Hello, IndieWeb!

For years I’ve considered this website my digital playground but it’s not just a playground, it’s also a learning space. Through the process of crafting this site I’ve learned more not only about technology but also about myself as a technologist (and a glimpse of how I’d be as a designer 🪄). I really appreciate this metaphor from Aral Balkan about how hands-on creation is an essential part of the learning process. The act of making itself deepens your understanding of the medium, its constraints, and its possibilities.

Coding is like taking a lump of clay and slowly working it into the thing you want it to become. It is this process, and your intimacy with the medium and the materials you’re shaping, that teaches you about what you’re making – its qualities, tolerances, and limits – even as you make it. You know the least about what you’re making the moment before you actually start making it. - Aral Balkan

It’s also fun to have a place to explore and experiment even when it doesn’t have a practical purpose which is what first sparked my interest in web development.

Last week, I updated my website to accept Webmentions again and was reading up on different web standards related to the IndieWeb. I kept discovering new ideas as the week went a long but my main takeaway is that I’m really looking forward to continue tinkering with this site and have no idea what it might look like a year from now. I re-wrote my site last year in Astro which helped make making site updates enjoyable again. Before this switch my website was in a state where there were some outdated packages that my site relied on that couldn’t be upgraded and my site always seemed to be at least a major version behind the GatsbyJS framework.

Even though I’ve since changed the underlying technologies and wrote this README for the previous version of my website, the feeling of this being my personal playground has not changed.

At the beginning of the year, I set the intention of spending more time doing tactile hobbies and activities which has led me to spend more time playing tabletop games, puzzles and journaling. I’ve also started reading more physical books this year although I’m still reading e-books ¹. This has shifted how I view the infinite scroll and I’ve deleted most-video centric apps from my phone aside from YouTube. Since I’ve shifted to primarily using a desktop, I’ve noticed a decline in my interest in certain websites, partly because they’re not as readily accessible as apps on my phone, and also because I’ve discovered a wider range of engaging content online

I’m not opposed to bringing back the concept of a computer room. I already treat my 15” laptop like a desktop. Image source: FreePik

I feel a bit out of the loop now that I’m spending less time on social media. So I’m still sorting out the balance between being informed but not overly distracted by endless notifications and an infinite amount of content. I recently stumbled upon a post about the lack of human curation on the modern web by Cassidy Williams where she says:

In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the latest thing because you decided to go do it. Now, all of this content is pushed in your face

So far, I’m enjoying spending more of my screen-time, tinkering around with my digital playground, exploring the IndieWeb and other personal websites². The IndieWeb is an alternative to the corporate web and defines itself as “a community of independent and personal websites based on the principles of: owning your domain and using it as your primary online identity, publishing on your own site first (optionally elsewhere), and owning your content”. I’m drawn to the idea of having my own little piece of the internet that I can share with others and it’s nice to know that there’s a “vast community of fellow web weavers”³ out there.

If you have any suggestions or RSS feed recommendations, I’m eager to get more involved with the IndieWeb and would love to hear them! I can be reached via Webmention, BlueSky or Mastodon.