Jeremy Cherfas

Very interesting write-up, echoing many of my own feelings from IndieWeb camps. Sorry to have missed discussion of the evolutionary history of camels.

Making tentative steps towards implementing an IndieWeb social reader and so reading up what other people have done and how they are using these ideas.

Here's hoping this sensible person soon becomes active in IndieWeb things. 

Sure, the defaults are elegant, but they are constant reminders that you’re ultimately building castles in someone else’s sandbox, which is sad and unfortunate when you’re trying to build the coolest castle you can.

This is about far more than merely being able to customize the look of your site, although that is clearly important too.

#IndieWeb

PESOS from Reading.am.

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4YUK/http://cathieleblanc.plymouthcreate.net/blog/indieweb/why-we-need-the-....

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4XZY/http://cathieleblancblog.com/2018/04/24/surveillance-capitalism-and-in....

PESOS from https://www.reading.am/p/4XXz/https://david.shanske.com/2018/04/24/how-i-set-up-my-indieweb-wordpres....

Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names.

Cannot say this often enough.

I want to make listening to or subscribing to a podcast as easy as sending an email. Or easier!

A very worthy goal, I don't doubt it. Sounds a bit like the universal Subscribe button that some people think is needed to get #IndieWeb writing going again. 

In any event, I wish them much luck and will be attempting to keep an eye on podTo.

I've set out in as much detail as I can understand what is happening when I try to POST a Bookmark with a Description to WithKnown.

And to add insult to injury, I'm adding this Description by hand, so I can include a blockquote:

[I]f you try to POST anything other than the URL of the bookmark, it simply never appears. With the help of good IndieWeb people, especially zegnat and cweiske, we worked out what was happening.

#indieweb #withknown

#testtag

And a bit of description

Essentially, the non-semantic web is a balkanised hellscape of competing open and proprietary metadata standards.

And I don't blame him one bit. Moreover, I'm increasingly fed up with the idea of modifying my website to do the work of undoing the Balkan megalomania.

#indieweb

But now here's the thing, when I do this by hand directly in WithKnown, it allows me to post some lines of description.

And a #testtag

But I ddo not seem to be able to do the same thing with micropub. Probably because I am doing it wrong.

PESOS from https://gregorlove.com/2017/12/indieweb-wordpress-feedback/">reading.am

Terrific video of a talk on #indieweb by Keith J. Grant, who kept remarkably cool during his live demos.

One could, for example, imagine an honest business model – in which people paid an annual subscription for a service that did not rely on targeting people on the basis of the 98 data-points that the company holds on every user. All it would need is for Facebook users to fork out $20 a year for the pleasure of sharing LOLcats with one another.

What’s the likelihood of that happening? You know the answer. Which is why Zuck will continue to keep mum about the sordid reality underpinning his money machine.

#indieweb

Interesting piece on "owning" your distribution channels. #indieweb.

Now, here’s the thing I’ll tell you—if I was running this site on, say, Medium or Tumblr, it would not have buckled. But to me, I think that independence from platforms is a hugely important thing to have in 2017. If you can spin up the server yourself and figure out a way to cobble together funding, you may miss out on some of the perks of larger sites, but you call the shots. 

Really super, fully comprehensive explanation that should make life easier for anyone wanting to make more use of WordPress in the IndieWeb.

Really good debriefing on two years of progress in the #indieweb. I found this rather familiar:

While learning all of the requisite skills was challenging, the real struggle in joining the indieweb was piecing all the components together to hold a mental image in my head of what an indiewebsite should be. I spent a great deal of time trawling through the wiki and absorbing all of the ideas on disparate pages. At the time, there were many pages which would all have slightly different variations of the similar information.

There's still a ways to go, mind. When I did this reply to automatically, the title of the entry came though as "kongaloosh". I added the correct title by hand myself. The entry title is there, as `p-name` and I cannot tell whether the issue is at my end (WithKnown) or at Alex's end.

link

> As is often the case, Dave is focused on RSS rather than the web per se.

In among the firehose of suggestions to someone wanting to know "why #indieweb" was this gem from Matthew Butterick, who sets out, at great but appropriate length, precisely what is wrong with Medium.

I've used his advice on Practical Typography before, on one of my sites; seeing it again, I think I need to spend some time making some more deliberate choices on the site I am currently gussying up.

I did a silly little thing in WordPress that made me inordinately happy and advanced my #indieweb progress.

Not going to listen to the podcast; life is way too short for that. But a couple of #indieweb quotes from My WordPress:

> “We’re trying to revitalize the independent web,” Matt Mullenweg said. He’s 33 now. “It’s not like these big sites are going anywhere. They’re fantastic. I use all of them, but you want balance. You need your own site that belongs to you… like your own home on the Internet.”

So, how about total indiewebness in the basic WordPress core and default theme?

> “Other sites provide space,” he said. “They provide distribution in exchange for owning all of your stuff. You can’t leave Facebook or Twitter and take all of your followers with you.”

> That’s why he recommends having your own website. It’s yours. Not Facebook’s. Not Business Insider’s or Huffington Post’s. It’s yours.

But no mention of which comes first? Does it even matter?