If you have your own personal website or are thinking of creating one, please check out IndieWebCamp. It is an organization co-founded by the guy behind microformats and CSS, Tantek Çelik, which focuses on a kind of radical way of creating your website.
Their main spiel is that our data should belong to us, not corporations. We can be in control of our social posts, etc, and those URLs will be permanent. That’s what the WWW is all about! If you wonder why this is important, take a gander at the “site deaths” page. Some of these websites died suddenly, not giving users ample time to download the archive of their data. Their philosophy is summarized in three main points:
- Your content is yours
- You are better connected
- You are in control
I like that they focus on simple solutions, such as IndieAuth which is logging in to other websites with really just your personal website + some microformats: leaps and bounds simpler than OpenID. Instead of creating wacky new protocols or data formats, the main way of enabling this manner of inter-website communication is with standard HTML tags, attributes and classes.
Anyhow, there is a Getting Started page which describes what it takes to get on the indieweb. Most everyone rolls their own libraries to accomplish these tasks, and I want to get crackin’ on some Elixir modules in conjunction with Phoenix. We even have a microformats2 Elixir library at the ready!
