The slides from a lovely talk by Ana with an important message:
By having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets. That’s right. Whether you participate in the IndieWeb community or not: by having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets.
I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.
I went along to this year’s State Of The Browser conference on Saturday. It was great!
Technically I wasn’t just an attendee. I was on the substitution bench. Dave asked if I’d be able to jump in and give my talk on declarative design should any of the speakers have to drop out. “No problem!”, I said. If everything went according to plan, I wouldn’t have to do anything. And if someone did have to pull out, I’d be the hero that sweeps in to save the day. Win-win.
As it turned out, everything went smoothly. All the speakers delivered their talks impeccably and the vibes were good.
Dave very kindly gave shout-outs to lots of other web conferences. Quite a few of the organisers were in the audience too. That offered me a nice opportunity to catch up with some of them, swap notes, and commiserate on how tough it is running an event these days.
Believe me, it’s tough.
Something that I confirmed that other conference organisers are also experiencing is last-minute ticket sales. This is something that happened with UX London this year. For most of the year, ticket sales were trickling along. Then in the last few weeks before the event we sold more tickets than we had sold in the six months previously.
Don’t get me wrong: I’m very happy we sold those tickets. But it was a very stressful few months before that. It felt like playing poker, holding on in the belief that those ticket sales would materialise.
Lots of other conferences are experiencing this. Front Conference had to cancel this year’s event because of the lack of ticket sales in advance. I know for a fact that some upcoming events are feeling the same squeeze.
When I was in Ireland I had a chat with a friend of mine who works at the Everyman Theatre in Cork. They’re experiencing something similar. So maybe it’s not related to the tech industry specifically.
Anyway, all that is to say that I echo Sophie’s entreaty: you should go to conferences. And buy your tickets early.
Soon I’ll be gearing up to start curating the line up for next year’s UX London (I’m very proud of this year’s event and it’s going to be tough to top it). I hope I won’t have to deal with the stress of late ticket sales, but I’m mentally preparing for it.
Obviously I’m biased, but I very much agree with Sophie.
After the last decade, where platforms have emerged as a core constituent of the web on which many rely, it may feel like things cannot change. That the giants are so big that there is no other way. Yet, to give into this feeling – that things can’t change – is not necessary. It is the way it is is not true on the web. We can make change. It’s your web.
The mathematics behind the halting problem is interesting enough, but what’s really fascinating is the community that coalesced. A republic of numbers.
I went to codebar Brighton yesterday evening. I hadn’t been in quite a while, but this was a special occasion: a celebration of codebar Brighton’s tenth anniversary!
The Brighton chapter of codebar was the second one ever, founded six months after the initial London chapter. There are now 33 chapters all around the world.
Clearleft played host to that first ever codebar in Brighton. We had already been hosting local meetups like Async in our downstairs event space, so we were up for it when Rosa, Dot, and Ryan asked about having codebar happen there.
In fact, the first three Brighton codebars were all at 68 Middle Street. Then other places agreed to play host and it moved to a rota system, with the Clearleft HQ as just one of the many Brighton venues.
With ten years of perspective, it’s quite amazing to see how many people went from learning to code in the evenings, to getting jobs in web development, and becoming codebar coaches themselves. It’s a really wonderful community.
Over the years the baton of organising codebar has been passed on to a succession of fantastic people. These people are my heroes.
It worked out well for Clearleft too. Thanks to codebar, we hired Charlotte. Later we hired Cassie. And it was thanks to codebar that I first met Amber.
Codebar Brighton has been very, very good to me. Here’s to the next ten years!
A proposal to retroactively classify additions to CSS in order to put more meat on the bones of the term “modern CSS”.
Gregory Bennett chronicles the enshittification of everything online in his piece Heat Death of the Internet. It makes for grim reading.
There’s a note of hope at the end. It’s the same note of hope that Charles Digges amplifies in his great piece, Viva la Library!:
Rebel against The Algorithm. Get a library card.
