. If you have any questions feel free to message here!
"Its nice to build websites and examine the reasons behind them because it gives purpose for making a website. By bringing in community as part of making my own website, a whole new world opened up what social media could be. :)"
Duvan's next steps:
- linking pages for entries
- blog post section
- make it prettier
Kosta's next steps:
- render icons and add links to them
- text styling/ editing
Niels's next steps:
- make a homepage that link to sub pages (own pages)
Jana's next steps::
- put the word on different parts of the brain
- make those words a link for a subpage
- more fire!!! and chaos
Maei's next steps::
- make a section for healthy recipies
- subsection for :
- breakfast
- lunch
- dinner
- linklist
This is the original workshop planning
- This is where i got my information about Neocities and some metaphores, they are really nice articles:
- https://plastermagazine.com/features/neocities-internet-art/
- https://laurelschwulst.com/e/my-website-is-a-shifting-house/
- https://tedium.co/2020/11/20/webring-history/
- Introduction about neocities
- websites / sources mentioned by you:
- Dyke march Amsterdam >> https://dykemarch-amsterdam.neocities.org/
- The monastery >> https://blamensir.neocities.org
- The matcha game >> https://gd.games/games/3e628c33-1e32-4104-a2e5-9b9016efb007?fbclid=IwdGRleANNHo1leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHnjO7owqkpq03SWvl7egKWe7Lxh3qOBkqrU4909WvXiP5WA4hrv6PKnhVQk__aem_dsi5WaerUgmBITVv80ocgg
- https://radar.squat.net/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revelations_of_Divine_Love
- other explanations about the internet
- how ip addresses work: https://scri.ch/1vat
- cat codes, https://http.cat/
- references for coding HTML / CSS
From us:
- HTML tutorial : https://craftyourown.neocities.org/html/
- CSS tutorial: https://craftyourown.neocities.org/css/
- Our webring: https://craftyourown.neocities.org/webring
External links if you have practical questions about HTML, CSS
- https://www.w3schools.com/
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/
- the names of colors in css: https://www.w3schools.com/colors/colors_names.asp
- explanation of flebox (can be used for putting things into rows): https://css-tricks.com/snippets/css/a-guide-to-flexbox/
- how to open link in new tab: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4907843/open-a-url-in-a-new-tab-and-not-a-new-window