Welcome to earlobe calming: a collection of desperate, vulnerable, and collaborative acts.
This is a project proposed by Leigh Brown. Leigh was hosting their graduate thesis on peatlands on a squarespace website and asked for my help rebuilding their website independent of squarspace’s subscription-based web-hosting. This may sound like a huge task but its actually pretty easy if you know where to look — so in order to adapt the project for this feed, Leigh and I had the idea of putting together an audio-guide for migrating your own website. Leigh paid $175 for my help with the transfer and I’d highly recommend checking out their new website as it comes together – especially if you’re interested in queer ecology: the web address is aquaticresolutions.com and I’ve put it in the episode description as well. So, without further ado please enjoy this audio how-to entitled Not Brought To You By Squarespace.
Let’s start by breaking down in simple terms exactly how a website works. A website is essentially a folder full of documents living on a server, like your computer, that is connected to the internet. A domain name like aquaticresolutions.com is the code that tells your browser which server your website is hosted on and which folder to look in. When you host a website through Squarespace, WordPress, or Wix, you’re paying for space on their server, their proprietary website building software, and often to register your domain name. In Leigh’s case, they paid $150 for an year-long subscription to Squarespace’s services. Squarespace provides free domain registration for the first year but if Leigh was to renew, they’d have have to pay an additional cost to keep their website registered at aquaticresolutions.com. Building a website with a company like Squarespace is fairly easy and works for a lot of people but it constricts you to the kind of website Squarespace’s software can build and leaves your web presence and your data in the hands of a single company that could change their price at any time. So how can you reclaim ownership of your own webpage without setting up your own expensive server and teaching yourself to code.
Let me introduce you to the May First Movement Technology. According to their website, May First “is a non-profit membership organization advancing the strategic use and collective control of technology for local struggles, global transformation, and emancipation without borders.” They’re a web technology co-op and a sliding scale annual membership starting at $62.50 gives access to email servers, website hosting, and a whole host of additional technologies. And you’re not only paying for access – Leigh, myself, and the other May First members collectively own all the servers and technology we use and can therefore control what happens to our data and our web-presence.
So how do you do it? It really just takes three steps: the first is to sign up for May First at outreach.mayfirst.org/joinus, provide contact information and describe your reason for joining. Then someone at the coop we’ll get in touch to organize payment and make sure everything gets set up alright. The second step is to transfer your domain. If you don’t have a domain yet you can buy one at a website like namecheap.com. If you’re okay with something other than .com (like gabriel.town for instance) your domain can cost as little as $5 for the year. If you have a domain hosted with a provider like squarespace this can be tricky as they often charge a fee to transfer your domain elsewhere while you’re in a contract. This was Leigh’s issue and to get around payment they just let their contract expire and purchased aquaticresolutions.com on namecheap immediately after. Unless you have a very popular domain that might be snapped up by a bot, this should work alright. The last step, once you’ve purchased your domain, is to input May First’s DNS, or domain name server, on namecheap or wherever you’ve bought your domain name. The DNS is what directs a web browser to the server where your website lives. May First’s are a.ns.mayfirst.org and b.ns.mayfirst.org. Once that’s set BAM ! You’ve got full ownership of your website! Congratulations!
But, you may be thinking… I don’t know how to code, how do I build a website without Squarespace’s intuitive web building software? Never fear, open source software is here! Open Source technology is tech that has been made free for everyone to download and use, and on the May First control panel, you can automatically install WordPress, Drupal, or Backdrop by just clicking through the menu on the Web Application tab. You’ll also need to create a mySQL database and username and this is also easily done via the MayFirst control panel. And yes, the WordPress interface is open source and can be downloaded from wordpress.org, so there’s really no reason to pay them more money just to host your site on their servers. The three programs MayFirst makes available will do pretty much anything you need, but if you want to take a more hands on approach, I’m going to finish this how-to by telling you how to install the fun and flexible drag-and-drop webpage builder hotglue.
In order to make backstage edits to your website beyond what May First’s control panel is capable of, you need to use Secure File Transfer Protocol or SFTP. This is a program that allows you to securely transfer files back and forth between the server that hosts your website and your own computer. Cyberduck, which can be downloaded at cyberduck.io is a free program that allows you to do just this. All you need to do is login with your May First credentials and server name (May First’s servers are all charmingly named after iconic movement leaders like Hugo Chavez and Patrice Lumumba) and you’ll be greeted with a list of folders, one of which is titled web.
The web folder is what’s called a root directory, essentially its the first place a web browser looks when it visits your website. Any folders within the root directory are called subdirectories and show up as slashes in the domain name. So the folder I’ve named “earlobe” within the root directory for my own site can be accessed at gabriel.town/earlobe and includes all the code to run the Earlobe Calming site.
Hotglue is an open source webpage builder which you can download from hotglue.me. It was developed by the ingenious Danja Vasiliev and allows you to drag and drop images, text, files, and whatever you like to create your own completely unique website. Its essentially like building a website from scrapbooking. Installing hotglue, or any open source program, takes only four steps. First is to download the .zip file from hotglue.me and unzip it. Next, upload all the unzipped files using cyberduck directly into your root directly by dragging and dropping them into the file. Alternatively, you can upload the files into a subdirectory if you only want to use hotglue for a part of your website – for instance, my site runs with hotglue in the root directory, but gabriel.town/podcasts where I upload all my podcast episodes uses wordpress so I installed wordpress into a subdirectory folder named “podcasts.” The third step is to open the file named user-config.inc.php-dist and set a username and password by changing the text after ‘AUTH_USER’ and ‘AUTH_PASSWORD,’ which by default say ‘admin’ and ‘changeme’ respectively. This username and password is what you use to login to your site and edit it! The last step is to rename two files: the file you just edited should be renamed from user-confic.inc.php-dist to just user-config.inc.php and the file named htaccess-dist should be renamed .htaccess. Once that’s done you should be able to get started editing by typing your domain name and adding /edit into the web browser.
I hope this helps you get started on your collective online ownership journey! the process can be tricky at times but there’s a whole bunch of help to be found out there. WordPress.org, hotglue, and May First all have some very helpful tutorials and troubleshooting databases if you get stuck and this episode transcription is available if you want to look back at some specific part. May First also has an incredibly helpful team of volunteers that are super responsive when you have a website issue. I’d like to shout out JamieV who was beyond helpful when I got stuck installing hotglue on Leigh’s page in figuring out what my issue was and how to resolve it in a way that worked for me so don’t be afraid to ask for help, that’s what cooperatives are for after all.
Thanks to Leigh Brown for proposing this project, if you’d like to propose a project for earlobe calming you can do so at gabriel.town/earlobe and click on C for create. A special thank you to Travis Amiel who introduced me to May First and got me started on my own journey into online independence. The Mii channel theme I covered in this episode is copyright of Nintendo. Thank you so much for listening and thank you, as always, for your help.
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