Indie Web Camp 2015

Last Saturday I attended my first Indie Web Camp. I've been using this site a lot more recently and I've been really excited to improve and add to it. I like the idea of owning my own data, but it's always felt like a mammoth task to real in all the services I rely on.

I run my site on Jekyll, it felt like a big barrier to getting my data in and out of the static site.

I found a fellow ex-gowalla user in Jeremy and we briefly lamented the lack of data export years after the Facebook acquisition.

I learned a lot about the principles of the Indie Web movement, and how to achieve this using POSSE, PESOS, and Backfeed.

I also found out about IndieWebify.Me, a step-by-step guide to owning your own data. This felt achievable! I no longer felt intimidated.

I using the validation tools I realised my login links did work as expected. I added invisible links in the head of every page.

At the end of the day we went for a drink and I introduced a few people to Burger Brothers. That's always enjoyable.

The Sunday was the hack day, which I missed because I was up in London hanging out with family. I did get a chance to work on my site a little, and luckily for me there were other attendees who were running Jekyll sites I could learn from as they were working through the same problems I was.

Thanks to Benjamin Parry and Paul Robert Lloyd for working out in the open, enabling my own attempts at implementing Webmentions.

If I've done this correctly, they should receive a webmention on their site.