Internet Homesteading

Course Goals

A website of your own is a wonderful thing. It's a place to anchor yourself on the internet, and to get the most out of all the network offers. This course is designed to help you build a website using tools you understand and can manipulate to make it your own.

You could make a digital garden, or a blog, or a portfolio. During the course we'll build up the infrastructure, the writing habits, and the code, neccesary to get it working.

Who is this for?

You don't have to be a "programmer" but you shouldn't be afraid to get your hands dirty with some code. Similarly, while you don't have to be a "writer", you shouldn't be afraid of doing some writing. We'll be doing both as we build our internet homes.

You should also be comfortable setting your own goals and making decisions. This course doesn't prescribe how your webiste should look, or a set of tools for you to use (though we'll definitely have suggestions!).

Length / Commitment

The course is 4 weeks long, and meets once a week for an hour. During each week there are two optional two hour sessions:

1. A Gardening Club: A time to create for your website, writing blog posts, collecting links, or anything of the sort.
2. Pair Programming: Learners come with a goal or a problem with their code and pair up to solve them. At the hour pairs switch.

Each week you'll also write 250-500 words to have something to add to your site.

Syllabus / Schedule

Week 1: Gathering Materials

During the video call:

• We'll introduce ourselves and go over the goals and structure of our course. Everyone will talk briefly about their goals for their website.
• We'll go over the different options for building your site, like building totally from scratch to using an exisitng static site generator.
• Finally we'll all create topics in the forum to track our development.

During the week: gathering materials to work with, in the form of software and inspiration. Throughout the week you should gather websites you find inspiring for whatever reason, and post them in your development log.

You also need to decide what software you're going to use. The goal of this course is for you to have a set of tools you understand, but the specifics are up to you. Do you want to build everything from scratch? Or do you want to use an existing static site generator?

Finally you need to write 250-500 words for the first of your site. It could be a manifesto for your site, a story, a daily log, or anything really!

Week 2: Putting a stake in the ground

During the video call:

• We'll talk about the websites that inspire people, and then go over the software they decided to use.
• We'll discuss patterns we see in both the websites and the technical architectures.
• We'll talk about what options there are for hosting your website, and the different tradeoffs.

During the week: the goal is to create first page for your site. You'll take the writing you did last week and turn it into HTML using the software you picked out! Then you'll put it online using one of the hosting options we discuss on the call.

Week 3: Laying things out

During the video call: We'll check in with everyone's pages, and talk about any problems we ran into along the way. Folks will screen share and go over both the output and the "code" of their site. Then, we'll talk about different ways to organize our websites.

During the week: The goal is to implement multiple pages for your site, and have a layout persist across all of them. You can

Week 4: House Warming!

During the video call: This is the final call! We'll look over everyone's development threads and talk about the joys and challenges of putting together our site. Then we'll talk about everyone's future plans for their internet homes.

Artifacts

You'll leave this course with a finished website live on the internet, and the knowledge for how to maintain it over time.