Good job y'all. You effectively decentralized the term "decentralize" to the point it doesn't mean anything in particular anymore.

Marty makes a quirky grin while staring into his phone

It looks like I will be speaking at IndieWeb Summit! Specifically, I’ll be giving a keynote about how to “Own Your Mobile Experience”.

As a long-time enthusiast for these tiny computers we carry, I try to make most of the things I can do online into things I can do on my phone or tablet. That turns out to be… a lot of things.

I’ll probably keep the technical details light, other than naming specific IndieWeb building blocks that each piece relies on. I plan to make a (set of?) posts on my site explaining the plumbing, afterwards.

With just about a week and a half left to plan my ~10-15 minute set of demos, here are some things I am thinking of discussing / demoing.

  • Reading! With an indie reader setup based on Microsub and the Indigenous iOS app.
    • Including following folks on Instagram and Twitter with the help of Granary
  • Replying and responding to things I read directly on my site via Indigenous and Micropub.
  • Posting my own notes and photos with Indigenous and Micropub
  • Seeing notifications on my devices when someone posts a response to my own posts.
  • Doing so many things with Shortcuts
    • Save articles to read later (similar to IndiePaper)
    • Save podcasts to listen later (via huffduffer.com)
    • Edit posts on my site and my private notes site via the Drafts app
    • Upload images and other files to my site
    • Track what I read (a Shortcut that extracts info from goodreads.com to post to my site)
    • Track what I eat / drink
    • Post iOS Live Photos as looping videos
  • Cheat a bit using external services
    • Checkins with Swarm go to my site via ownyourswarm.p3k.io
    • Podcast listening history with the Overcast app goes to my site via a script and the Overcast “All data” export
  • And other more exotic stuff that technically uses web apps but work well on mobile:
    • Syndicating to Twitter and updating my post with the syndication URL thanks to micropublish.net
    • Post silly animated GIF responses with kapowski.schmarty.net

Obviously this is too many things to demo in ~15 minutes. So, I’m looking for feedback!

What things on this list do you care to see most?

What things do you already do with mobile apps or social silos that you’d like to do on your website?

(Posted from an iPad mini, composed using Drafts, Micropub’d via Indigenous)

What things do you do with your website that you wished worked on mobile?

#indieweb #mobile #ownyourdata #IWS2019

I had a couple extra hours last night before the scheduled server upgrade. Used the time to work on the book and made a bunch of progress, including editing the transcript of my audio interview with the IndieWeb co-founders last year.

Though YMMV with that - people have run into some 500 errors. I think we are moving away from that on indiewebify.me in favor of using Telegraph (and maybe webmention.app, too!)

Interacting with Twitter from my Own Site

#micropub #how-to #indieweb #microsub

Admiring the care and attention that @rem has put into the technology and the documentation for https://webmention.app/

So useful!

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.

#webmentions #indieweb #automate #sending #pinging #blogging #blogs

WWDC 2019 wrap-up

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.

#webmentions #indieweb #linking #blogging #personal #publishing #sharing

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.

#social #networks #indieweb #facebook #instagram #whatsapp #twitter #flickr #exchange

For those #iOS / #Swift developers, @Eddie Hinkle got a library to help you build @IndieWeb apps a lot easier!

https://github.com/EdwardHinkle/IndieWebKit

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.

#content #indieweb #writing #publishing #sharing

Jacky Alciné

The Crushing Weight of the Facepile—zachleat.com

Using IntersectionObserver to lazy load images—very handy for webmention avatars.

#intersectionobserver #lazyloading #images #facepile #webmentions #performance #weight #frontend #development
Replied to a post by Ton Zijlstra

I use Mastodon Autopost (github.com/simonfrey/mastodon_wordpress_autopost) for this. (I think originally came across it via Chris Aldrich). You can choose per post whether you want to post to your instance. I also added a couple of very hacky functions (github.com/ngm/semloop/blob/master/includes/syndication-targets.php) to add it as a Micropub syndication target.

For those with ideas for the IndieWeb Summit, check out https://indieweb.org/2019/Summit/Sessions! This way, we can surface them early and get to them sooner.

I was up working on some side projects when Andy Bell's note appeared on Monocle. He notes how the IndieWeb (outwardingly facing) is strongly a male-presenting environment. Which is true, for the most part. As far as I know, this has been the case but it's not a mission or goal to keep it this way - it's quite the opposite. Due to the dece...

#indieweb #building-blocks

Yeah; that’s part of something I’m writing out right now. The IndieWeb prides itself on https://indieweb.org/building-blocks, which is SUPER empowering since it gives you the final say but it can be tricky. I do suggest treating it like any other Web project - reporting issues, posting on your site (or Twitter) and keeping the conversation going. This’ll help surface it for others.

Definitely. There’s work by people in the community to make this stuff a bit easier. As with everything, there’s room for growth. What’s something you see about the IndieWeb tooling wise that took too long to find out? I have a bit of bias since I’m working on greenfield projects.

Work on that is being done on every turn. Biggest blockers are (perhaps) reach, interest and attraction to the concepts being portrayed. Def down to brainstorm more at https://indieweb.org/discuss!