How tildes serve user content. The model is the same across town, pink, club, green, envs, and sdf.

Anything dropped in is live immediately. No deploy step, no build queue: the server is just a web server reading your home directory.

The thing everyone forgets:

chmod 755 ~                           # home must be traversable
chmod 755 ~/public_html               # dirs: 755
chmod 644 ~/public_html/index.html    # files: 644
chmod 664 file                        # communal file: group-write
chmod 775 dir                         # communal dir

The symptom of getting this wrong is a 403 Forbidden on a file that definitely exists. It is always permissions.

Edit locally, push with rsync:

rsync -avhP --delete ~/site/ host:public_html/
rsync -avhP ~/site/ you@tilde.town:public_html/

• –delete mirrors exactly. Preview with -n (dry run) first.
• sshfs works too (sshfs host:public_html ~/mnt), but rsync does not depend on connection quality.
• On the host, everything is editable live: ssh in, edit ~/public_html/index.html in nano or vim, done.

• ttbp (“feels”): the town diary tool. One plaintext entry per day, renders to ~/public_html/feels/ and gopher. See tilde.town Tools.
• town planet: the blog aggregator. List your feed URL in ~/.planetfeeds to join it. See RSS by Hand for making a feed.
• town square: /town/square/public_html maps to tilde.town/square. Shared and world-writable. See Town Square.
• guestbook.txt: convention for leaving notes. Link it from your index so visitors know it exists.

• Hand-written or lightly generated HTML. Heavy JS sites feel alien on a pubnix.
• Link to your other tildes. Webring and badge culture is alive: 88×31 buttons are the convention.
• robots.txt and a favicon are cheap politeness.
• A .plan file (what finger you@host shows) is the old-school status line. See .plan and .project.

• tilde.town
• A Tilde Account
• bashblog
• Minimal Static Site Generators
• Gopher · Gemini
• Return to wiki home