Colin, you hit the nail on the head. The IndieWeb community has done brilliant work over the years, but I think 2017 is the year to make it easier for “the users” to tap into these Open Web technologies too. It feels quite similar to 2003/04 in that way.
Month: June 2017
👓 IWS Summary | Zegnat
DAY 1 ===== Keynotes: • “we got building blocks” -- aaronpk, • “we have grown this last year” -- tantek, • “I built websites for 20 years but still do not code and want your tools to be easy” -- anomalily, • “I used my laptop to crawl the internet, it got hot, but now I have fancy network graphs” -- snarfed.
👓 A stream-of-consciousness review of the Indie Web’s onboarding experience | Aaron Patterson
This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none of this comes across as too critical. I am REALLY impressed by what is already working. This is my experience “indiewebifying” my personal WordPress site. A user test from a “Gen 1” UX guy who just heard about this stuff last week. Hopefully none...
👓 Medium and the Scourge of Persistent Sharing Dickbars | Daring Fireball
When people click a URL and see that it’s a Medium site, their reaction should be “Oh, good, a Medium site — this will be nice to read.” Right now it’s gotten to the point where when people realize an article is on Medium, they think, “Oh, crap, it’s on Medium.”
The beginnings of a blogroll
It’s far from finished (particularly from the data perspective), but it’s starting to shape up and look like something. I’m currently publishing an Indieweb blogroll on my front page. (Don’t presume anything if you’re not on it yet, I’ve a long way to go.) I’m still contemplating how to break it up into more manageable/consumable chunks primarily for myself, but also for others like Richard who were looking for ways to subscribe to others in this particular community.
For those who have readers that allow them to either subscribe to OPML files and/or import them, here’s my open OPML file. It’s a full firehose of everything, but hopefully I’ll get a chance to divide it into chunks more easily. I’d recommend subscribing to it if you can as it’s sure to see some reasonable changes in the coming weeks/months.

👓 Depressed Me Coping With The Black & White World of Social Networks | savethis.space
The last couple of months I’ve exiled myself from Twitter and Facebook. I do miss many individuals, but overall I don’t think those sites have been good for me. I felt like shouting my troubles into the void would be wasting time that I could be using to do something about them. The thing tha...
👓 Allow me to explain why we don’t need words like ‘mansplain’ | The Guardian
The man-shaming portmanteau undermines feminism’s message of equality
👓 Reflections on Two Years of #Indieweb | kongaloosh
Today marks two years of #indieweb for me. I've been reflecting on my experience joining the community and my plans for the future.

Congratulations and Thank You to Matthias Pfefferle, David Shanske, Ryan Barrett, Michael Bishop, Asher Silberman, Brandon Kraft, Lillian Karabaic and all of the others in the Indieweb community who provided the setting, conversation, thinking, and underpinning that made all this possible!
Checkin In-N-Out
📺 Keynotes – IndieWeb Summit 2017 | YouTube
Join the chat: https://indieweb.org/discuss
https://indieweb.org/2017/
I’m apparently the king of the microformat rel=”me”
What is a rel=”me”?
Rel=”me” is a microformat tag put on hyperlinks that indicates that the paged linked to is another representation of the person who controls the site/page you’re currently looking at. Thus on my home page the Facebook bug has a link to my facebook account which is another representation of me on the web, thus it has a rel=”me” tag on it.
His data is a bit old as I now maintain a page entitled Social Media Accounts and Links with some (but far from all) of my disparate and diverse social media accounts. That page currently has 190 rel=”me”s on it! While there was one other example that had rel-mes pointing to every other internal page on the site (at 221, if I recall), I’m proud to say, without gaming the system in such a quirky way, that each and every one of the rel=”me” URLs is indeed a full legitimate use of the tag.
I’m proud to be at the far end of the Zipf tail for this. And even more proud to be tagged as such during the week in which Microformats celebrates its 12th birthday. But for those doing research or who need edge cases of rel-me use, I’m also happy to serve as a unique test case. (If I’m not mistaken, I think my Google+ page broke one of Ryan’s web crawlers/tools in the past for a similar use-case a year or two ago).
The Moral of the Story
The take away from this seemingly crazy and obviously laughable example is simply just how fragmented one’s online identity can become by using social silos. Even more interesting for some is the number of sites on that page which either no longer have links or which are crossed out indicating that they no longer resolve. This means those sites and thousands more are now gone from the internet and along with them all of the data that they contained not only for me but thousands or even millions of other users.
This is one of the primary reasons that I’m a member of the Indieweb, have my own domain, and try to own all of my own data.
While it seemed embarrassing for a moment (yes, I could hear the laughter even in the live stream folks!), I’m glad Ryan drew attention to my rel-me edge case in part because it highlights some of the best reasons for being in the Indieweb.
(And by the way Ryan, thanks for a great presentation! I hope everyone watches the full video and checks out the new site/tool!)
👓 Is It Racist To ‘Call A Spade A Spade’? | NPR
What happens when a perfectly innocuous phrase takes on a more sinister meaning over time?
Case in point, the expression "to call a spade a spade." For almost half a millennium, the phrase has served as a demand to "tell it like it is." It is only in the past century that the phrase began to acquire a negative, racial overtone.
Historians trace the origins of the expression to the Greek phrase "to call a fig a fig and a trough a trough." Exactly who was the first author of "to call a trough a trough" is lost to history. Some attribute it to Aristophanes, while others attribute it to the playwright Menander. The Greek historian Plutarch (who died in A.D. 120) used it in Moralia.The blogger Matt Colvin, who has a Ph.D. in Greek literature, recently pointed out that the original Greek expression was very likely vulgar in nature and that the "figs" and "troughs" in question were double entendres.
👓 Why Microformats | David Shanske
I’ve spent some time on this site commenting on the use of various Indieweb concepts, but I haven’t really touched on Microformats. Microformats just turned 11 years old. Microformats are human-readable markup that are easily human readable as well as machine readable. They appear as classes att...
👓 RicMac, part II | Scripting
Richard MacManus keeps on truckin. There's nothing more powerful than a persistent and curious user who's relatively fearless. #
- In a follow-up post I learned that there is an IndieWeb-approved feed reader called Woodwind. That's good news. RSS and related technolgies, including OPML import and export, are essential components of the open web. #
- BTW, to Richard, I wrote up my rules for standards-makers, based on experience re what (imho) is important and what works and doesn't. Another item for your consideration. #
