For our 200th anniversay Schepp, Anselm and Stefan invited Jeremy Keith. Enjoy our excessive talk about the Indie Web!
[00:00:39] The Indie Web Building Blocks Jeremy explains what’s the meaning behind the whole indie web term and why it exists. He continues to explain the technical basics: Decentralizing sources, authenticate on websites using your very own website and a social network of choice, sharing links to your blog posts to the social networks and getting mentions from twitter etc on your website and store them there. You can do this with just one requirement: if you have your own domain. It even can work on static sites and there are open source services like Bridgy that help you with concatenating the external sources.
[00:22:57] IndieWebCamps We talk about the people who are part of the indiewebcamp thing and how it’s been created. It was created to create solutions and not only discuss stuff. We also speak about how to teach people about indie technology, how to learn to integrate it and where you can do so. Finally we talk about content ownership and the problem with external services who own your content and do what they want with it (like deleting it even if you don’t want to, thanks archive.org for storing things anyways). And Jeremy shares his first website version. If you are considering going to the upcoming beyond tellerand in Düsseldorf (which you should), be aware that there’s an accompanying IndieWebCamp happening.
[00:48:23] Useless Design Patterns We’re talking about false assumptions of security which often have heavy impact on usability. Like on login screens when there’s only a generic error message not saying if username or password is wrong. We speak about if passwords should be shown by default to avoid the ‘confirm password’ fields and typing errors and most of the time people are in private and if not, they should be able to switch to hidden type mode. We also talk about captchas which are non-sense. In fact we should always ask ourselves why are we doing this or wait a minute, is this really a good idea? And test with real users to figure out what works and what doesn’t. Because assumptions by us is often simply wrong..