Small independent pieces, loosely joined

It was fascinating at Indie Web Camp Germany to see how much could be accomplished by taking some pre-existing small things and loosely joining them.

For example, there are already webmention and micropub plug-ins for quite a few CMSs. If you’re using Wordpress or Jekyll, you can get pretty far pretty quickly by making use of what people have already provided. And after that Indie Web Camp, you can add Drupal and Kirby to the list of CMSs with readily-available components.

I was somewhat surprised—and very pleased—that people made use of some little PHP snippets that I had posted as gists. I deliberately posted them as gists to show how minimal and barebones the code could be—no need for a whole project, or installers, or dockering the node to yeoman the gulp, or whatever it is the cool kids do these days.

This modular approach also worked well for interface elements. Glenn and Aaron worked on separate projects to create small JavaScript enhancements for posting interfaces. Assemble enough of these enhancements together and before you know it, you’ve got something approaching Medium.

By the end of the second day, I was amazed to see how much progress people had made. Like Johannes says:

I was pretty impressed by how much people got done. At the final demo session, everyone had something he or she had done to update their website – although I’m pretty sure that the end of this event will not be the end of their efforts to try and own their stuff online.

It was quite inspiring. In fact, I think I’ve been inspired to have an Indie Web Camp in Brighton. I’m thinking we could have it at the same time as Indie Web Camp Portland, which is on July 11th and 12th.

Save the dates.