Tag: Indieweb

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I’ve thought about joining in with the indieweb carnival a few times, but procrastinated. This months struck me, May 2025 IndieWeb Carnival: Small Web Communities – uncountable thoughts.

I’d love to hear your experiences of them, why and how you participate and what you think are the key ingredients for a successful small web community.

I didn’t start using digital technology until I was in my 30s (the 1990s). A primary school teacher, I got interested in using our Macintosh pizza boxes when I realised they could produce worksheets that took less time and looked better than Banda ones. I missed out on bulletin boards, myspace and live journal. Over the years I’ve have been involved in a few small web communities that have had great effects on me. My experience has been nearly completely positive.

AOL HyperCard forum

The first community. I discovered was the A.O.L HyperCard forum. I had borrowed a school Mac for the summer holiday and a neighbour had showed me HyperCard and l fell in love with the program.

Shortly after that I got access to the internet via AOL which included various forum. The only one I can recall was the HyperCard one. It was a great model of the best of online community behaviour. In the few years I was involved, I think that it might have included a transition to a mailing list, I can’t remember any snark. I do recall getting tons of help and advice for the start. This encouraged me to join in and help too when I could.

Joining a mature, confident community was a great place to start. A lot of the participants were old hands at online communication, the culture was not so much stated but exemplified.

ScotEduBlogs

The next small community was one I had more to do with setting up. Round about 2005, I extended my class blog where my pupils posted about their learning and started an educational blog myself. There was a small number of other teachers and educators blogging at that time. Driven by Ewan Macintosh, a community of bloggers grew up, initially round a wiki that collected links to blogs. Just before Twitter this lead to a flowering of blogging and commenting. We ran courses for teachers on blogging, meet-ups and eventually the TeachMeet idea appeared.

SEB, as I think of it, worked, while it did because it was driven by individuals, excited by using technologies in the classroom and pleased to find fellow practitioners who thought along the same lines. It was not that long ago but everyone was not online and certainly not all of the time.

I became involved in an aggregation project, which still limps along at ScotEduBlogs.org.uk, now a WordPress site, that still aggregates a dwindling number of rss feeds.

For a while this loose community was great, but it slowly dissolved into twitter & Facebook.

DS106

Ds106 has been the most exciting & creative community I’ve belonged to. Hard to describe, in part an aggregation of rss feeds in part a hashtag. DS106 is sometimes described as an open online course and sometimes a cult. It started as a Digital Storytelling course at the University of Mary Washington, but was open to anyone from anywhere to join in a very casual way. I’ve learnt more about using technology, Web 2.0 as was, from DS106 than any of the technology inservice courses I’ve been on. DS106 taught me about RSS and aggregation. I spent a lot of time making gifs too.

DS106 works because of a combination of the infectious energy and enjoyment exemplified by the leaders combined with a very open attitude to other participants having fun too.

micro.blog

I joined micro.blog at the very start. It is a marvellous, and for folk like me who used an existing blog, free service. For the first few years it was also an amazing community for me. I really enjoyed following and commenting with people there. I think some of that this community feeling might have slipped a bit for me. I’ll hopefully get more involved again in the summer.

Micro.blog itself has developed a lot both as a hosting service and what feels like the easiest way to use IndieWeb ideas. My posts now flow through micro.blog to mastodon, blue sky and threads. Micro.blog, and brid.gy pull comments and likes back. Micro.blog, for me, has become the glue to link me to some other larger communities.

The IndieWeb

As far as I can tell I discovered the indieweb in 2014. I’ve been using IndieWeb plug-ins on this site since 2015. I don’t really participate in the forums or other gathering. I’ve left a few comments here and there. I still feel I am somewhere in this community. Or the webbing at least.

As I typo my way through this post I have been breaking off reading some of the submission to this month’s Carnival. Links & blogrolls spiral off in all directions. The meaning of community expands. What an interesting place the smaller web is.

Thanks to Chris Shaw for the prompt.

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If you want to leave some of the more toxic online spaces, I’d recommend a look at micro.one. You can gain ownership, and control over your content. All without the overhead of setting up your own site1.

Blogging is at the heart of Micro.one. Short microblog posts or long-form posts. Photo blogs or podcasts. Inspired by IndieWeb principles. Your own domain name where you can own your content, then feed your posts into the Micro.one social timeline or the larger fediverse.

All for $1 a month2.

Micro.one is part of the fediverse. When you post to your blog, your posts and photos are also sent to followers on Mastodon and elsewhere.

Micro.one is a ‘subset’ of micro.blog, which is also a relaxed and charming community.

  1. Of course some of us like setting up or own sites;-) ↩︎
  2. If you are Scottish educator I’d recommend Glow Blogs £0 ↩︎
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Listened to Timetable – Episode 135: It is 2025 from @manton.

Love this, 1 minutes 42 seconds. I’ve listened twice, read the transcript. If you are

ready to bring back a little bit of the old web as a shield against a web that feels increasingly like an ad engagement machine instead of a publishing platform and community for people.

micro.one looks like a great way to control your content and

a quieter space that still feels connected to other platforms.

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Likes why post, what to post, and how to post by Tantek Çelik.

Here are a few specific reasons why you should post:

* Search everything you write. Do you post long comments or issues on GitHub? Do you post on public mailing lists? Post such things to your own site, so you can more easily search everything you’ve written on a topic. Then post a copy to those external destinations.

Lots of other ideas. Including Use a local text editor, I do sometimes. I used to use TextMate pretty exclusively, but drifted away because of post kinds, then blocks. Thinking about it a good bit more since testing WordLand, which I am enjoying.

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Likes My current Webmention setup by Nick Simson.

but I thought it may be helpful to share my configuration settings and demonstrate how I’m using both the Webmention plugin and IndieBlocks on the same site.

Helpful indeed. I wish I’d taken some notes as I went along on this site. I think I may have woven a tangled web.

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In reply to https://jan.boddez.net/notes/07e0df2cff by Jan.

That’s also why your post content wouldn’t break, if you were to disable IndieBlocks. (I.e., while the dynamically generated “theme blocks,” like the Facepile block for webmentions, would “disappear,” posts should remain intact.)

Thanks Jan, the not breaking part is really important. I am using IndieBlocks more as I transition slowly to blocks here. I also just had the thought I could look at the code view with the reply block to get a template I could use with TextMate so that those posts word be the same as ones make with IndieBlocks.

I was thinking of the Site Editor as I was using it elsewhere to make templates for different posts, but I think that is a red herring. Now I think about it templates are more about the look and layout.

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Bookmarked Disabled PostKinds Plugin by Ton Zijlstra.

My main issue with it was that it places key elements such as the weblink you’re responding to outside the posting itself. It gets stored in the database as belonging to the PostKinds plugin. Meaning if you ever switch it off, that gets wiped from your posting (although it’s still in the database then). This was a dependency I needed to get rid of.

This crosses my mind from time to time. I depend on without fully understanding the Post Kinds plug-in. I am halfway between Post Kinds and IndieBlocks as I use Blocks a bit more. I’ve used them a lot on Glow Blogs and am less worried about switching to them full time. I wonder about,

deploying small templates that allow me to mark a posting as reply, rsvp, favourite, bookmark, or check-in, within the postings I’m writing.

as mentioned in Ton Zijlstra’s post.

I wonder if these are an alternative to IndieBlocks or something else. Can you make templates with the correct microformats in the Site Editor? But that would not work as semipress is not a block theme so I guess the template would be php?