End-to-end tutorials: how to set up an Indie Website with UBOS

The Indieweb community has long spearheaded many of the same principles behind UBOS: users should be in control of their online lives, creators should own their content and data, not the big websites, and the like.

Over the years, thousands of Indie Websites have sprung up all over the world support the IndieWeb standards and conventions, such as publishing your content on your own site and syndicating it everywhere else (POSSE).

Unfortunately, so far setting up an Indie Website required substantial server administration skills, largely limiting the IndieWeb to geeky Generation 1 users.

Enter UBOS. Because UBOS makes systems administration substantially simpler, it enables people with less-hardcore tech skills to run Indie Websites as well.

So we published two new tutorials on the IndieWeb.org site:

• Set up an Indie Website using WordPress on Amazon Web Services
• Set up an Indie Website using Known on Amazon Web Services

These are end-to-end tutorials covering all steps that are needed, with a screenshot for almost every step. Here’s the outline of the first tutorial:

• Find and purchase a great domain name for your site
• Sign up for an Amazon Web Services account
• Set up a new Amazon cloud server, and log in (that’s the part that has UBOS in it)
• Set up DNS so your new domain name points to your website
• Install WordPress and the Indie Web plugins
• Configure WordPress and the Indie Web plugins to your liking
• Write your first WordPress post and syndicate it out

So … join the Indie Web? It’s become a lot easier and better documented.