Indie Web

13 Jan 2023

I spent most of yesterday exploring some different options to create a non-static blog. I’m currently building this with Jekyll and hosting it on GitHub. I love that I can focus on the text without character limits. 280 characters is great for keeping me from getting long-winded, but it’s no substitute for an editor. Very few of us read past the headlines anymore, and I think it is worth slowing down a bit sometimes.

I also love the simplicity of a static site, but I want to publish more than just text. There is some great software for the IndieWeb out there that’s evolved over the years. I read the MicroPub spec, I read about IndieAuth, and I made some pretty good progress with IndieKit; it’s excellent, but the complexity is a bit more than I want to deal with. I don’t want a complex server environment to manage, and I certainly don’t want to maintain a database.

Nevertheless, I want to be more focused on writing this year, mostly because I’ve been reading a lot, and I want to improve my understanding of what I read.

And I still want images, so I’m going to build something that is a bit more distributed. My phone and my laptop are powerful computers. I’ll let them do the work, and upload it to a simple static site. Later if it gets more complicated, it will all be locally processed.

I’ll make my work public, and I’ll talk about it here. Hopefully you will find it useful.