Playing with the Indieweb

A presentation at Northern Ireland Developer Conference in in Belfast, UK by Stephen Rushe

I’ve recently been exploring the world of the IndieWeb, and owning my own content rather than being reliant on the continued existence of “silos” to maintain it. This has led me to discover the varied eco-system of IndieWeb, such as IndieAuth, Microformats, Micropub, Webmentions, Microsub, POSSE, and PESOS. I’ll give a whirlwind high-level tour of each and also show examples of the related projects I’ve spend my time on in recent months, including hand-crafted artisanal music scrobbling.

Video

Resources

The following resources were mentioned during the presentation or are useful additional information.

  • IndieAuth

    A protocol allowing you to use your own domain to sign in to other sites and services.

  • IndieAuth.com

    "IndieAuth.com provides an IndieAuth server for your website that authenticates you using your existing social accounts. First you link from your website to one or more authentication providers such as GitHub or a PGP key, then when you enter your domain name in the web sign-in form on websites that support IndieAuth, you can sign in without using a password".

  • Microformats

    "microformats are extensions to HTML for marking up people, organizations, events, locations, blog posts, products, reviews, resumes, recipes etc".

  • Micropub

    An open-standard specifying a means of creating, updating, deleting, and undeleting posts on a website.

  • Micropub Rocks!

    Micropub Rocks! is a validator to help you test your Micropub implementation.

  • Post Type Discovery

    Details on an algorithm used to identify the type of a post from its properties.

  • Indieweb::PostTypes Ruby Gem

    Indieweb::PostTypes is a Ruby gem for performing post type discovery for Microformats 2 JSON data.

  • Quill

    A micropub client written by Aaron Parecki.

  • Indigenous

    iOS and Android apps for use as Micropub/Microsub clients.

  • Transformative

    Ruby-based Micropub endpoint written by Barry Frost.

  • Webmentions

    A "web standard for mentions and conversations across the web, a powerful building block that is used for a growing federated network of comments, likes, reposts, and other rich interactions across the decentralized social web".

  • webmention.io

    "Webmention.io is a hosted service created to easily handle webmentions (and legacy pingbacks) on any web page".

  • brid.gy

    "Bridgy pulls comments, likes, and reshares on social networks back to your web site. You can also use it to post to social networks - or comment, like, or reshare - from your own web site".

  • Microsub

    The IndieWeb wiki page for Microsub, including a link to the specification.

  • Monocle

    An open source PHP-based IndieWeb-enabled Microsub reader developed by Aaron Pareck.

  • Together

    A Javascript-based Microsub client written by Grant Richmond, and Jonathan LaCour.

  • Aperture

    Aaron Parecki's Microsub server, written in PHP.

  • Ekster

    A "very-alpha" Microsub server, written in Go.

  • Building an IndieWeb Reader

    Article by Aaron Parecki on his work building an IndieWeb Reader, and Aperture and Monocle.