Build a Website in an Hour: Meetup in Review

A page for listing bookmarks written by hand. A personal fanfic home page. A web tool for working with PNG file headers. What do all of these three things have in common? They were built in an hour at the "Build a Website in an Hour" meetup hosted yesterday. You can find links to all of the creations on the project wiki page.

A few weeks ago, I proposed the idea for a timed challenge: build a website in an hour. I thought this would be a fun exercise in which we could learn new skills, practice existing ones, and, in the process, create something that we can share with each other. This dream was realised today, when eight people joined me in building a website in an hour.

Prior to the meetup, I invited everyone to think of an idea to build. This was crucial for ensuring that time could be spent building rather than thinking about what to build.

At the beginning of the meetup, we all introduced ourselves, then I shared the formalities about how the meetup would work. Everyone had one hour to build a website, after which point there would be an opportunity to present what you have made. Participants could use the tools they prefer, from site generators like WordPress and micro.blog to programming languages like Python.

I started a timer. 60:00. 59:59. The clock was ticking.

I went into the meetup with an idea that I wasn't sure was possible with the technology I was going to use. The end result was to be a game that is a combination of a scavenger hunt and I, Spy, built using the CLIP computer vision model. I thus saw the time as room for experiment. I knew that if my idea didn't work out, I could always say I learned something that I could use to guide me in future projects. After some thought and experimentation, my idea did work. I was excited.

We were quiet for most of the hour. I interjected with a few reminders on time. If you have ever seen the show Masterchef, my time reminders were in a similar vein. 20 minutes. 10 minutes. 2 minutes. Reminders grew in frequency closer to the end of the event.

After the hour, we had presentations. All of us presented what we had made. Projects ranged from the three mentioned at the beginning of this post all the way to a web page served over the Gemini protocol and an offline-friendly website for listening to audio content. I loved the discussion that went on during the presentations. We asked each other questions about how our projects worked. I learned new things about CSS, service workers, and more.

You can see all of the projects that were presented in the archived meetup notes.

At 9am PT (5pm UK time) our ideas were just ideas. After introductions and an hour of building, we all had websites we could share with each other. Some were even published online! (Mine isn't quite ready yet, but I hope to publish it soon!) Seeing so many new websites was exciting.

In 60 minutes, you can start to build something for the web: a blog, a fan fiction page, a bookmarks page, a tool you would find useful. I hope to schedule another one of these events in the future, inviting more people to join us to build websites in an hour. I will blog when we schedule another "Build a Website in an Hour" meetup.