A wonderful look at the kind of links we didn’t get on the World Wide Web.
From the memex and Xanadu right up to web mentions, this ticks all my boxes!
(And can I just say, it’s so much fun to explore all of Maggie Appleton’s site …or should I say web garden.)
Amber describes how she implemented webmentions on her (static) site. More important, she describes why!
A wonderful introduction to the indie web—Ana really conveys her sense of excitement!
A great introduction to indie web building blocks from Jamie.
A way for you to comment (anonymously, if you wish) on any post that accepts webmentions. So you can use this to respond to posts on adactio.com if you want.
This is good to know! Because of a bug in Google App Engine, Brid.gy won’t work for sites using Brotli compression on HTML.
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.
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.
Using IntersectionObserver to lazy load images—very handy for webmention avatars.
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.
Day one of Indie Web Camp Berlin is done, and it was great! Here’s Charlie’s recap of the sessions she attended.
A good half-hour presentation by Stephen Rushe on the building blocks of the indie web. You can watch the video or look through the slides.
I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS.
This is a great description by Chris of the problems that webmentions aim to solve.
If you use Twitter, your friend Alice only uses Facebook, your friend Bob only uses his blog on WordPress, and your pal Chuck is over on Medium, it’s impossible for any one of you to @mention another. You’re all on different and competing platforms, none of which interoperate to send these mentions or notifications of them. The only way to communicate in this way is if you all join the same social media platforms, resulting in the average person being signed up to multiple services just to stay in touch with all their friends and acquaintances.
Given the issues of privacy and identity protection, different use cases, the burden of additional usernames and passwords, and the time involved, many people don’t want to do this. Possibly worst of all, your personal identity on the internet can end up fragmented like a Horcrux across multiple websites over which you have little, if any, control.
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.
Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.
Chris gives a step-by-step walkthrough of enabling webmentions on a Wordpress site.
A plug-in for Craft CMS for receiving webmentions. I’ll have to tell Charlotte about this (she’s using Craft for her site).
or: how I learnt to stop worrying and love the blog.
This is a really nice introduction to the basics of the Indie Web …with nice illustrations too.