From Spotify running ICE recruitment ads to Bandcamp's union-busting, navigating streaming options as a musician can feel like an ethical minefield. In this workshop we'll take matters into our own hands, using a static site generator called Faircamp to build a simple website where fans can browse, stream and download your music.
This workshop is geared toward total beginners – no coding or website building experience necessary!
If you want to follow along during the workshop and end up with a fully-functional site at the end of the evening, there is a little bit of homework!
Please gather and bring these things with you:
You're still totally welcome to come to the workshop and see how it's done if you can't get all your shit together! The contents of this workshop will eventually be turned into a written guide for The Counterforce. During and after the workshop, I'll be soliciting feedback from attendees in order to make the guide as easy to follow and foolproof as possible.
aka putting the site online so anyone in the world with internet access can view it. We'll go over the how-to of this stuff in the workshop, but since there's money involved you may want to think about it a bit beforehand:
In my guide/workshop, I'm recommending using a paid Neocities account to host your site. Neocities is a commercial hosting service that is very popular among smallweb/indie web hobbyists and lends itself well to learning and tinkering – similar to geocities, if you're old enough to remember that era! You might have noticed that this very site you're looking at is hosted on a Neocities page :) Neocities does offer a free plan, but it doesn't let you host the types of code/files we need in order to have functional music streaming and downloading on our site. The paid plan costs $5 USD a month, HOWEVER! One paid account has enough storage and bandwith to host many, many sites, each with their own YOURBAND.neocities.org URL. So if cost is a barrier, you may want to get organized with some friends (before or after the workshop) to split the costs of one paid account between a few bands/projects.
If you have a different hosting provider that you already like or use, you're welcome to use that instead.
Optional: Custom Domain. A custom domain means people can go to https://recall.rocks rather than https://recallhcpunk.neocities.org to find your site. If you already have a custom domain for your band or yourself that you want to use, bring your domain login info to the workshop with you and I'll show you how to set it up with Neocities. If you want to look into getting a custom domain, I use Porkbun but there are others. You can probably find something suitable for around $10-20/year, but watch out for suspiciously cheap domains with high yearly renewal fees!
Questions? Email me.
I'll add more resources and info to this page as the workshop gets closer.