Tags: personal

IndieWebifying my website: part 1, the why & how – AltPlatform

Richard MacManus begins to document the process of making his website part of the indie web.

The IndieWeb Movement Will Help People Control Their Own Web Presence?

A pretty good summary of some key indie web ideas.

GarrettDimon.com

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.

It’s more than just the words

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.

Thread. — Ethan Marcotte

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.

Offline content with service workers · MadebyMike

This is a really great step-by-step walkthrough of adding a service worker to a website. Mike mentions the gotchas he encountered along the way, and describes how he incrementally levelled up the functionality.

If you’ve been going through a similar process, please write it down and share it like this!

Megnut – I’ve been thinking a lot

Sixteen years on, this still rings true.

I realized there are dot-com people and there are web people. Dot-com people work for start-ups injected with large Silicon Valley coin, they have options, they talk options, they dream options. They have IPOs. They’re richer after four months of “web” work than many web people who’ve been doing it since the beginning. They don’t have personal sites. They don’t want personal sites. They don’t get personal sites. They don’t get personal. Web people can tell you the first site they ever saw, they can tell you the moment they knew: This, This Is It, I Will Do This. And they pour themselves into the web, with stories, with designs, with pictures.

Of the Web • Kyle Gach

I’ve been on the web for most of my life, but, without a site to call home, I haven’t been of the web for far too long.

An invitation to bring back your personal site

I invite you not just to follow along here as I expand into topics beyond design and technology, but to start your own personal blog up again if you’ve been neglecting it for a while. I’m really interested in the things you are passionate about. I want to learn from you.

Peaceful Reflection

Paul takes a look back at a time in his life one decade ago. This is a great piece of personal writing.

No one will ever read this but

There’s something so beautifully, beautifully webbish about this: readings of blog posts found through a search for “no one will ever read this.”

Listen to all of them.

Blogging Known Style

Companies go out of business, get bought and change policies, so what if you had one place to originate all of your content then publish it out to those great social services? And hey, why not pull comments from those services back to your original post?

That’s the idea behind Indie Web Camp: have your own website be the canonical source of what your publish. But right now, getting all of the moving parts up and running requires a fair dollop of tech-savviness. That’s where Known comes in:

It’s similar to the WordPress model: you can create a blog on their servers, or you can download the software and host it on your own.

This post is a good run-down of what’s working well with Known, and what needs more work.

15 Lessons from 15 Years of Blogging - Anil Dash

I’d go along with pretty much everything Anil says here. Wise words from someone who’s been writing on their own website for fifteen years (congratulations!).

Link to everything you create elsewhere on the web. And if possible, save a copy of it on your own blog. Things disappear so quickly, and even important work can slip your mind months or years later when you want to recall it. If it’s in one, definitive place, you’ll be glad for it.

Lillian Karabaic: The Indie Web is the new Zines

I really like this comparison:

As a zinester and zine librarian, I see the Indie Web as a pretty direct correlation to 1980’s and 1990’s zine culture. The method of production may be completely different (photocopiers and direct mail vs web posts and servers) but the goals are almost identical – controlling the way in which your message and identity are displayed, crafted, and stored while avoiding censorship that corporate media might impose. The end goal of both zine and indieweb technologies is ownership of your own identity without a filter.

But there also challenges:

The key issue right now for diverse populations utilizing the Indie Web is accessibility. As long as the tools for creating & controlling your own identity online are still relatively obtuse & technical to implement, we won’t have great diversity within the Indie Web.

Hello, Again — Craig Mod

Craig has redesigned and pulled various bits of his writing from around the web into his own site, prompting some thoughts on the indie web.

The Personal Blog – AVC

There is something about the personal blog, yourname.com, where you control everything and get to do whatever the hell pleases you. There is something about linking to one of those blogs and then saying something. It’s like having a conversation in public with each other. This is how blogging was in the early days. And this is how blogging is today, if you want it to be.

Here I Go Again On My Own : Elizabeth Spiers

In the days before comments on blogs, you could generally have a thoughtful conversation online without everything degenerating into madness and chaos simply because responding to a post required that you wrote a post on your own blog and linked back. This created a certain level of default accountability because if someone wanted to flame you, they had to do it on their own real estate, and couldn’t just crap all over yours anonymously.

The shoebox - a manifesto for transmat.io

Glenn eloquently gives his reasons for building Transmat:

When I was a child, my brothers and I all had a shoebox each. In these we kept our mementoes. A seashell from a summer holiday where I played for hours in the rock pools, the marble from the schoolyard victory against a bully and a lot of other objects that told a story.