2025-12-indieweb-gift-calendar
🎁 Welcome to the IndieWeb Gift Calendar! The 2025 IndieWeb Gift Calendar is the 9th annual group effort to gift (ship) one or more IndieWeb-related thing(s) each day of December that others can use to improve their IndieWeb experience.
This can be anything from IndieWeb friendly services & apps (like social readers, Micropub clients), CMSs, plugins, major documentation contributions, or community libraries.
Anyone can participate. See the Inspiration section below for ideas.
Please keep Considerations in mind, and if you’re not sure, make a commitment for yourself to ship something you’ll use yourself, which may reveal ways to improve things for the community.
Once you've finished something, write a short blog post and link to it in the calendar below!
Considerations
Gifts can be anything from major wiki documentation contributions / improvements to shipping updates on any of the IndieWeb applications (like social readers), services, CMSs, plugins, community libraries, or any other projects in use by multiple folks.
Please keep in mind the following considerations when adding something to a day:
- Please keep the description to three lines or less. If you need help or ideas to copyedit your description down to fit, see other entries, or ask in chat for help copyediting.
- It must be shipping / usable, not just a blog post announcing / saying you plan to do it.
- Is it clear what your thing does?
- Is it clear how someone is supposed to use it or otherwise benefit from it?
- What use-case does it solve for others (besides yourself)? Ask yourself, how would/could someone else in the community use the thing I'm posting?
- If it's a markup / styling example, is it clear what its purpose is, and how someone could/should copy the markup/styling and customize it for their own site?
- If it's a programming example, is it clear how an indieweb site could use the code, using what language(s)? Does it require any frameworks?
- If it's a code example or project, is it clearly open sourced, with a clear link to its GitHub or other code repo that has at least a README explaining how it can be used for either direct user benefit or to enhance existing indieweb sites?
Emoji gift kinds
We use emoji to indicate different kinds of IndieWeb related gifts since the 2022 gift calendar! E.g., always requiring IndieWeb related as part of the description, here are the emoji gift kinds we have used so far:
- 🎁 gift planned — wait for the day for it to be unwrapped! Have something you’re making for the community for a particular day? We have used the 🎁 emoji since 2023 for planned gifts! Put 🎁 on the day of your planned gift, and wrap it in
<span>giftwrap like this so others know who it’s from.<span title="from: yourname">🎁</span>
- ✨ gift predicted or likely — if you’re somewhat of a precog (or pattern recognizer) and strongly suspect there will likely be a gift on a certain day, you may indicate it with the sparkles ✨ emoji. Put ✨ on the day of, and wrap it in
<span>giftwrap like this:<span title="from: IndieWeb community">✨</span>- if you know of or learn of a gift planned for a ✨ in the calendar, upgrade it to a 🎁 as noted above
- ❇️ new user service
- ✳️ updated or friendly user service (or improved building blocks support)
- 🖍 graphics posting/creating user client (presumably with Micropub support)
- 🤝 offer to help with another’s site, e.g. edit a blog post, code-review site code
- 🧩 user-installable plugin or add-on e.g. WordPress/Drupal plugin, browser add-on/extension
- 🛠 tools, libraries, web components, command line utilities etc. for developers
- 📃 for external documentation updates for any of the above (e.g. improved tools or services docs)
- 📅 event, e.g. IndieWebCamp, Pop-up, Homebrew Website Club, Front End Study Hall
- 🎧 podcast, e.g. TWITIWAE
- 📄 new non-trivial wiki page, or non-trivial expansion thereof (like a major subsection, perhaps a screenful, or helpful for discovering one or more existing indieweb resources or tools), that is immediately useful for others in the community
- 🗓 new event notes or session notes wiki page
- 📑 new category wiki page
- 📼 video recording uploaded, e.g. an IndieWebCamp session
- 📫 newsletter published, e.g. This Week In The IndieWeb
- 💬 chat related improvements (bots, chat bridges, moderation, archives, chat web UI)
- 📜 blog post about the IndieWeb — only use this if the blog itself is the gift, i.e. if it’s a blog post about one of the above, use the icon related to the thing itself, not the blog post about the thing.
Roughly sorted by more directly personal website related first, then user-centric before developer-centric, then IndieWeb community (events, meta) related gifts with apparently hardest first
More ideas (inspired by kinds of gifts from 2021)
- 📝 writing client (presumably with Micropub support)
- ...
More sources of ideas:
Got a gift that does not fit any of the above?
- Add your gift to the day, then ask in the indieweb-meta channel for suggestsions on which emoji to use!
Inspiration
Looking for something to do to benefit the community?
In general (feel free to add things here that you find inspiring in general, or hope someone else is inspired to do :)
- Updates to / new versions of things shipped in last year’s calendar or prior gift calendars.
- to-do and look for something you can do in a day!
- IndieWebify issues to fix, fix one, and get an update deployed
- New release of microformats2 parser(s)
- Work on 2025-review and previous years that weren't completed
- Organize and host an IndieWeb event
- ...
Specific inspirations:
- We haven't had an updated "people grid" in a while (latest 2016?). If someone would like to go through more recent IWCs and other IndieWeb events, a new one could be created from photos or current avatars on their personal sites
- ...
In progress
Got something you're working on for the IndieWeb Gift Calendar but it's not quite complete or ready for community re-use? Feel free to link to it here while you're working on it, especially if you'd like others to review it, provide feedback etc.
Brainstorming
Past Gift Calendars
See Also
- challenge
- Latest: IndieWeb Gift Calendar
- As listed in Adrian Roselli’s Web Design / Dev Advent Calendars for 2025!