Tags: indieweb

Automate your outgoing webmentions

I’ve been kicking the tyres on this great new tool from Remy. Give it a URL and it’ll find all the links in its h-entrys and automatically send webmentions to them. Very cool!

The documentation on the site is excellent, guiding you to the right solution for your particular needs. Read Remy’s announcement:

I’ve also tried very hard to get the documentation to be as welcoming as I can. I’ve tried to think about my dear visitor and what they want to do with the software, rather than type my typical developer approach to documentation - listing all the features and options.

Kicks Condor: The Web Finally Feels New Again

For me, I do find that Webmentions are really enhancing linking—by offering a type of bidirectional hyperlink. I think if they could see widespread use, we’d see a Renaissance of blogging on the Web. Webmentions are just so versatile—you can use them to commment, you an form ad-hoc directories with them, you can identify yourself to a wider community. I really feel like they are a useful modernization.

A wonky barter (Phil Gyford’s website)

I don’t know how we got to a point where chatting and sharing with friends means having to pick through adverts, and agreeing to being tracked and marketed at, and risk being exposed to, or abused by, terrible people. Our conversations and holiday snaps have become darkly marketed events. You could say this is a fair exchange but it feels wrong to me. The things being exchanged are too different, a kind of category error. It’s a wonky kind of barter in which I feel powerless and used. It’s not why I came here, to the internet.

The Problem With “Content”   – On my Om

My website has my words, my interviews, my photos, and my identity — what it doesn’t have, as far as I’m concerned, is “content.” Looking at it from the other side, for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, everything is “content” regardless of its provenance. Each creation is merely an object, only valuable for its ability to increase our time spent on their platforms, allowing them to sell more advertising.

Render Snarky Comments in Comic Sans—zachleat.com

Sounds like Zach had a great time at Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf:

I can’t really express how meaningful this experience was to me. An antithesis to the rat race of social media, IndieWebCamp was a roomful of kindred spirits that care about the web and their own websites and hosting their own content. It felt like the Google Reader days again, when everyone was blogging and writing on their own sites. I dunno if you can tell but I loved it.

He also made a neat little plug-in that renders negative comments in Comic Sans with mixed cased writing:

This isn’t intended to be a hot-take on Comic Sans. Instead it’s meant to change the tone of the negativity to make it sound like a clown is yelling at a kid’s birthday party.

mathieudutour/medium-to-own-blog: Switch from Medium to your own blog in a few minutes

Following on from Stackbit’s tool, here’s another (more code-heavy) way of migrating from Ev’s blog to your own site.

Khoi Vinh on How His Blog Amplified His Work and Career – Own Your Content

It’s hard to overstate how important my blog has been, but if I were to try to distill it down into one word, it would be: “amplifier.”

Khoi talks about writing on his own website.

I personally can’t imagine handing over all of my labor to a centralized platform where it’s chopped up and shuffled together with content from countless other sources, only to be exploited at the current whims of the platform owners’ volatile business models.

Medium | Stackbit

This is very handy! Export your data from Ev’s blog and then import it into a static site generator of your choice.

You may have noticed the recent movement of people looking to get off Medium. Most of us are motivated by a desire to own our content, have data portability and get more control over how/where our content is displayed and monetized. Most importantly many of us consider our blog/site to be a core part of our online identity and while Medium offers a fantastic writing experience it sacrifices other important values. Luckily there’s a modern approach to running your blog which aligns with these ideals, its called the JAMstack and its all around us.

Can “Indie” Social Media Save Us? | The New Yorker

This is a really great, balanced profile of the Indie Web movement. There’s thoughtful criticism alongside some well-deserved praise:

If we itemize the woes currently afflicting the major platforms, there’s a strong case to be made that the IndieWeb avoids them. When social-media servers aren’t controlled by a small number of massive public companies, the incentive to exploit users diminishes. The homegrown, community-oriented feel of the IndieWeb is superior to the vibe of anxious narcissism that’s degrading existing services.

Take Back Your Web - Tantek Çelik on Vimeo

Tantek’s barnstorming closing talk from Beyond Tellerrand. This is well worth 30 minutes of your time.

Own your domain. Own your content. Own your social connections. Own your reading experience. IndieWeb services, tools, and standards enable you to take back your web.

Eintrag “Take back your web – Tantek Çelik @ Beyond Tellerrand Conference, Düsseldorf 2019” beim Webrocker

Tom shares his thoughts on Tantek’s excellent closing talk at Beyond Tellerrand this week:

Yes, the message of this rather sombre closing talk of this year’s Beyond Tellerrand Conference Düsseldorf is important. Watch it. And then go out, take care of yourself and others, away from the screen. And then come back and publish your own stuff on your own site. Still not convinced? ok, then, please read Matthias Ott’s great article (published on his own site btw), and then start using your own site.

IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2019 | 2 | Flickr

Today was a good day …and here are the very good photos.

Into the Personal-Website-Verse · Matthias Ott – User Experience Designer

There is one alternative to social media sites and publishing platforms that has been around since the early, innocent days of the web. It is an alternative that provides immense freedom and control: The personal website. It’s a place to write, create, and share whatever you like, without the need to ask for anyone’s permission.

A wonderful and inspiring call to arms for having your own website—a place to express yourself, and a playground, all rolled into one.

Building and maintaining your personal website is an investment that is challenging and can feel laborious at times. Be prepared for that. But what you will learn along the way does easily make up for all the effort and makes the journey more than worthwhile.

Brendan Dawes - Permission to Write Stuff

A beautiful post by Brendan, comparing the ease of publishing on the web to the original Flip camera:

Right now there’s a real renaissance of people getting back to blogging on their own sites again. If you’ve been putting it off, think about the beauty and simplicity of that red button, press it, and try and help make the web the place it was always meant to be.

Home Page — Doug Block

There’s a new reissue of the twenty year old documentary on Justin Hall’s links.net and the early days of the web.

A Webring Kit | Max Böck - Frontend Web Developer

Inspired by Charlie, here’s a straightforward bit of code for starting or joining your own webring.

Goodbye Google Analytics, Hello Fathom - daverupert.com

Dave stops feeding his site’s visitors data to Google. I wish more people (and companies) would join him.

There’s also an empowering #indieweb feeling about owning your analytics too. I pay for the server my analytics collector runs on. It’s on my own subdomain. It’s mine.

Webrings | sonniesedge

Charlie muses on ol’ fashioned web rings …and the cultural needs they fulfilled.

We suffer from homogenous dirge in most of our contemporary web presences. Having a personal website has become a rarer and rarer thing in this time of social media profile pages.

However, recent months have seen a surge in personal websites and blogging amongst some members of the web tech community. This is something that we urgently need to encourage!

Nothing Fails Like Success – A List Apart

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

Some Unsolicited Blogging Advice - daverupert.com

When you greet a stranger, look at his shoes.

Keep your money in your shoes.

Put your trouble behind.

When you greet a stranger, look at her hands.

Keep your money in your hands.

Put your travel behind.