Well Gedacht Publishing

News & Updates

Self-hosting

The second workshop in our Post-Publishing Digital Toolkit program will take place on the 22nd of February, between 13:00-19:00 at offline, Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin.

We will present and discuss self-hosting methods for artists and others, as well as how to revive the usage of RSS feeds, and will look at some nice free and open-source software for digital publishing.

At the workshop, we want to share with you our quest to break free from the ever-enshittifying products, services, and platforms run by the oligarchic big tech and move towards self-hosting our data, websites, and services at Well Gedacht Publishing.

To register, please send an email to [email protected]

Self-hosting

Program:

  • How to self-host a static website at home, using a cheap mini-PC, Raspberry Pi, or an old laptop? (2:30 hours)
  • 30 minutes break
  • Using RSS in 2025! Is RSS also a publishing tool? Advocating wider use of RSS and Atom feeds today as an alternative to oligarchic social media, Spotify, Youtube, etc. (or Big Social). We'll show how to use it daily, its obstacles, and how to overcome them. (40 minutes)
  • Trying out Pandoc to generate websites from text files. We will convert files into one another, doc, epub, HTML, and markdown for instant, easy, and self-hosted digital publishing. (1:20 hour)
  • Looking at alternative (to big tech) digital publishing platforms and tools for specific publishing needs (40 minutes)

We would also like to learn about your experiences, existing solutions for avoiding big tech or propriety software, and ideas on digital autonomy models. These could include examples from your practice or could be collective practices.

After the workshop, we want to open it up to everyone who may wish to join us for a drink. It will be a casual meet-up for people interested in self-hosting and self-publishing and questioning the hyper-comfortable tools and platforms on the market; you are more than invited to join and/or contribute to our wiki Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit!

Self-hosting

Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit is a project exploring how to overcome the limitations of digital publishing today, on social media or elsewhere online, and aims to advocate self-hosting methods for artists and artists' book publishers. All graphic design in this project is done by Fadi Houmani. Stay tuned for the launch of our project wiki. PPDPT is funded by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture's Innovation Fund for Digital Development of the Cultural Sector.

https://publishing.wellgedacht.com/

Declarations

Well Gedacht Publishing is hosting a two-day workshop with the research group Declarations on the 24th and 25th of January between 11-18:00 at Offline, Lichtenrader Str. 49, 12049 Berlin.

Declarations is an ongoing artistic research project into the CSS web standard's visual, poetic & linguistic materiality and its echoes on design and artistic practices.

CSS shapes with words, it can tell browsers, phones, apps, computers, eBooks, printed books, and desktop environments how information is displayed: how text flows, spaces are divided, typography is materialized, and different planes are layered. It takes care of color, sizing, depth, movement, animation, responsiveness, and (to some extent) accessibility. Every “sentence” of the CSS language is called a declaration.

Declarations

publish style ↻ style publishing

Early web publishing platforms like Geocities, Myspace, or Tumblr gave their users tools for customization. Contemporary platforms like X, Instagram, and TikTok have limited and homogenized the format and shape of the content. If websites are “an articulation of form and content,” the interplay between those two concepts breaks out of the idea that the visual/interactive outcome of publishing can be “solved by experts” into framework-induced smooth templated spaces.

In this workshop, helped by a custom DIY browser extension and open-source tools, we inspect online publishing platforms and question our agency as individuals and collectivities on the web through storytelling, commenting, critiquing, degrading, improving, and transforming websites into a poetic medium. Style sheets are ambiguous documents: they're declaring visual spaces, but they can also be seen as standalone literary pieces or tools. By claiming back this layer of customization, we not only style publishing but also publish style—by making our style sheet an available hosted document, a companion to the HTML page.

“My favorite aspect of websites is their duality: they're both subject and object at once. In other words, a website creator becomes both author and architect simultaneously.”

— Laurel Schwulst, My website is a shifting house next to a river of knowledge. What could yours be? (2018)

“In today's highly commercialized web of multinational corporations, proprietary applications, read-only devices, search algorithms, Content Management Systems, WYSIWYG editors, and digital publishers it becomes an increasingly radical act to hand-code and self-publish experimental web art and writing projects.”

— J. R. Carpenter, A Handmade Web (2012)

The workshop will be facilitated by Doriane Timmermans, Clara Pasteau, and Vinciane Dahéron. Please bring your laptops and digital publishing ideas such as texts, sketches, image collections, etc. Prior CSS knowledge is not required, although some basic knowledge would help you to get through. There will be breaks in between and food for lunch. Participation is free of charge; places are limited.

To register, please send an email to [email protected]

This is the first of the two workshop series as part of the project “Post Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit,” where we research and advocate the use of free/libre and open source software and more autonomous ways of digital publishing in a broader sense. The second workshop will be on the 21st and 22nd of February. There will soon be another post about that.

Declarations

Post-Platform Digital Publishing Toolkit is a project exploring how to overcome the limitations of digital publishing today, on social media or elsewhere online, and aims to advocate self-hosting methods for artists and artists' book publishers. All graphic design in this project is done by Fadi Houmani. Stay tuned for the launch of our project wiki. PPDPT is funded by the Berlin Senate Department of Culture's Innovation Fund for Digital Development of the Cultural Sector.

https://publishing.wellgedacht.com/