Small dents in the IndieWeb
Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you and you can change it, you can influence it, you can build your own things that other people can use.
The IndieWeb – the community of independent and personal websites built around open standards – fascinates and frustrates me in equal measure.
The web is a democratic publishing platform but its inherent limitations means there’s a thriving market for centralised services that focus on frictionless user experience, often at the expense of control and agency.
The IndieWeb however is, like humans, messy. There’s great power (and pragmatism) developing technologies based on usage – rough consensus and running code. Yet, as a recovering perfectionist, it’s this mess, this roughness, that so often frustrates me.
I’m trying to smooth over some of these bumps with Indiekit. Alongside usability, I’m also focused on accessibility, extensibility, customisation, localisation and much more besides. My over-designed CMS might have become a worry stone.
As the saying goes, if you want to go far, go together. Recently, I’ve been contributing to some wider community initiatives. Granted, these may be motivated by the frustrations of a graphic designer who yearns for order and structure, but hopefully my little interventions have been useful.
So, if only for my own vanity, here’s a list of things I’ve contributed to the IndieWeb over the last few months.
Icons for IndieWeb protocols and concepts
At IndieWebCamp Nuremberg last October, I proposed a series of icons for common IndieWeb protocols and concepts. They now appear on an about page for Micro.blog and in Indiekit’s documentation.
They have yet to see any broader usage, but I’d rather see the protocols and concepts they represent gain wider adoption, and if the icons come along for the ride, even better.
Updated design for IndieWeb.org
The IndieWeb wiki is an important resource for learning about the movement, its standards and practices as well as a place to share insights and implementation examples. By using an older version of MediaWiki’s default theme not optimised for smaller screens, people new to the community didn’t get the best first impression.
There’s a newer version of this theme, but to make it the default on IndieWeb.org meant updating a heavily customised homepage. The homepage is a difficult page to get right, and many attempts have been made to update its design over the years. I was keen that such discussions didn’t prevent the site moving to the newer, responsive theme.
I proposed a limited scope redesign, one that retained the existing content and layout, but made small changes so that it wouldn’t look out of place with the new theme, while also being easier to edit and maintain.
I documented the issues with the older theme and homepage, outlined my redesign proposal and provided a way for people to try out the new homepage. With the help of Aaron, Tantek and the wider community, we ironed out bugs, made tweaks and then gradually rolled out the change, launching the new design on Valentines Day.
Icons for Micro.blog’s companion apps
I’m a huge admirer of the work Manton has been doing with Micro.blog. Since its launch in 2017, his platform continues to prove out many of the ideas and technologies that underpin the IndieWeb. It’s no accident that it’s one of the best places on the web to publish and then share content across the different social networks that have sprung up since Elon Musk rocked up with a sink.
The service also provides a number of companion apps for iOS and Android, and the launch of the note-taking app Strata brought this number up to 4. That each icon appeared unrelated to Micro.blog made me twitchy.
My unsolicited redesign caught the eye of Manton, and the new icons are being slowly rolled out across the different apps. This image gives me more pleasure than is possibly healthy:
IndieWebCamp Brighton 2024
Finally, alongside Mark Everitt, I’m organising the first IndieWebCamp of the year which is taking place here, in Brighton. It’s just 2 weeks away, and a handful of tickets remain.
I’m excited to think about what may emerge from 2 days of discussion, prototyping, hacking and hopefully, together, we can make a few more dents in the IndieWeb.