What is the Indieweb? It’s many things, like a philosophy of publishing content on your own website and a set of protocols to connect those websites together. Perhaps the most important aspect is something I discovered for myself over the past two days: The Indieweb is a wonderful community.
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.
It also gave me a new way of thinking about writing and publishing: The Digital Garden. In this paradigm, posts aren’t a once-and-done affair; articles can be returned to, updated and changed. Content creation becomes more akin to tending a garden than cranking out posts one after the other. The date still matters, of course, and I’ll keep showing ‘published on’ in my articles, but I’ll add a ‘last updated’, too.
Digital Gardening breaks my sense that things must be perfect before publishing them. I can return to posts repeatedly to massage them into shape.
Jeremy Keith said something that resonated: You either feel that you don’t know enough, so you shouldn’t share, or you know too much and feel that what you know is so obvious that people won’t care. I’m hoping that this new way of thinking will help break this spell.
I wrote this post in fifteen minutes.