Indie Web Camp Brighton 2016 is done and dusted. It’s hard to believe that it’s already in its fifth(!) year. As with previous years, it was a lot of fun.
The first day—the discussions day—covered a lot of topics. I led a session on service workers, where we brainstormed offline and caching strategies for personal websites.
There was a design session looking at alternatives to simply presenting everything in a stream. Some great ideas came out of that. And there was a session all about bookmarking and linking. That one really got my brain whirring with ideas for the second day—the making/coding day.
I’ve learned from previous Indie Web Camps that a good strategy for the second day is to have two tasks to tackle: one that’s really easy (so you’ve at least got that to demo at the end), and one that’s more ambitious. This time, I put together a list of potential goals, and then ordered them by difficulty. By the end of the day, I managed to get a few of them done.
First off, I added a small bit of code to my bookmarking flow, so that any time I link to something, I send a ping to the Internet Archive to grab a copy of that URL. So here’s a link I bookmarked to one of Remy’s blog posts, and here it is in the Wayback Machine—see how the date of storage matches the date of my link.
The code to do that was pretty straightforward. I needed to hit this endpoint:
http://web.archive.org/save/{url}
I also updated my bookmarklet for posting links so that, if I’ve highlighted any text on the page I’m linking to, that text is automatically pasted in to the description.
I tweaked my webmentions a bit so that if I receive a webmention that has a type of bookmark-of, that is displayed differently to a comment, or a like, or a share. Here’s an example of Aaron bookmarking one of my articles.
The more ambitious plan was to create an over-arching /tags area for my site. I already have tag-based navigation for my journal and my links:
But until this weekend, I didn’t have the combined view:
I didn’t get around to adding pagination. That’s something I should definitely add, because some of those pages get veeeeery long. But I did spend some time adding sparklines. They can be quite revealing, especially on topics that were hot ten years ago, but have faded over time, or topics that have becoming more and more popular with each year.
All in all, a very productive weekend.
