Hi Internet friends.

I have been tweaking my website a lot this week and wanted to write a few notes about my IndieWeb progress.

In my early days, I tried to just implement a ton of stuff. Then I had to tweak a bunch of things to get what I wanted. I can be too rigid sometimes, and I think some of my IndieWeb implementation efforts have fallen in this category.

I’m in a life moment where my IndieWeb commitment needs to be eclipsed by, well, most of my other commitments. So here’s where I’m at right now. I’m using the IndieMark list to work through it all. This will get a little technical, so if it’s not interesting, please move on with your day.

  1. I do own my own domain, kimberlyhirsh.com.
  2. I think it's set up for Web sign-in, but I sometimes struggle with the IndieAuth/Micropub plug-ins.
  3. My posts do have permalinks.
  4. Also they have h-entry markup.
  5. Robots can index my site.
  6. I'm pretty sure WordPress outputs my stuff in html.
  7. You can defs use the site-specific search in Google to search kimberlyhirsh.com.
  8. I have an h-card with contact info and a photo of myself on my homepage.
  9. I am currently posting two post types to my site: notes and articles. Both get syndicated to Twitter and Facebook as I deem appropriate.
  10. I have linear previous/next navigation between my posts.
  11. I have a search UI.
  12. URLs are auto linked.
  13. I can both send and receive webmentions.
  14. I receive backfeed from Twitter. (Facebook eliminated this functionality, sadly.)

What now?

I’m not adding any other post types just yet. For me, the inconvenience of creating replies on my own site and syndicating them outweighs the benefit of owning my replies, as my replies are rarely substantive. Occasionally, replies may inspire a longer article. But for now, I’m going to reply on the silos where I see folks post stuff. (That said: I will try to work out using webmentions to reply to folks replies that get backfed to my site, using my site’s comments. We’ll see.)

Similarly, posting photos here instead of to Instagram, events and RSVPs here instead of to Facebook, and reads here instead of to Goodreads is just not something I want to tackle all at once. So as I figure out which use cases I want to urgently own, then I’ll work that out.

But I will be posting links here instead of directly to Facebook or Twitter, so I may use the read post type for that purpose. Or bookmark. I’m trying to decide how I want to distinguish those uses.

I’m not really clear on how to make web actions happen, even though I have the necessary plug-ins installed.

I want to get back into documenting my own itches and participating more in the IndieWeb community.

But honestly, this is mostly just a post giving myself permission not to own my replies.