Over the last few weeks, while working on OpenTechEvents, I ended up pulling a thread I had only touched lightly before: the IndieWeb.
And, honestly, it makes a lot of sense that I got there from a project about open tech events.
OpenTechEvents is making me think again about how we publish information on the web, how we connect communities, and how we make things discoverable without depending too much on a single platform. The more I read, the more I found myself nodding along with some IndieWeb ideas: owning your identity, publishing on your own domain, making content more interoperable, and letting websites talk to each other again.
I still have a lot to learn, but I have taken a few first steps.
I added more semantic data to this website using JSON-LD and Microformats2, so my homepage describes me a bit better as a person, not just as a collection of HTML elements. I also updated my links page so it can act as a clearer identity hub, with rel="me" links and better compatibility with IndieLogin.
While reading more about all this, I also kept bumping into Aaron Parecki, one of the people behind IndieWebCamp and someone I have admired for a while. There is a funny personal connection there: he co-founded Geoloqi, a location platform that was later acquired by Esri, where I now work. And beyond the geolocation overlap, I learned a lot about OAuth from his courses and material, which I even credited in my 2023 Commit Conf talk, OAuth, OpenID Connect and JWT para dummies.
And now I have also enabled Webmentions.
That means that, at least in theory, if someone writes a post linking to one of my articles, that mention can be discovered and shown here. It feels small, but I like the direction: instead of conversations being trapped only inside social networks, a personal website can receive signals from the rest of the web.
I'm not pretending this is a finished migration to the IndieWeb. It is more like opening a door and putting one foot inside.
But I like what it represents.
For years I have treated this site as my digital brain. Maybe now it can become a bit more connected too.
Let's see where this path leads 😅.