Here’s Zach’s style guide. But the real reason I’m linking to this is his lovely description of having a personal website that grows over time:
As my own little corner of the web unceremoniously turned ten years old this year, it’s really starting to feel more like a garden than a piece of software. I certainly enjoy tending to it. I can plant what I like and with proper care it can grow into something useful.
Alex Kearney looks back on two years of owning her own data.
With a fully functional site up and running, I focused on my own needs and developed features to support how I wanted to use my site. In hind-sight, that’s probably the most indie thing I could’ve done, and how I should’ve started my indieweb adventure.
This really resonates with me.
One of the motivating features for joining the indieweb was the ability to keep and curate the content I create over time.
Terrific post!
Here’s to two more years.
Drew has been adding webmention support not just to his own site, but any site using Perch. This account of his process is a really good overview of webmentions.
You can help support the indie web community with their fairly modest costs: about $200 each month for hosting, domain names, and the like. Also:
We want IndieWeb events to be as accessible as possible, regardless of personal barriers. Because of this, we have offered a travel scholarship fund in the past to underrepresented groups thanks to our generous sponsors. Your support will allow us to continue to offer and expand this scholarship fund, helping make sure that IndieWebCamps represent everyone.
Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.
A pretty good summary of some key indie web ideas.
I was just talking about micropub …and now it’s officially a W3C spec. Great work!
If you’re building a blogging platform, you can allow your users choose from a wide variety of posting clients by implementing the Micropub spec.
If you’re building a posting client and want it to work with many different server backends instead of hard-coding it to Twitter or other proprietary APIs, implement the Micropub spec and you’ll quickly have people eager to start using the app!
Amber’s report from Indie Web Camp Nuremberg last week. I was blown away by how much she got done in one day.
This really resonates with me. Tim Bray duly notes that people are writing on Medium, and being shunted towards native apps, and that content is getting centralised at Facebook and other hubs, and then he declares:
But I don’t care.
Same.
Anyhow, I’m not going away.
Same.
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a Wordpress site.
Ethan wrote about container queries on his website. Paul wrote his counter-argument on his website. Now Ethan responds. It’s fun to watch two gentlemen engage in civilised discourse.
Blogs, man. They’re gonna big, I tells ya.
What an excellent idea! A weekly round-up in audio form of indie web and homebrew website news. Nice and short.
It strikes me that Garrett’s site has become a valuable record of the human condition with its mix of two personal stories—one relating to his business and the other relating to his health—both of them communicated clearly through great writing.
Have a read back through the archive and I think you’ll share my admiration.
I can relate to what Rachel describes here—I really like using my own website as a playground to try out new technologies. That’s half the fun of the indie web.
I had already decided to bring my content back home in 2017, but I’d also like to think about this idea of using my own site to better demonstrate and play with the new technologies I write about.
Aaron documents how he posts to his website through his Amazon Echo. No interface left behind.
Here’s an interesting Kickstarter project: a book about owning your notes (and syndicating them to Twitter) to complement the forthcoming micro.blog service.
Ethan redesigned. It’s lovely.
And now that the new site’s live, I realize I’d like to keep working on it. I’m not just feeling excited to see where it goes from here: as modest as it is, I’ve made something I’m proud of.
I have so much admiration for Jason Kottke’s dedication (or sheer bloodymindedness)—he’s been diligently writing and sharing weird and wonderful stuff on his own website for so long. I’m more than happy to support him in that.
Whereas before content used to be spread out on numerous domains in numerous ways, content now mostly makes its home on the three domains that are most hostile to thoughtful human discussion: Twitter, Medium, and Facebook.
So what? you may ask..
Think about how many times you’ve tweeted. Or written or commented on a Facebook post. Or started a Medium draft. These are all our words, locked in proprietary platforms that controls not only how our message is displayed, but how we write it, and even more worrying, how we think about it.
Andy is sticking with the indie web.
Here, I control my words. Nobody can shut this site down, run annoying ads on it, or sell it to a phone company. Nobody can tell me what I can or can’t say, and I have complete control over the way it’s displayed. Nobody except me can change the URL structure, breaking 14 years of links to content on the web.
I second that emotion.