{"id":93,"date":"2018-05-14T02:04:25","date_gmt":"2018-05-14T06:04:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.stillmuchtoponder.com\/blog\/?p=93"},"modified":"2018-05-14T02:04:25","modified_gmt":"2018-05-14T06:04:25","slug":"a-mini-sabbatical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.stillmuchtoponder.com\/blog\/2018\/05\/a-mini-sabbatical\/","title":{"rendered":"A mini-sabbatical"},"content":{"rendered":"

This week I took a mini-sabbatical from work to explore the IndieWeb<\/a>\u00a0movement and really liked what I found. It’ll be exciting to see what future holds for this vision of creating people-focused technology to enable social interactions on the open web.<\/p>\n

Aaron Parecki’s Building an Indie Web Reader<\/a>\u00a0strikes a chord particularly close to my heart. Currently I manage my information influx clumsily via a combination of Feedly, email newsletter (mostly Medium), Nuzzle, Google Now, a couple of magazines and the family\/friends network on WhatsApp and WeChat. I have quit Facebook 7 years ago, have been pondering about going back as a particular community I’m now involved with is more active there, but am worried about the deluge there. I’m new to GitHub and IRC but haven’t figured out a good way to incorporate them into my information consumption. This leaves me feeling overwhelmed often. The Microsub<\/a>\u00a0server abstraction seems like a great idea. Normalizing various data sources will not only improve organization, but also provides a perfect seam for more “magic”, such as personalized algorithms for classifying and summarizing content for the user. I see this is distinct from the current social silos’ “algorithmic timeline” model because 1) it works across the web, and 2) the algorithm is a hackable module that the user can tinker with to their liking. This is an area I’d like to work more in.<\/p>\n

I also followed Chris Aldrich’s Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb Use<\/a>\u00a0to set up this blog. The title says it all. It’s a very accessible step-by-step guide for getting a basic IndieWeb-compatible site up and running. It was amazing how much the community has already built up that I was able to post a cross-site reply using webmention<\/a>\u00a0and post to this blog from a 3rd party editor (Aaron Parecki’s Quill<\/a>) using Micropub<\/a> without writing a single line of code. Having abandoned many silos because of the lack of interoperable tools, this completely blew my mind.<\/p>\n

I also found several interesting conversation within the community. How to design web services that properly respect user privacy yet still promote openness is something I’d like to learn more about. Sebastian Greger’s The IndieWeb Privacy Challenge<\/a>\u00a0is a great starting point.<\/p>\n

Overall, I feel the time this week has been well spent. These are the main accomplishment:<\/p>\n