Joining the Indieweb

I started this blog for a couple of key reasons: to share my thoughts and to become part of the “small web.” Writing my first post ticked the first box instantly. The second goal is more of a journey. Lately, my focus has shifted towards integrating my site with the Indie Web, a concept that’s easier said than done, as solid resources are scarce. However, I’m making headway through the steps on Indiewebify.me.

Steps

Here’s what I’m tackling, based on the Indie Web site’s guidance:

  • [ ✅ ] Purchase a domain name.
    • I have owned this domain for 16 years and see no reason to change.
  • [ ✅ ] Publish content to your domain.
    • I have a webserver and publish my content with Astro.
  • [ ✅ ] Setup web sign in.
    • This requires adding rel=me links to your homepage. In my case I added links to my profiles with Github, Twitter, and Threads. I also added a masked email address.
		<link rel="me" href="https://github.com/sloped" />
		<link rel="me" href="https://twitter.com/sloped" />
		<link rel="me" href="mailto:gritty.frog3468@cafm.me" />
		<link rel="me" href="https://www.threads.net/@sloped" />
  • [ ✅ ] Add h-card
    • This requires some html modifications. I added the h-card class to my homepage, along with p-name, p-category, and some other identifiers. You can see this at https://indiewebify.me/validate-h-card/?url=http://connermccall.com
    • One key is that you do not need to use a tags, you can use span or any other tag as long as it has the correct classes. It was not super clear in the documentation that that was possible.
  • [ ✅ ] Add h-entry to posts
    • I edited my Blog post layout to include h-entry, e-content, and other markup to match the h-entry spec.
  • [ ✅ ] Allow Webmentions.
    • This looks a bit more involved since I deploy this site as a static website. I have a few ideas on how to accomplish this, and have read at least one post with some ideas. It will be fun to send a webmention to that site when I have implemented my solution.
    • I managed to add this in March
  • [ ] Automatic Post Syndication (POSSE)
    • This is called Publish Own Site Syndicate Elsewhere. Which means that when you publish a post you share a link to your post on other sites, such as Twitter, Threads, or Discord. You can include all the content if the platform supports it, but you can also just include a link back to your primary source.
    • I am not really sure how I want to approach this. I already have an RSS feed, so I am part way there. But resurrecting my Twitter account and posting to Threads, Bluesky, and maybe Discord could be a way to start engaging a wider audience.
    • The second part of this is adding syndication links. These are links back to the syndicated post. So for example when I shared a recent post on Bluesky it would look like <a rel="syndication" class="u-syndication" href="https://bsky.app/profile/sloped.me/post/3kmdmhr2h5e2q">Bluesky</a>

Embracing Indie Web is about owning your content, a powerful concept. Implementing this was a great excersise, but I did not find it simple, which is a bit of a let down. I do not have any great solutions, other than hopefully those of us that can do this start building tooling and tutorials to make things simpler for those with less experience and expertise.

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