Month: April 2020
Desmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)In which I zoom in slightly on the #indieweb
Some nice quotes on what the IndieWeb is about, from Desmond’s article Your Website Is Your Castle.
In a nutshell:
At the heart of the IndieWeb is an attempt to unify the ideas behind personal websites, blogs and social networks, but in a manner consistent with how the world wide web operates.
Your website acts much like your wall on Facebook or your timeline on Twitter – it’s your personal soapbox, your castle on the web.
[…]one recreates, in a decentralized manner, the kinds of online interactions one has come to expect from private social networks.
Desmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)Your personal website as a form of identification #indieweb
I found this a very helpful discussion of IndieAuth from Desmond, touching on web sign-in, RelMeAuth, OAuth and OIDC along the way. It’s one of those things that I know exists, and just works for me (e.g. everytime I use a Micropub client), but it’s nice to get a bit of a handle on how it works.
In a nutshell the purpose is this:
your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL
Desmond does a great job of explaining the nitty-gritty of how it works, too. The two bits I bolded below jumped out at me – a decentralised authentication mechanism leveraging DNS as a user registration system. It’s very elegant.
The process of using your domain to log in to sites and services is called web sign-in and is implemented via a protocol called IndieAuth, an extension of OAuth used for decentralized authentication.
If your goal is to make a social network out of the world wide web, there is a certain elegance to the idea of leveraging DNS as a user registration system.
I fixed a small issue in my theme that I’d noticed, where other people’s sites weren’t picking up my author details. The problem? My author info wasn’t included in the entries. I had a site-wide h-card but I hadn’t got it in the entries themselves.
The process for figuring out who has written a post is referred to as authorship, and the IndieWeb wiki page on it is very helpful. Also thanks to Sven for the help.
This is a decent app for getting a bit of variety in to your 7 minutes: https://seven.downdogapp.com/
I’ve ended up with an online meeting schedule clash this week, unfortunately.
Desmond Rivet (desmondrivet.com)In which I describe how to avoid solipsism on the #indieweb
Great writeup!
I just wrote a big ol’ blog post about indiewebifying my event discovery and RSVPs. Thinking about it just now, however, it’s a bit of a mish-mash between why I wanted to do it, and how I did it.
For someone coming to the post who is new to the IndieWeb, it’s probably bit off-putting (and maybe fuel for the fire of ‘IndieWeb is too complicated’). And for someone who already knows about the IndieWeb, but isn’t using WordPress, they might skip over the hows and in the process miss some of the whys.
So in future I might try and split these kinds of articles into two – a ‘why’ post, and a ‘how I did it’ post. The ‘why’ post will kind of be my behaviour-driven development specs, so to speak, and probably mostly links to various pattern pages on the IndieWeb wiki. And the ‘how’ post will get into the weeds of one very specific implementation, liberally referring back to the ‘why’ post.
I think that would work well and make the articles a bit more reusable and less niche.
Been doing a small bit of wiki gardening on my books pages today. Nothing major, just starting to link the different ideas from different books to the concepts they’re discussing.
I really like how Nadia Eghbal‘s writings are peppered with cultural references. When I’m getting to the point where I’m writing longer-form articles on an idea, I would like them to have a similar cross-pollination vibe. Like Mark Fisher, too.