IndieWeb Posts 📝

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 participated in IndieWeb Create Day, an online event during which people in the IndieWeb come together to work on personal projects, this Boxing Day. I decided to start on a new project. I wanted to build a tool that would let me highlight specific pieces of text on my website and send those highlights to someone else for them. I have previously built a tool, fragmention.js, that lets you link to a specific paragraph of text, but this tool has its limitations: I can't link to multiple parts of a web page, I can only link to full paragraphs.

I change the emojis next to my website name in the top right corner of my website and on my home page during certain events. This December, I changed the coffee emoji to a snowflake. During the month of Halloween, I changed the emoji to a pumpkin. I enjoyed making these changes manually, but I would regularly forget to change the emoji back to a coffee mug after an event was over. That is why you may have noticed my website showed a pumpkin emoji until the end of November (!).

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.

On my website home page, I have a "sparkline" that shows all of my contributions to the IndieWeb wiki. The sparkline doesn't show any specific values. The goal is to show my activity and trends contributing to the wiki as opposed to showing exactly how many contributions I have made. I enjoy this visualization. Every time I go to my home page I get a quick reminder about how often I have contributed to the IndieWeb wiki. Sometimes I look and realise I contributed a lot; sometimes I see I contribute more in bursts.

What is Webmention? What can I build on top of the Webmention protocol? How do I start sending and receiving Webmentions? These are three questions I'm going to answer in my upcoming talk on Codementor Events: Decentralized Website Communication with Webmention.

Earlier today, I was playing around with OpenAI's new ChatGPT model. I have thus far asked ChatGPT what coffee is, how to boil a kettle, what microformats are, and what the IndieWeb is. I thought I'd share the result I got for the prompt "What is the IndieWeb?":

Webmentions enable distributed social interactions over the web. Using webmentions, you can send replies, likes, and other interactions that were published on your site to respond to another web page. For example, I send Webmentions for all of the bookmarks I create on my website. If a site can receive Webmentions, they will be notified that I bookmarked their post for later.