When I write a blog post, I want it to live on my blog, rather than a platform. I can thus invest my time thinking about how to make my blog better and backing it up, rather than having to worry about where my writing is, finding ways to export data from a platform, setting up persistent backups, etc.
Speaking of zines, I really like Benjamin’s ideas about a web-first indie web zine: using print stylesheets with personal websites to make something tangible but webby.
Co-signed!
If the web is now a metaphorical barren wasteland, pillaged by commercial interests and growth-at-all-costs management consultants, then I’m all the more motivated to keep my little patch of land lush, and green, and filled with rainbow flowers.
So, feel free to stop by any time and stay as long as you like. I won’t track you, make you look at ads, ask you to download my app, harass you with popups, suggest you sign up for my newsletter or push you through a sales funnel. Enjoy the garden, and the peace 💐.
Things can be different:
The core value of the IndieWeb, individual empowerment, helped me realise a fundamental change in perspective: that the web was beautiful and at times difficult, but that we, the people, were in control.
I really, really like Paul’s idea of splitting up the indie web principles into one opinionated nerdy list of dev principles, and a separate shorter list of core principles for everyone:
- Own your identity An independent web presence starts with an online identity you own and control. The most reliable way to do this today is by having your own domain name.
- Own your content You should retain control of the things you make, and not be subject to third-parties preventing access to it, deleting it or disappearing entirely. The best way to do this is by publishing content on your own website.
- Have fun! When the web took off in the 90’s people began designing personal sites with garish backgrounds and animated GIFs. It may have been ugly but it was fun. Let’s keep the web weird and interesting.
It would be much harder for a 15-year-old today to View Source and understand the code structure that built the website they’re on. Every site is layered with analytics, code snippets, javascript plugins, CMS data, and more.
This is why the simplicity of HTML and CSS now feels like a radical act. To build a website with just these tools is a small protest against platform capitalism: a way to assert sustainability, independence, longevity.
Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.
There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:
Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.
Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:
Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.
And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.
Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.
Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.
But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.
The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.
A blog post can be a plain text document uploaded to a server. It can be an image hosted on a social network. It can be a voice note shared with your friends.
Title, dates, comments, links, and text are all optional.
No one is policing this.
Owning your own piece of the Internet (to borrow a recent phrase from Anil Dash) is itself a radical act. Linking to others at will is subversive all on its own. Or as Jeremy Keith once put it, “it sounds positively disruptive to even suggest that you should have your own website.” The web still exists for everyone. And beneath this increasingly desiccated surface, there is plenty of creators still simply creating.
People create these sites simply so that they exist. They are not fed to an algorithm, or informed by any trends. It is quieter and slower, meant to tether us to a more mechanical framework of the web.
This is the analog web.
The most important lesson that blogging taught me is that writing is for thinking first, communication last.
Craig and Jason are walking the walk here:
- Build your own damn platform.
- Treat social media like the tool it is.
- Build your technical skills.
I was having a discussion with some people recently about writing. It was quite cathartic. Everyone was sharing the kinds of things that their inner critic tells them. We were all encouraging each other to ignore that voice.
I mentioned that the two reasons for not writing that I hear most often from people are variations on “I’ve got nothing to say.”
The first version is when someone says they’ve got nothing to say because they’re not qualified to write on a particualar topic. “After all, there are real experts out there who know far more than me. So I’ve got nothing to say.”
But then once you do actually understand a topic, the second version appears. “If I know about this, then everyone knows about this. It’s obvious. So I’ve got nothing to say.”
In both cases, you absolutely should be writing and sharing! In the first instance, you’ve got the beginner’s mind—a valuable perspective. In the second instance, you’ve got personal experience—another valuable perspective.
In other words, while it seems like there’s never a good time to write about something, the truth is that there’s never a bad time to write about something.
So write! Share! Publish!
Then someone in the discussion said something I always find a bit deflating. They said they had no problem writing, but they’re not so keen on publishing.
“After all”, they said, “the world doesn’t need yet another opinion.”
This gets me down because it’s hard to argue with. It’s true that the world doesn’t need another think piece. The world doesn’t need to hear your thoughts on some topic. The world doesn’t need to hear what you’ve been up to recently.
But you know what? Screw what the world needs.
If we’re going to be hardnosed about this, then the world doesn’t need any more books. The world doesn’t need any more music. The world doesn’t need art. Heck, the world doesn’t need us at all.
So don’t publish for the world.
When I write something here on my website, I’m not thinking about the world reading it. That would be paralyzing. I do sometimes imagine that one person is reading it; someone just like me who hasn’t yet had this particular thought, or come up with that particular idea.
I’m writing for myself. I write to figure out what I think. I also publish mostly for myself—a public archive for future me. But if what I publish just happens to connect with one other person, I’m glad.
So, yeah, it’s true that the world doesn’t need you to write and share and publish. Isn’t that liberating? You’re free to write and share and publish for yourself.
An in-depth look at Indie Web Camp Brighton with some suggestions for improving future events. Also, this insightful nugget:
There was something really energising about being with a group of people that had a diverse range of backgrounds, ideas, and interests, but who all shared a specific outlook on one problem space. We definitely didn’t all agree on what the ideal solution to a given problem was, but we were at least approaching topics from a similar starting point, which was great.
I had a fantastic time and hope it will become a frequent event.
Same!
You can feel it in the air. What’s old is new again. Blogs are returning. RSS is again ascendant.
I just attended IndiewebCamp Brighton, where I had a mind-expanding time with a bunch of folks as enthusiastic about the web as I am. It left me with a sense of hope that there are pocks of people keeping the dream of a free and open web alive.
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.
There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.
Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.
Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.
I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.
I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.
But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.
So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.
It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.
While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.
“It’s having your own website”, I said.
But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.
Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.
What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.
I’m at day two of Indie Web Camp Brighton.
Day one was excellent. It was really hard to choose which sessions to go to because they all sounded interesting. That’s a good problem to have.
I ended up participating in:
In that testing session I shared some of the bookmarklets I use regularly.
Bookmarklets? They’re bookmarks that sit in the toolbar of your desktop browser. Just like any other bookmark, they’re links. The difference is that these links begin with javascript: rather than http. That means you can put programmatic instructions inside the link. Click the bookmark and the JavaScript gets executed.
In my mind, there are two different approaches to making a bookmarklet. One kind of bookmarklet contains lots of clever JavaScript—that’s where the smart stuff happens. The other kind of bookmarklet is deliberately dumb. All they do is take the URL of the current page and pass it to another service—that’s where the smart stuff happens.
I like that second kind of bookmarklet.
Here are some bookmarklets I’ve made. You can drag any of them up to the toolbar of your browser. Or you could create a folder called, say, “bookmarklets”, and drag these links up there.
Validation: This bookmarklet will validate the HTML of whatever page you’re on.
Carbon: This bookmarklet will run the domain through the website carbon calculator.
Accessibility: This bookmarklet will run the current page through the Website Accessibility Evaluation Tools.
Performance: This bookmarklet will take the current page and it run it through PageSpeed Insights, which includes a Lighthouse test.
HTTPS: This bookmarklet will run your site through the SSL checker from SSL Labs.
Headers: This bookmarklet will test the security headers on your website.
Drag any of those links to your browser’s toolbar to “install” them. If you don’t like one, you can delete it the same way you can delete any other bookmark.
Paul has been doing so much fantastic work with the indie web community, not least of which is co-organising Indie Web Camp Brighton—just ten days away now!