It seems peculiar that the revision time before Tripos triggers my programming crave, every year. It was the Tripos question bank website in year 1, … something that I’ve forgotten in year 2…, and this year, updating my website for the IndieWeb concept.
Learning about IndieWeb
I was searching for ideas about starting a personal website for a friend, when IndieWeb came up in the search result. It is a people-focused alternative to the ‘corporate web’.
Despite the seemingly clear definition, the word IndieWeb and what it represents became increasingly confusing as I go deeper in its website and wiki. Only after I worked through this update project have I got a grip on what that is about.
Here I share some of my own understandings, regarding what I found confusing.
My personal understandings might not be accurate; also you may find it helpful to browse through the official website before reading this.
A concept and a community
It is definitely not a product or a service. It encourages you to create your own site - “beyond blogging and decentralization”. It includes a lot of tutorials on its wiki for you to get started, as well as a helpful community to interact with.
While it is your own, the IndieWeb concept also encourages certain standards - owning your domain, using it as your primary identity, as well as technical standards including Microformat and Webmentions. Of course, this doesn’t mean that your personal website must conform to these rules; but instead, these are what the people in the IndieWeb community believe will make personal websites more efficient and more communicative, and will maximize the value of personal websites.
People-focused?
That seemed a confusing word. Why not straight-forwardly use the word ‘personal website’ in the definition?
Perhaps because some ‘personal website’ are aimed at monetizing contents or products, which is not what IndieWeb is promoting?
Perhaps this also explains why some of the aforementioned web standards are not yet widely accepted - there is no profit driving behind all this, since all is about people themselves.
Owning data vs Syndication
This is definitely the part that I was most confused about.
A big motivation of having a personal website is about owning your data and your privacy. In this case, why is ‘syndicating to social media’ (aka POSSE) an important function module of these websites? If you publish to social media sites, don’t they still have your data on hand?
I understand this as an intermediate step. In the current era, information spread fast anywhere within, but hardly beyond social media. Most people are not able to interact with you, or even read about what you write, outside social media.
But when eventually, a good number of people in your circle has a personal website which supports Webmention, you can safely say goodbye to social media platforms.
Briefly on how Webmention works
Alice and Bob both have personal websites that supports webmentions.
One day, Alice wrote an article about ‘lemon cakes’ and publishes on her website.
Bob, scrolling through his news feed (not a Twitter or Instagram feed anymore, but a feed gathering all updates from all his friends’ personal websites), found Alice’s ‘lemon cake’ article interesting.
So, he replies(or likes or reposts) to Alice, not on any platforms, but by writing an entry on his own website, quoting the link to Alice’s article. Then he sends a webmention to Alice’s server, quoting the link to his reply (or like or repost). Therefore Alice knows that Bob wrote a reply.
Now both Alice and Bob’s websites know about the interaction, and they can present this in whatever way they want to. There is no middleman though - 隔空传信 - hence the ultimate ‘owning your data’.
Update to ButterAddict
The key is to emphasize that this is a personal website, not some company that sells butter by writing maths notes LOL.
- Included a paragraph to introduce myself in the intro part.
- Included a /now page to describe my recent activities. More on the /now page concept here.
- Updated wordings in the ButterAddict philosophy
Also incorporated the technical parts of IndieWeb.
- Enabled IndieAuth.
- Added Microformat2 in rendered html tags.
- Receives Webmentions via webmention.io.
- Presents Webmentions below each article, referring to the script by Keith.
After all these effort, I will definitely write more on my site. Well I say definitely…