TK's Web Quest

Welcome to TK's Web Quest, now fully independent! // Check out some photos of the fall colors from Guanella Pass in the blog! // Now built with 11ty! // Try our new Midnight flavor! // The Worst Webring: Additional slots now open! //
Welcome to TK's Web Quest, now fully independent! // Check out some photos of the fall colors from Guanella Pass in the blog! // Now built with 11ty! // Try our new Midnight flavor! // The Worst Webring: Additional slots now open! //
blog/2026-06-05-indie-web.md

blog entry

Indie Web Resources

12 min read

This post originally was a separate page. Due to some re-arranging of things, it no longer makes sense to have it as a separate page, so I converted it to a post.

Whenever I mention to someone in my day-to-day life that I have a website of my own, I tend to see two reactions. One is people being generally supportive but uninterested in doing the same. The other reaction is to be supportive, but with a longing for that kind of space for themselves. Building your own website can be intimidating! And it can often feel like if you don't go all the way and host or write it yourself, you might as well not try. Folks, I am here telling you that having a website of your own is easy and fun! I recognize that my credentials kind of harm my credibility here. As a working IT professional and a hobbyist system administrator, it might feel like I'm about to throw you in the deep end. Dear reader, this could not be any further from the truth. So, take my hand and I'll explain what we're doing here and the idea behind it. If you're already sure of your footing with regards to the ideology and terminology, you can certainly skip down to the actual list of resources.

  • A blog is a publication on the web. It could be a personal journal, notes on a project, or more thematic than that. It could be independent and self-hosted, or it could be on a larger platform. It could be updated occasionally, randomly, or on a set schedule. The key thing to note is that a blog is a website with content that is added over time.

  • A Digital Garden is a web-space built to house more evergreen content that is grown over time, rather than adhering to a faster schedule. These spaces are different from blogs in that the intent is to cultivate them based on active additions and pruning.

  • The Small Web is a collection of personal websites and blogs. These are often, but not always, noncommercial. They also are sometimes hosted on larger corporate platforms like Blogger which is owned by Google. However, the guiding philosophy is towards human-made content and expression. It's more about doing the thing rather than how it's done.

  • The Indie Web is sometimes a contentious term, but in my own writing, I'll be referring to it as websites that are not hosted on existing corporate platforms. This means no Blogger, no Substack, no Medium. The indie web is significantly more concerned with who owns the content. If you post something to a major platform, the likelihood that you have exclusive ownership of that content is slim to none. By managing as many links in the chain yourself as possible, you ensure that your information and content is yours and no one else's. In the indie web, managing your own hosting, domain, etc is encouraged, but not required.

  • The Good Web is a category I really like that has been recently pushed by Brennan. This category is significantly more broad than the other two, but the idea is simple. The Good Web is built out of communities, websites, and technologies that maintain the idea that the person on the other end of the wire is a human being and deserves to be treated as such, without being turned into a commodity by the technology or tactics involved. The good web posits that people are worthy of dignity and respect.

Resources

RSS Readers

  • Firefox - Firefox has a built in RSS reader! No extension required.

  • FreshRSS - A free self-hosted RSS reader and aggregator. Add all your feeds to FreshRSS and you can then use the Google Reader API to sync your read status and subscriptions to other applications.

  • Fluent Reader - A multiplatform RSS reader that supports the Google Reader and Fever APIs.

  • NetNewsWire - A free and open source RSS reader for Mac and iOS. Follows the Mac/iOS design language closely.

Domain Names

  • Porkbun - A paid domain name registrar. This is where the Taming Knots domain and my other domains are registered. Overall a pretty great experience.

  • Open Domains - A free subdomain registrar. To get a domain, you fork their github repository and request it there. Once their DNS updates, the domain is live.

  • DuckDNS - Their regular service is built to dynamically update DNS records for a home IP, since internet service providers rotate user IPs every so often. A side-product of this is that you can get a (site).duckdns.org domain name for free.

  • Afraid.org's FreeDNS - A registry of domain names where people have offered to allow others to forward a subdomain to their own site. For example since I own tk-web.top, I could (but do not currently) offer it so that someone else's site could be (site).tk-web.top.

Blog and Site Hosts

  • Bear Blog - Free, $5/mo for custom domain - A dead-simple blog host with a focus on longevity. In the words of Herman, the founder and maintainer of the site, "Bear won't shut down. Period." It's under active development, but has a big focus on simplicity and speed. No coding experience is required and posts are written in Markdown or HTML.

  • Pika Page - Free, $6/mo or $60/yr for more than 50 posts, custom domain - Another very simple blogging platform made by the folks at Good Enough. Reliable and fast, with no coding required. Posts are written in their own online editor.

  • DreamWidth - Free, $35/yr, $50/yr for additional resources/features - A spiritual successor to LiveJournal, Dreamwidth is a publishing platform with social integrations and a directory built in. The entire codebase is open source as well, continuing on from where LiveJournal left off.

