Earlier this month I spent an awesome afternoon in the back room of Virtua Gal, in the Lloyd Center Mall, teaching a great group of friends and strangers how to edit their own websites. This was an experiment to see if anyone was interested, how possible it would be to go from 0 to Website in an afternoon, and if it, like, mattered.
On all three counts, the answer was a resounding yes. I think I crammed about three or four classes’s worth of info into the afternoon, so there was a lot more teaching and a lot less working than I planned on, but the students hung in there admirably and everyone left with a site!
You can follow them here
And my friend Lenara was moved to make her own, even though she wasn’t in the class!
https://wooden-gaudy-satellite.glitch.me/
The big selling point of Glitch was that no one had to install anything on their computer, and everyone could remix a starter site I built. And it’s fun! People liked that I could say things like “click on the dinosaur” and that they could drag and drop into the assets directory.
We didn’t really get into the tooling that Eleventy provided, but it did allow me to bake some things into the templates, like Octothorpes. Some students were interested in blogging, so it’s good that they have one built in, but less good that I didn’t have time to show them how to use it.
I love this tool, and it was really cool to see how it helped people in the class learn about HTML, since it still required that they copy and paste the HTML and CSS into their site. That was more effective than any explanation, because they saw how something should look and then could figure out what to do to make it look that way. Stefan Bohacek, the developer, makes a bunch of cool things and just generally seems like a nice guy. I also included his very good list of Resources for keeping the web free, open, and poetic in the class notes.
This is a good tool because it’s actually simple. I feel like there are a lot of tools out there that developers call “simple” because they feel simple to developers. They still require the ability to look at a bunch of text, understand the structures that organize it, and imagine how they will look like something later. Visually building something is so valuable.
This was, predictably, a big hit. As a demo, I had everyone try to move the elements on the example page at the same time while I had it up on the projector, which got a lot of laughs. I think any class about having fun on the web should include work by Spencer Chang. My favorite use of this was Martha’s bonkers site.
I tried to do a cool “but wait there’s more” moment about how all the sites can use hashtags and backlinks because Octothorpes were baked in, but it fizzled a little because of a combo of a Glitch glitch (caching the env variable for the original url) and everyone being dug into their own projects. But after the fact it’s real nice to have a central spot to see everyone’s site. If we do another class and get them up on the Eleventy features, I hope people will use more hashtags. Whoever made this tool must be really cool, and people should give them money.
Like many of you reading this, I have had many lukewarm reactions from people who don’t make websites but still put things on the internet when I talk about the benefits and fun of doing that on a website you, and not a billionaire, owns. All of a sudden I feel like I no longer have to explain why that matters. Granted, the group that came to the class was self-selecting, but the vibe was way more lively and on-board than I expected, and we got three times as many RSVPs as we could accommodate. Partly because it got posted to freakscene.us – fun fact, the founders of that gave a talk in the same space the next day.
If you told me, in early 2024, dozens of people would want to spend a Saturday afternoon learning how to write HTML from me, in the former storeroom of a Lady Footlocker, partly because they saw it on a locally hosted forum, well, I would have had some questions.
Similarly, the response I got to posting a brief guide to what my fellow artist friends could use instead of Instagram was way more engaged than I expected.
Basically everyone who wanted to come to the class but couldn’t said they were interested in future classes or a website making club or something. So I’ve really been thinking about how to set up something sustainable that can keep these conversations going.
I want to stress that I purposely didn’t promote this in spaces where people already care about or engage with the open/independent internet. Almost everyone there was new – one person had never looked at HTML before in their life. I think it’s super important to get those voices on to the open web. Also I just want all my artist friends to have blogs so I can, like, zoom in on and save pictures of their beautiful art. And I don’t want to have to screenshot a damn Instagram story to get the details of their events. (But if you have to some cool folks here in town made an app that turns those screenshots into something useful.)
Why were we in a mall anyway? Because the tides of late stage capitalism, rent-seeking, and [waves hands at everything] first washed away all the cheap industrial spaces where we used to have DIY venues in the 2010s, and then also rotted all the value out of conglomerate, corporate spaces, so now we have these glossy husks of the invasive former apex predators that are parked where civic spaces used to be. So artists and marginalized small business owners moved int, and now the mall is one of the only reliable places to find cheap rent for poetic, community-oriented, or otherwise marginalized projects and venues. Who knows how long it will last, but the projects operating there right now have turned it into a place where you can see multiple, worthwhile art shows on the same day, learn piano, video game development, rollerskating, electronic music, or chess, and spend your money at plenty of locally and POC-owned businesses.
So yeah, a few dozen people making their own sites (on the web or in the mall) isn’t going to tank Meta stock, but it can plant the seeds of community in a place that’s lost most of its topsoil.
I left the class very encouraged to keep encouraging people to empower themselves in how they use the internet. I’m still working out what comes next, but I want it to address both how we read and write the internet, and stay rooted in local community. Consider this post the first in a series. Follow