Molly White has also chronicled the decline of everything good on the web, but her piece has hope threaded throughout. We can have a different web:
Though we now face a new challenge as the dominance of the massive walled gardens has become overwhelming, we have tools in our arsenal: the memories of once was, and the creativity of far more people than ever before, who entered the digital expanse but have grown disillusioned with the business moguls controlling life within the walls.
And if anything, it is easier now to do all of this than it ever was.
Like I’ve repeatedly said, having your own website has gone being something uncontroversial to being downright transgressive.
Still, the barrier to entry remains too high for my liking. I wish more smart minds were working on making publishing on the web easier instead of just working on getting people to consume.
But even if you don’t have your own website, Andrew Stephens says you can still Save the Web by Being Nice:
The very best thing to keep the web partly alive is to maintain some content yourself - start a blog, join a forum and contribute to the conversation, even podcast if that is your thing. But that takes a lot of time and not everyone has the energy or the knowhow to create like this.
The second best thing to do is to show your support for pages you enjoy by being nice and making a slight effort.
To paraphrase Shakespeare, being nice “is twice blest; It blesseth him that gives and him that takes.” Tell someone that you liked something they put on the web. You’ll feel good. They’ll feel even better.
An in-depth look at Indie Web Camp Brighton with some suggestions for improving future events. Also, this insightful nugget:
There was something really energising about being with a group of people that had a diverse range of backgrounds, ideas, and interests, but who all shared a specific outlook on one problem space. We definitely didn’t all agree on what the ideal solution to a given problem was, but we were at least approaching topics from a similar starting point, which was great.
I had a fantastic time and hope it will become a frequent event.
Same!
I just attended IndiewebCamp Brighton, where I had a mind-expanding time with a bunch of folks as enthusiastic about the web as I am. It left me with a sense of hope that there are pocks of people keeping the dream of a free and open web alive.
Mark’s write-up of the excellent Indie Web Camp Brighton that he co-organised with Paul.
The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.
There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.
Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.
Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.
I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.
I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.
But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.
So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.
It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.
While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.
“It’s having your own website”, I said.
But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.
Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.
What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.
Paul has been doing so much fantastic work with the indie web community, not least of which is co-organising Indie Web Camp Brighton—just ten days away now!
Really good advice from Maggie on running small community events:
No one else will organise the group you most want to be a part of. Whatever weird, specific things you enjoy – perhaps doing speed sudokus while smoking robusto cigars, or hosting a chemistry analysis session on sourdough bread techniques (I’m not judging either of these) – it’s worth trying to find the others. You are the most qualified person to create environments and experiences that you will personally enjoy, and in doing so you will attract people who like things that you also like. This is a decent way to make friends.
I was chatting to Andy last week and he started ranting about the future of online documentation for web developers. “Write a blog post!” I said. So he did.
I think he’s right. We need a Wikimedia model for web docs. I’m not sure if MDN fits the bill anymore now that they’re deliberately spewing hallucinations back at web developers.
This is going to be a fun weekend!
Not got a personal website? Bring your laptop or mobile device, and we’ll help you get setup so that you can publish somewhere you control and can make your own.
Seasoned web developer? Learn about the different open web services, software and technologies that can help empower yourself and others to own their content and online identity.
The internet has always been made of people, but it has not always been people-first. The indieweb reminds us that humanity is the most important thing, and that nobody should own our ability to connect, form relationships, express ourselves, be creative, learn from each other, and embrace our differences and similarities.
Ben’s ode to the indie web:
One could look at the movement as kind of a throwback to the very early web, which was a tapestry of wildly different sites and ideas, at a time when everybody’s online communications were templated through web services owned by a handful of billion dollar corporations. I’d prefer to think of it as a manifesto for diversity of communications, the freedom to share your knowledge and lived experiences on your own terms, and maintaining the independence of freedom of expression from business interests.
