IndieWeb Posts 📝

Within my first day or two of arriving in San Francisco, I saw Cruise driverless cars on the road. The cars are allowed to drive during the day with a driver at the helm. After 10:30pm the cars can drive in autonomous mode without a driver. I forgot that driverless cars were allowed on the streets here. Later, a friend asked whether I wanted to take a ride in a driverless car.

IndieWeb Utils v0.7.2 is out. In this release, we introduce utilities to help you work with Really Simple Discovery and Trackbacks. The additions to the library were inspired by this week's Homebrew Website Club London / Europe meetup. One discussion point was how arXiv supports receiving Trackbacks, an old standard used to notify one site that you have linked to another. Given arXiv's support of Trackbacks -- and its application as a way to build community around research papers -- I decided to add a few helper functions to IndieWeb Utils.

The rain outside here in San Francisco is unyielding. This is perhaps a sign that I should let my feet rest after two long days of walking outdoors. While the rain falls, I have taken an opportunity to do a bit of writing and design. I decided to make a poster that shows the IndieWeb principles. The poster, sized for A4 paper, is available in JPG and PDF forms.

On Thursday, Aaron noted an idea for a service that would, given a URL, return the profile photo associated with the h-card on that URL. I found the idea intriguing, noting my interest in building it. I agreed that it would be great to have an API to call to retrieve a photo, similar to Gravatar but using h-cards.

Breakfast and Coffee (b&c), a wiki that aggregates breakfast and coffee recommendations, is now over one year old. I published a blog post announcing b&c on February 3rd, 2022. Since then, I have syndicated most of my coffee shop recommendations to the wiki and have made a number of improvements. b&c has been the subject of numerous discussions in the IndieWeb community, resulting in new ideas on how to improve the site.

I recently gave a talk for Codementor on Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention. A recording for the talk is available on archive.org, in case you are curious! In the 45 minute discussion, I walked through what Webmention is, how it works, and did a live demo of how to get started using Webmentions on your site.

This morning, on the final day of my holiday, I spent around two hours thinking through a way to auto-classify content on my blog, as part of a project to recommend tags to my posts. Most of my old posts don't have tags, and I wondered: could I build a system using embeddings and a classification algorithm to help recommend tags when I write a new post? It turns out that yes I can but the hours of work I put into "solving" this particular problem were not worth it. I got stressed and was anxious throughout my coding session.

For the next 100 days, I am committing to ship something related to the IndieWeb each day. A "ship" could be anything that is seen publicly or could be used by someone else that pertains to the IndieWeb. For example, if I make a change to my personal website that other people can see, that would count. If I write a blog post about something related to the IndieWeb, that too would count. Changes could be made over multiple days, but I should write a short post summarizing what I did on a given day to hold myself accountable.

I was sad to see that the Beaker Browser project has now been sunsetted. Beaker did great work on building concepts related to a read-write decentralized web. Beaker showed that there is a lot of room for exploration in browsers. The notice that the project had been sunsetted, while unfortunate, was a pleasant read.

The IndieWeb has a friendly bot called Loqi that is connected with a community wiki hosted on MediaWiki. The community extensively documents information, ranging from plans for upcoming events to UX patterns for applications relevant to the IndieWeb. The wiki continuously evolves. I regularly find myself saying "Happy newsletter day!" on Friday, celebrating the compliation of all of the information published on the wiki into a single newsletter post.