Setting up a personal (Indie)Website
How I set up a new iteration of this website, following IndieWeb principles and taking some inspiration from James' Coffee Blog
At the end of 2025 I began to explore Wiby.me. It led me to a lot of 'classic' websites; the sort of websites I cut my teeth developing. Although, back then, I didn't call it 'developing'. No-one in my circles did. We were 'HTMLing'.
I stated making this site back in 1997. It started as an About Me and Sailor Moon fansite, made in Microsoft FrontPage as part of an after-school ICT programme when I was in Year 7.
Over the years which followed, I dabbled in coding and programming generally, including learning to code using Visual Basic 6.0 (although my teacher really turned me off it, which I will talk about some day.
At the start of the year 2001, I became involved with the MV-1 Fanfiction Project, and all of our fanfiction was presented as HTML documents. I whipped out FrontPage Express 2.0, present in my copy of Windows 98, and would WYSIWYG my way to success, writing the fanfic directly into FPX 2.0 and saving the output. It worked fine. I would view the source of other webpages to pick up other tips and edit my FPX 2.0 output in Notepad to achieve it, and through that method I learned the basics of CSS and JavaScript as well.
Occasionally I would make pages from scratch in Notepad to take advantage of .ASP and .PHP, which I couldn't do in FrontPage Express 2.0.
Then Facebook, and Twitter, and YouTube happened (not in that order) and my whole community shifted there. We didn't shift our content there, of course. We just shifted... and stopped making content.
For years, I tried to make social media-friendly content, adopting CMS' like Post-Nuke and WordPress, enabling 'search engine optimisation', but it got boring very quickly and no-one really paid attention because there were YouTube videos and Netflix series to watch.
Then I explored Wiby, and found websites the way I like them. What's more, some linked to something called the IndieWeb wiki, which showed me there was a community attached.
I liked this, and decided to come back.
First, I browsed a few sites which sounded nice, and particularly liked James' Coffee Blog. Not only the design, but the content as well. Zachary Kai's site also appealed - and what's more, he's Australian as well!
I considered what I liked about their sites and went back to the IndieWeb wiki to learn more about those concepts, then set out to make my own. So much of the IndieWeb already aligns with my values: static, permanent documents, linked rather than changed. That part was fine.
What I needed to wrap my head around, it turned out, was microformats. I already knew what I was likely going to include, but it became a case of doing it in ways consistent with both the IndieWeb, microformats... and eventually something I stumbled across in someone's code called the Fediverse.
The IndieWeb wiki led me to a site called Indiewebify.me. That website checks for IndieWeb consistency. The first step was owning my domain name, which I have since around 2002, if I recall correctly.
The second step was more tricky. It was being able to sign in to things using that domain name. That meant creating rel=me links in my site's code to confirm I am me, but they had to link somewhere. The silos I did use couldn't be used to confirm I am me, so I had to sign up to Github and connect through that. I created an otherwise blank index.html with the rel=melinks invisibly within the code. Once that was done, I was able to connect it to IndieAuth and use the domain to sign in. From there, I was able to create a Mastodon account, and once that was done, I had multiple sources of verification and multiple ways to sign in.
The third step was to start using microformats. I made an invisible h-card in index.html to show I could make one. Not too tricky. I later added a visible one to the About page as well. I did make extensive use of both the IndieWeb wiki and microformats wiki to learn what to do!
The fourth step was to make an example post marked up as a h-entry. Once I could fathom a h-card, this wasn't too tricky.
Then came the hard part: setting up webmentions and 'reply contexts'. I found this difficult to understand at first, but eventually it clicked. I used webmention.io as a go-between for webmentions. I just need to remember to check it from time to time...
Then came the fun part - joining the IndieWeb community. I will discuss this more in another post, I suspect, but it was actually fun. Learning how to confirm my identity, create a user page, and actually contribute was actually quite fun! It was the first, delicate step to feeling like part of a community.
Over the next few weeks I will be making a few posts about setting up this website, following inspiration from some big IndieWeb-ers, and reflecting from time to time on how it fits my existing values.
This post is created in response to 100 things you can do on your personal website by James - and hey, that's my first 'reply context'.