IndieWeb: The Book

For a quite a while I’ve been thinking about writing a book about the IndieWeb to provide a broader overview of what it is philosophically, how it works, how its community functions, and most specifically how the average person can more easily become a part of it.

Back in January Timo Reitnauer wrote Let’s Make 2017 The Year of the Indie WebI agree wholehearted with the sentiment of his title and have been personally wanting to do something specific to make it a reality. With the changes I’ve seen in the internet over the past 22 years, and changes specifically in the last year, we certainly need it now more than ever.

In large part, I’ve been inspired by the huge number of diverse and big-hearted developers who are an active part of the growing community, but specifically today I came across a note by Doc Searls, an email about the upcoming NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month), and then a reminder about the 100 Days of IndieWeb project. This confluence of events is clearly my tipping point.

As a result, I’m making my 2018 IndieWeb resolution early. For the month of November, as part of NaNoWriMo, I’m going to endeavor to lovingly craft together a string of about 2,000 words a day on the topic of the IndieWeb to create a book geared toward helping non-developers (ie. Generation 2 and Generation 3 people) more easily own their online identities and content.

IndieWeb Generations Diagram by Amber Case (Caseorganic.com) as depicted on the IndieWeb Wiki

Over the past year, surely I’ve read, written about, or interacted with the IndieWeb community concretely in one way or another on at least 70 days. This sprint of 30 days should round out a 100 days project. To be honest, I haven’t necessarily posted about each of these interactions on my own site nor are they necessarily visible changes to my site, so it may not follow the exact requirements of the 100 Days of IndieWeb, but it follows the spirit of the creator idea with the hopes that the publicly visible result is ever more people adopting the principles of the movement for themselves.

I’ll focus the book primarily on how the average person can utilize the wealth of off-the-shelf tools of the WordPress content management system and its community–naturally with mentions of other easy-to-use platforms like Known and Micro.blog sprinkled throughout–to own their own domain, own their content, and better and more freely communicate with others online.

If you haven’t heard about the movement before, I’ll direct you to my article An Introduction to the IndieWeb, portions of which will surely inform the introduction of the book.

If you’ve recently joined the IndieWeb, I’d certainly love to hear your thoughts and stories about how you came to it, why you joined, and what the most troublesome parts have been so I can help direct people through them more easily–at least until there are a plurality of one-click solutions to let everyone IndieWeb-ify themselves online.

As a publisher who realizes the value of starting a PR campaign to support the resultant book, I’m also curious to hear thoughts about potentially launching a crowdfunding campaign to support the modest costs of the book, with profits (if any) going toward supporting the IndieWeb community.

I’m happy to entertain any other thoughts or considerations people have, so feel free to reply in the comments below, or better yet, reply on your own site and send me a webmention.

🎧 This Week in Google #398: None More Black

Listened to This Week in Google #398: None More Black by Jeff Jarvis, Jason Howell, and Kevin Marks from Twit.tv
Leo is out - Jason Howell dives into the Android O Developer Preview. Samsung announced the bezel-free Galaxy S8 today, along with a new Gear 360, Connect Home router, and virtual assistant Bixby. Google continues to confuse everyone with its messages strategy. More advertisers are boycotting YouTube. Congress kills FCC ISP privacy rules. Android's daddy has a secret new phone. And the blackest paint ever comes in spray form.

I miss the more open-ended philosophical slant that Leo puts on this series in contrast to Jason’s more news-y rundown approach. I’m sure Jason’s method stems from his prior work on C|Net’s Buzz Out Loud and Tech News Today which follow that format/style.

Kevin’s discussion of starts at 89:04 into the episode.

Homebrew Website Club Los Angeles notes, December 28, 2016

Last HWC for 2016

Tonight was the last meetup for HWC in Los Angeles for 2016. We’ve managed to make it through more than a handful of meetups throughout the year as well as an excellent IndieWebCamp experience. We also recently managed to get our first virtual meetup off the ground two weeks ago with participants in LA, NYC, Portland, Florida, and Maryland!

Thanks again to everyone (near and far) who has helped to encourage and get the budding Los Angeles IndieWeb community off the ground this year.

At the onset of the meetup, we spent a few minutes discussing the concept of #100DaysOfIndieWeb which Aaron Parecki has a great head start on already. (BTW, Happy Birthday Aaron!)

Though I’m not personally ready to go all in on , I am on the verge of committing to 100 Days of Book Donations to Little Free Libraries (or the potentially easier and just as effective 100 Book Donations) particularly as I managed to do 31 days of donations last January.

I’m also seriously considering 100 days of closing tabs which has always been a real problem for me in the past. 100 days of posts also seems relatively interesting as well as doable. 100 days of deleting email toward inbox zero could be useful too.

Building

Following a productive quiet writing hour, we did a quick round of introductions and a short demo or two. Given our group size/composition, we split up and delved right into some building and helping each other out.

I helped newcomer Jeffrey Stewart begin to build a WordPress site on a temporary host which he can later to a personal domain name he’d bought a while back and had resolved to begin using.  He’s been siloing his content primarily on Facebook for a long time now, but wanted more freedom and flexibility than Facebook allows. In particular he’s looking forward to a better platform for longer form content as well as better/richer interactions.

In under two hours, we managed to get a pretty significant start on his site including rel=”me” links to his current social media presences. We also set up and configured several IndieWeb related plugins courtesy of the Indieweb plugin to allow for Webmentions as well as future syndication capabilities. With just a few hours of work, I suspect he’ll not only be able to put together his first post and syndicate it to several silos, but he’ll be receiving his first webmentions and backfeed via Brid.gy.

Meanwhile, Angelo Gladding managed to simultaneously work on not only his own site, but assist Thaine Allison with one of his itches. Several years ago Thaine had built a website in HTML3, but he wanted to update it to deal with the demise of Flash and make it more mobile friendly. Despite some difficulty accessing his site due to issues with hosting, they made some reasonable progress.

No photo (Sorry Tantek…)

We all got so wrapped up in what we were working on and discussing, we completely forgot to take a break to get a group photo. In fact, I sadly didn’t think about it until I was in the car and halfway home. I even forgot to “check in” and POSSE a copy to FourSquare, which is pretty uncommon for me lately.

At least this is an area on which we can improve on for our 2017 resolutions...

Happy New Year Everyone!

💯 #100DaysOfIndieWeb

I think exists just so Tantek could use the 💯 emoji on a  wiki page at https://indieweb.org/100DaysOfIndieWeb

But, more seriously, this sounds like a good idea. I’m going to have to put some thought into… Looks like Aaron Pareki has got a good jumpstart on things.