IndieWeb-ifying ColoradoBoulevard.net

I’ve spent some time over a few days this month to help IndieWeb-ify my local Pasadena online newspaper ColoradoBoulevard.net. They can now send and receive webmentions and can backfeed their comments, likes, and other responses from their Facebook and Twitter accounts.

They can stand to improve their support for microformats v2 and do some more work on their h-cards and other related metadata, but the editor seems thrilled with the initial results–particularly having their conversations in other areas of the internet come back to the original article.

I know that individual journalists have brought their personal websites into the IndieWeb fold, but this may be one of the first online newspapers/magazines I’m aware of to begin using some of these principles and tools. With any luck and some testing, they could be one of the first journalistic enterprises to begin receiving “Read” posts of their articles via webmention! Update: read posts are working! See the first example here.

I’d like to get them to a place where they can automatically syndicate to social silos and display their syndication links properly. In the end it would be really nice if their writers could own their own articles on their personal websites, syndicate them to the newspaper itself (as the rel=”canonical” link), and then both parties to be able to receive the appropriate backfeed, but this is a nice new baby step on the way to bigger and better things.

I did run across one interesting identity related issue that may need some addressing within this particular space. Some of their journalists prefer not to display photos (or even names) so that they’re not easily (or as easily) identified in person for the sake of doing online reviews or other sensitive reporting assignments.