IndieWebCamp principles for building the indie Web

"You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain, but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life, that there's something wrong with the world [wide web]." — Morpheus, The Matrix

Whatever the reason, you're done with sharecropping your content, your identity, your self. Our content is becoming more important, and sometimes even critical to our lives. It is not secure in the hands of random startups, organizations and web companies. We should be the holders of our own data.

(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

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

http://activitystrea.ms/

http://indiewebcamp.com/Semantics_Of_Article-Note_Distinction

http://barcamp.org/w/page/402984/FrontPage

http://sandeep.shetty.in/2013/06/really-simple-social-blogging.html

http://webmention.org/

http://indiewebcamp.com/2013/UK

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

http://www.w3.org/community/fedsocweb/

http://tt-rss.org/redmine/projects/tt-rss/wiki

Good explanation in this August 15, 2013 Hacker News thread about the Wired story titled Meet the Hackers Who Want to Jailbreak the Internet

Most people commenting in this thread are missing the point. This is about giving you the ability to put your personal data on a server that you control first, and then having the ability to push it to cloud services you don't control (like Facebook, Twitter, Google apps) easily and selectively through those services' APIs. That way, from your perspective, all the "clouds" revolve around your personal server and they are all interchangeable and disposable to you, because you have all the data on your box and can just choose to push it somewhere else instead. It means you can use all the cloud services, but are no longer dependent on any one of them for storing your own data.

http://tantek.com/2012/173/t1/posse-core-indieweb-approach

at last night's #microformats 7th celebration, @willnorris and I came up with "POSSE" as an #indieweb approach: Publish Own Site, Syndicate Everywhere (or Elsewhere). It's a bit awkward, but we think it improves on "POSE" - Publish Once Syndicate Everywhere. In particular, POSSE's use of "own site" while connecting with your "posse" as it were, is really what the #indieweb is about.

#programming - #opensource - #indieweb - #blog_jr