Today is My Third Indieweb Anniversary

I suppose I’ve had a few dozen domains and sites at earlier points, but three years ago today was when I began conglomerating it all here at boffosocko.com. It’s amazing to see the changes (big and small) I’ve been able to effect since I celebrated last year. It’s had a profound effect at how I interact on the internet and consume content.

For those who aren’t aware of the broader concept of Indieweb, here is a great introduction with some history by Tantek Çelik entitled The Once and Future IndieWeb

IndieWeb Summit

This is also a good time to remind those who are interested, that the annual IndieWebSummit is coming up soon and RSVP’s are now open:

June 24-25, 2017
Portland, Oregon
The seventh annual gathering for independent web creators of all kinds, from graphic artists, to designers, UX engineers, coders, hackers, to share ideas, actively work on creating for their own personal websites, and build upon each others creations.

I hope to see people there in person, though I’ll note that remote attendance is possible as well.

A Brief Look Back

This post started out initially as a brief status update and I extended it with the video and notice about the upcoming Summit.

Now that I’m past what I would consider “note” length, and since it’s a milestone of sorts, I thought it would be interesting to take a nostalgic look back at my last year of Indieweb. I didn’t think it would be quite so much, but it’s really amazing what you can do if you take things in small steps over time. So here’s a quick review of some of the things I’ve done in the last year on my site. (Thank goodness for documentation!)

• I’ve made some reasonable changes to my theme and CSS
• I’ve now got a built in RSS feed reader and better own my bookmarks of things I want to read
• I’ve added a few new post types which I use more regularly: checkins, jams, listens, wishes, and watches
• I don’t tweetstorm often, but when I do, I’ve changed how it happens
• I’ve improved archiving my content to Archive.org as it posts
• I’ve added some custom RSS feeds for better content discovery and subscription
• I support subscription by web-based Push notifications
• I’ve started owning my highlights, notes, and marginalia from books, e-books, and online articles.
• Changed the way I own my Instagram posts (still via PESOS), but with better metadata and display of maps when location is added
• I continue to own my Twitter archive and have detailed how others can too
• I own my reading status updates and don’t rely as much on GoodReads.com
• I now own all of my content from Tumblr and now only syndicate content there when I do use it
• I downloaded and owned my TwitPic Archive in case it shuts down

Other Indieweb activities, which don’t necessarily appear on my site:

• I started local Los Angeles Homebrew Website Club meetups to help others
• I helped co-host and attended my first IndieWebCamp
• I’ve also written a lot about Indieweb in the past year as it relates to other areas including education and journalism and done some reasonable work improving the Indieweb wiki, particularly with regard to indiewebifying one’s WordPress site.

As a separate statistic I made approximately 1,071 posts to my (main) site in the last year compared to 136 in the same time frame the year prior. There are over 2,400 posts on my social stream site this past year. It’s great owning it all here now instead of having it spread out all over hundreds of other sites and thousands of URLs over which I have no control.

To my recollection I’ve only joined 6 new silos in the past year (to which I really only syndicate into). In that same time frame at least 15 services of which I was a member or used at one time or another have shut down and disappeared. Entertainingly (and perhaps miraculously) one which had previously disappeared came back to life: Upcoming.org!