  • Neko Web Free, $3.50/mo, $7/mo for additional storage, Git/WebDAV/FTP access, and unlimited bandwidth - A free static web hosting service, good for learning to code with HTML, or using a Static Site Generator to generate a site.

  • Neocities - Free, $5/mo for additional storage and features - A classic reinvention of the venerable Geocities. A static site building and hosting platform with built in tutorials for making your own website.

  • Smol Pub - Free - A tiny blogging service, accessible via regular web and the Gemini protocol. Very feature light, but if all you want is a place to write, this is a good one.

  • Midnight Pub - Free - Another tiny blogging service, with a little more community. All users' posts show up in the recent posts section of the homepage.

  • Mataroa - Free, $9/yr for custom domain, post by email - A minimal blogging service built to get you writing as quick as possible with no distractions. 5% of all revenue from premium users goes to CO2 removal.

Static Site Generation

  • Hugo - It's what Taming Knots is built on! Written in Go, it takes a theme (HTML templates) and applies those to Markdown posts you write. Very easy to use, and it gives you a ready-built website you can upload to a static web host or host yourself with a basic webserver.

  • 11ty - Eleventy is extremely popular in the SSG crowd. It's written in Javascript and benefits from very wide support. The selection of themes available is pretty great. Note: 11ty has been renamed to Build Awesome, but it hasn't launched yet. When it does, there will be a paid pro version, but they have committed to continuing support for the open source free version as well.

  • Jekyll - The backend that powers Github Pages. Jekyll is also a well-loved SSG, built in Ruby and distributed as a Gem. You don't have to host via Github, but the close ties might give folks pause.

  • Aurora - Uses Python to generate a site. A little smaller with less support, but is focused on generating sites very fast so that you can do semi-live editing.

Site snippets, add-ons, etc

Contact Forms & Guest Books

  • Letterbird - A contact form by Good Enough. It's actually the same one I use!

  • Atabook - A basic Guest Book for your site, has manual approval and email alert options.

Counters & Analytics

  • FC2 Counter - A website access counter with a lot of styles to choose from

  • GoatCounter - A basic analytics engine for small websites. Also available as a self-hosted app.

  • Bearlytics - Simple analytics engine built by the same person who builds and maintains Bear Blog.

  • Smallcounter - A basic, small, embed-able visitor counter for your website.

Communities

  • MelonLand - Free - A Web-Revival project and community built around artists and how the internet used to be. Has some neat features around websites that can be edited by anyone or select groups of users as well as an active forum, minecraft server, and wiki.

  • 32-bit Cafe Free - An extensive online community that maintains Fediverse instances for Pixelfed and Mastodon, a git server using Forgejo, a FreshRSS instance, free email hosting, online docs via Etherpad, a Discord server, a forum, a tilde server, a pubnix, and even a community recipe book.

  • omg.lol - $20/yr - A community web services provider. The entry fee gets you a subdomain at (site).omg.lol with an email address, a basic website, a status log, a fediverse account on the omg.lol instance, a permanent url shortener, pastebin, access to the omg.lol Forgejo instance and some other goodies.

Distribution

  • Echofeed - A service that will keep an eye on your blog's RSS feed and automatically cross post your blog entries to social media for you. Supports Mastodon, Bluesky, Discord, and others.

Discovery

  • Ooh Directory - A manually curated blog directory separated by category.

  • A Website is a Room - A directory of posts from user-submitted sites.

  • Art Hive Studio Directory - A directory of sites from visual artists, including tags and filters.

  • The Big List of Personal Websites - A directory of user-submitted personal websites.

  • Blogroll.club - A curated directory of user-submitted blogs.

  • BlogScroll - A collection of blogs, personal sites and digital gardens maintained via GitHub repository.

  • Indie Web Directories - A directory of other indie web directories

  • IndieBlog - An indie blog aggregator that sends users to a random post from a random blog at the click of a button

  • IndieSeek Directory - A manually curated and edited directory of independent sites.

  • List-Me - An independent site directory with manual curation.

  • Nekoweb Districts - Topic-based categorization of sites hosted on NekoWeb.

  • Neocities Neighborhoods - A directory of sites hosted on Neocities based on a number of categories.

  • Ye Olde Blogroll - Over 1000 hand-picked and curated blogs that are actively updated.

  • Smooth Sailing Listings - A human-curated category-based listing site for webrings, cliques, blogs, roleplaying forums, and many other types of independent web spaces.

Social Media

  • Mastodon - An open source, federated microblogging service. Think Twitter but not full of fascists or bots. And also built in a way that allows communities to own their data. Based on the ActivityPub protocol.

  • Pixelfed - An ActivityPub compatible service that focuses on images and video instead of text posts.

  • Lemmy - A Reddit alternative based on ActivityPub.

  • Tildes - Another Reddit alternative that is open source and not based on AtivityPub.

Guides

About the author

TK

Writer, woodturner, photographer, podcaster, and game designer making cool things on the internet.

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