A closeup of a pastel pink mechanical keyboard. The Enter key has what looks like a little cream pastry on it, with berries on top. The image has been edited to have a pink tint to match the style of the website, and it has a slight rgb split glitch applied.

I have (v0.0.1 of) a website!! 🙌🏼

robyn :: 02 Aug 2025 #small web #indie web #blog

I can’t believe it. I have quite often daydreamed about setting up a simple little statically generated website where I can shoot the shii, maybe with myself, because who’d ever read this!?, about topics I am interested in. But there was always more important digital projects, more important home improvement projects, general Life Stuff, so it didn’t happen.

Also the small web is probably dead, and really where’s the value in devoting my time & effort to something probably about 12 people are ever going to look at… but wait! After coming across fantastic small/indie web sites like BinaryDigit.city and 32bit.cafe, I was starting to wonder:

Maybe the small web isn’t dead. If we contribute a tiny little piece to it, maybe we can keep it alive, safe from the grabby hands of capitalist techbro corporations.

💜💜💜

And as for the value? I believe there is a lot of value in this. A) Just to show that this is still possible. Maybe, one day, someone will come across this fledgling little indie web site and think, hey, I’ve been wanting to do that! Maybe this is the little prod they needed to realize they too could set up a simple SSG page with a tiny little blog where they talk about things they enjoy. No “building of brands,” no “shareholder value.” Just people talking about things they enjoy and/or are good at. On a website they created themselves, with whatever wonky colour scheme and background they like.

And B), because we can in fact just do something because we enjoy the process, and because we feel like we may be contributing positively to something.

The Goal

Let me preface this by saying that ideally, I would like to self-host my website. However, that is not something I can achieve at this current time - it seems too daunting, and open to attacks and such if you don’t totally know what you are doing.

So my goal was to set up:

  1. A custom domain with a little ✨ whimsy ✨
  2. A website being hosted on a hosting service, ideally free, but not too privacy-invasive
  3. A static site generator (SSG) with live server capabilities on my Windows machine
  4. An FTP connection to transfer the public content to my hosted site.

The Tech Stack

Currently, I have achieved (tried to achieve?) the above via the following:

  1. The custom robyns.space domain, purchased on NameCheap
  2. Free hosting on InfinityFree
  3. HUGO with the re-Terminal theme
  4. FileZilla

There were some Problems ™️, which I will write about in a future post. I’m just happy a basic version of this site is up and running!