I made a selfhosted 'Nekoweb-like' site editor for my kid!

[Dan Q]

Imagine my pride when my 12-year-old told me that she wanted to start learning HTML and CSS and begin making a website of her own. But where would I recommend that she host it?

My first thought was Nekoweb, because its "Nekode" text editor is amazingly easy-to-use and a great way to start making sites without having to think about the "hard stuff" until she's ready to. But it seemed silly to recommend that she host a static site elsewhere when I've got a fibre connection right to the NAS in my own home.

So I basically copied (some of) what Nekoweb do: I pointed a domain and a subdomain at our house, told Caddy to serve a static site directory for the former, and told it to proxy OpenVSCode Server from the latter. And it all... just worked. Now she's got a web address she can go to and edit/upload files and it instantly publishes to her site.

It took just 17 lines of Caddy configuration, one Docker command, and a tiny bit of DNS configuration and this just... worked. I'm so pleased, my kiddo is happy that she can publish quickly and easily, and because it's on infrastructure I control it'd be trivially easy to extend it if she later wanted to do PHP, or use the shell to run a static site generator, or integrate some kind of source control with a continuous deployment pipeline, or anything else. Win, win, win.

Anyway: I wrote a short blog post explaining exactly how I did it, if anybody's interested.

[rnottelovesowls]

that's so sweet, dan! well done!

shout-out to all parents who support their kids in their personal projects 

[Cabbage]

So cool! It's great seeing stuff like that, bookmarking the blog post in case I ever wanna tinker with something like that down the road. Appreciate the point towards Nekoweb, too, haven't heard of it before this thread.

[lakes]

that's so sweet :0

[dogbrain]

this is so sweet and cute if i was your kid i would feel so loved and encouraged, great job on this!

[Loebas]

This is so sweet to read. And also awesome to hear your kid wants to make his own website.