IndieWebCamp principles for building the indie Web

(I agree with this list.)

http://indiewebcamp.com/principles

• Own your data.
• Use visible data for humans first, machines second. See also DRY.
• Build tools for yourself, not for all of your friends. It's extremely hard to fight Metcalfe's law: you won't be able to convince all your friends to join the independent web. But if you build something that satisfies your own needs, but is backwards compatible for people who haven't joined in (say, by practicing POSSE), the time and effort you've spent building your own tools isn't wasted just because others haven't joined in yet.
• Eat your own dogfood. Whatever you build should be for yourself. If you aren't depending on it, why should anybody else? More importantly, build the indieweb around your needs. If you design tools for some hypothetical user, they may not actually exist; if you build tools for yourself, you actually do exist.
• Document your stuff. You've built a place to speak your mind, use it to document your processes, ideas, designs and code. At least document it for your future self.
• Open source your stuff! You don't have to, of course, but if you like the existence of the indie web, making your code open source means other people can get on the indie web quicker and easier.
• Build platform agnostic platforms. The more your code is modular and composed of pieces you can swap out, the less dependent you are on a particular device, UI, templating language, API, backend language, storage model, database, platform. The more your code is modular, the greater the chance that at least some of it can and will be re-used, improved, which you can then reincorporate.
• Build for the long web. If human society is are able to preserve ancient papyrus, Victorian photographs and dinosaur bones, we should be able to build web technology that doesn't require us to destroy everything we've done every few years in the name of progress.
• Have fun. Remember that GeoCities page you built back in the mid-90s? The one with the Java applets, garish green background and seventeen animated GIFs? It may have been ugly, badly coded and sucky, but it was fun, damnit. Keep the web weird and interesting.

Links:

• http://indiewebcamp.com/selfdogfood
• http://indiewebcamp.com/antipatterns
• http://indiewebcamp.com/building-blocks
• http://indiewebcamp.com/why
• http://indiewebcamp.com/POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere
• http://indiewebcamp.com/dogfood
• http://indiewebcamp.com/why
• http://indiewebcamp.com/Projects

https://code.google.com/p/diso/

August 2013 - http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/08/indie-web/

http://dashes.com/anil/2012/12/the-web-we-lost.html

http://tantek.com/2011/010/b1/owning-your-data

http://www.zeldman.com/2011/01/10/own-your-data/

http://laughingmeme.org/2010/05/18/minimal-competence-data-access-data-ownership-and-sharecropping/

http://tantek.com/2010/231/b1/bringing-back-the-blog

http://tantek.com/2010/231/b1/bringing-back-the-blog

http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/21743425/Falcon

Falcon is a personal publishing (tweeting, blogging, realtime syndicating) web application.

http://microformats.org/wiki/Main_Page

http://tantek.pbworks.com/w/page/19402872/CassisProject

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/federatedsocialweb/wiki/Federated_Social_Web_Summit_2010

#programming - #opensource