Of course I have heard of the #IndieWeb paradigm before. But for some reason I never bothered to really dive into it. Until a few days ago, when I decided I want my personal presence on the web to be IndieWeb-style from now on.
How came that? Partly because I’m currently reading the book Kill Process by William Hertling. It’s about murder, privacy, hacking, high tech surveillance and data mining. The book is great and I can recommend it to everybody who likes tech thrillers. Hertling gets the technical background and hacker stuff of the story really good together. Angie, the heroine, works at Tomo, the largest and quasi-monopoly Facebook-like social network as a database programmer. Part of the story is her ambition to create an alternative to the centralized privacy nightmare the Tomo service became. So she decides to do something about it and plans to build a distributed, federated social network of networks. She also meets and joins with people familiar with the IndieWeb concept. That’s when I was reminded of how good the idea really is.
I had a simple personal site running on the Grav database-less content-management system. Grav is nice because you can have a Git-based deployment process relying totally on the actual (Markdown) files – since there is zero configuration in the database. It would not have been too complicated to enhance my old site with IndieWeb attributes and protocols but anyway I was excited to discover the fantastic Known CMS this site is now running on. I’m very happy with it, thanks to all of you involved in the development.
If you want to find out more about the IndieWeb, I can recommend An Introduction to the IndieWeb by Chris Aldrich.