Whether you're starting a blog, building your personal brand, posting a resume, promoting a hobby, writing a personal journal, creating an online commonplace book, sharing photos or content with friends, family, or colleagues, writing reviews, sharing recipes, podcasting, or any one of the thousand other things people do online it all starts with having a presence and an identity online.
I remember some of the difficulties I had in understanding, comprehending, and coming to grasp with the overall concept of the IndieWeb. Then I contended with strategies for navigating my way through the wiki and deciding in what order to do things and finding my way into the rich and diverse community of help and additional resources.
I’ve written an introduction–aimed at beginners (and non-developers)–on AltPlatform.org that I hope might help out others who are thinking about or starting their own journey.
Editor’s Note:
As of December 2017, the AltPlatform.org site which originally published this article has shut down. I’ve smartly kept a private archived copy of the original of this post here on my personal site and manually syndicated a copy of it to AltPlatform for just such a possibility. (Hooray for PASTA (Publish Anywhere, Save to (Private) Archive)!) As a result of the shutdown, I’m making the original public here and you can now read it below.
If you wish, you can also read a copy of the original as it appeared on AltPlatform on the Internet Archive.
@c Really great write up and introduction. However, for people like “Mom” it is still far easier to sign up on Facebook and post/like there.
@renem Thanks renem! We’ll get there eventually.
@c A little hint on how do you got micro.blog mentions visible on blog posts? I thought Manton hadn’t implemented WebMention support in M.b. yet? Bridgy, beta?
@renem, @manton has implemented Webmentions, but a filtered version. If I recall, mentions are only sent to the website listed in your account settings and not to others. Although, now that I’m thinking about it, perhaps it could be a selling point for expanding the user base of micro.blog if he let all @mentions and @replies send Webmentions. Barring that it would be nice if there were additional fields for more websites which could receive them as I use two different sites to feed my micro.blog account, and currently only one of them can get these “whitelisted” Webmentions.
@c @renem Just to clarify, any reply on Micro.blog should send a Webmention if the target page supports it. The limit is for the incoming mentions, which need to be matched with an existing username / web site, for now.
@manton so if I write something on my blog, and it gets posted here via feed and someone answered, my site receives the Webmention? Tbc, my blog is. It my verified site here, because that would break OwnYourGram and other IndieAuth connections.
@renem @manton That’s right. You need a webmention endpoint on your blog (often provided by a plugin) and a way for mentions to be displayed. WordPress, for example, treats them as comments but you often need to tweak the theme.
@colinwalker I use Webmention.io on my blog for this and display the mentions via JavaScript client side. But I was not aware that this setup works if someone mentions me here because M.b. Only knows my verified site which is my MicroBlog custom domain.
@renem OK. Webmentions work in response to specific posts so if you post and it gets brought in by RSS to m.b/renem then you get them sent back in reply to those posts. I’m not sure if generic mentions are supported if someone just posts a link rather than replies. @manton ?