Hi folks, I’m so dang tired of the internet as it currently is. The idea of a small web, personal websites, returning to what the internet was intended to be sounds incredibly exciting to me and I’d like to invest in that… but I don’t really know where to start? So much of what I read seems to have a ton of coding jargon. I clicked on Small Web 101 and it was a masterlist of somewhat confusing links.

The most coding I’ve done was on Khan Academy as a teenager or setting up an automatic macro to run the coliseum for me in Flight Rising. I pirate basically everything I watch but I’ve only torrented one or two things and don’t really grasp how that works. I don’t really know anything about my laptop but I have a vague idea that I should switch to Linux and I replaced the screen once.

What’s step one for a wannabe Small Web enthusiast?

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    2·
    7 days ago

    If you want to experiment with PHP+Mysql, you can make an account on InfinityFree and do stuff there. Their free tier lets you have a free domain. As for learning content, I recommend looking for something like “making a blog from scratch with php”[1] or some such, try to look for “from scratch” wherever possible, as those will avoid cumbersome frameworks and CLI commands (like artisan install blah, which you won’t have access with on InfinityFree)

    You can create and edit files within the browser, from their control panel, but you can also set up a program to automatically connect via FTP, so you can code on your computer and the program magically syncs with the domain’s folder

    Even if you don’t want to go out of the way with learning php, it can be useful to let you write markdown, the same type we use for posts here, and translate into plain html.

    If you don’t feel like you’ll need programming or a database connection, you can go with a Neocities page and write html yourself. Again, the best way to learn will be by searching for “<how to do thing> from scratch”

    1. Fucking AI shit makes it hard to find stuff that actually teaches step by step. If you see anything that has “Conclusion” near the end, it’s AI slop. Here are 3 that might help you: – https://dcblog.dev/creating-a-blog-from-scratch-with-php – https://ilovephp.jondh.me.uk/en/tutorial/make-your-own-blog/introduction – https://codewithawa.com/posts/how-to-create-a-blog-in-php-and-mysql-database ↩︎