Owning my links

Tantek shared that he has links on his website that post to other social media profiles he owns. This became a topic of discussion in the IndieWeb chat (if you are not a member and like talking about the web, you should definitely join us!). We have not yet fully arrived at a way to articulate the pattern of having a link on your site that takes you to another profile or resource you own on the web. The best we have right now is "own your links." I prepared a stub IndieWeb wiki page for this concept earlier today to keep the discussion going and encourage more thought on this topic.

I have set up two new links on my site. One link redirects to my GitHub profile. Another link redirects to my Instagram profile:

• GitHub: https://jamesg.blog/github/
• Instagram: https://jamesg.blog/instagram/

I now intend to refer to the above two resources by using the links I have made rather than using direct links to my profiles. Using the links above and linking directly to the resource to which they point both achieve the same effect, with one key difference: I own the links on my site but not necessarily the ones on other sites. I can change these links as I want. That's not the main reason I am doing this though. I like the vanity and clarity of having links that are on my site and take you to a certain place. jamesg.blog/github/ puts my personal website front and center, unlike linking directly to my GitHub account.

To achieve this, I wrote two simple redirects in my site nginx configuration:

rewrite /github/ https://github.com/capjamesg permanent;

rewrite /instagram/ https://instagram.com/capjamesg/ permanent;

You can learn more about this pattern on the IndieWeb wiki. Expect to see me link to the above profiles using my own domain rather than the platform-first URLs from now on.

Also posted on IndieNews.

Tagged in indieweb.