IndieWeb Posts 📝

As a programmer, I often feel tempted to brainstorm ideas for "projects." What is my next project going to be? How am I going to make it interesting? I've come to find that all of the best projects I work on are those that scratch the itches that I am facing. If I look back on the projects I have built that have lasted the longest, they all have one thing in common: they are related to my personal website.

For a moment a few days ago, I was tempted to build a server-side application for my website. What stopped me from doing so was my memories from building my personal website with Next.js. My site worked. It looked nice. My site lacked one thing. I didn't really know how it worked. There were too many abstractions away from the code itself. I was often confused about why I had made certain programming decisions.

I am tempted by all of the IndieWeb websites to add more features to this site. Yesterday evening, I had somewhat of a realization: the parts of my website that stand the test of time are those that are simple and do not require any overhead.

A few weeks ago, someone asked me how I built my website. When faced with this question, one of the first ideas that came to mind is that I should write a blog post exploring this topic in more depth so that all of my readers can learn how the site is built. As I understand that my readers might be a mixture of both coffee lovers, website lovers, and others, I thought I'd try to keep the description as simple as possible.

While perusing the IndieWeb wiki, I stumbled upon a quote from a blog post written on adactio.com. The quote was:

I have spent a lot of my free time participating in the IndieWeb community over the last year or so. I love the IndieWeb community. The community opened my eyes to how I can take control over my own data and publish content that matters to me on my own site. As I have worked on this website, the community has been there for support, pointing out bugs and helping me think through ideas and features. The community has an excellent body of resources for building a website, from a well-maintained wiki to an active chat where you can meet other people interested in personal websites.

The results to my poll asking "How much coffee do you drink in a day?" are in. Here are the votes cast:

Do you want to chat about personal websites? Are you looking for assistance in building your own website? Are you interested in helping other people learn about websites and share your thoughts about owning a presence on the web? If you answered "yes" to any of these questions, consider attending Homebrew Website Club.

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.

After a discussion with Tantek in the IndieWeb chat [1], I decided to do more work towards my "own your links" project. My first pass at this was to create /github/ and /instagram/ links on this domain that take you to my GitHub and Instagram pages, respectively. The idea is that I can refer people to my profiles by using a link that I own rather than pointing to the platform-first link. It's a small difference but one that I care about.