I presented during the 2022 Netherlands WordCamp edition in Arnhem on turning all WordPress sites into fully IndieWeb enabled sites. Meaning turning well over a third of the web into the open social web. Outside all the silos.
The slides are available in my self-hosted Slideshare replacement for embed and download, and shown below.
I have been blogging a long time, and can tinker a bit with code (like a home cook). I want my site to be the center of how I read and write the web. Its purpose is to create conversations with others, who write in their own spaces on the web. The IndieWeb community supports that with a number of technical building blocks that allow me a set of pretty cool things. But all that IndieWeb offers has a high threshold for entry.
The key parts of IndieWeb to me, the parts that make interaction between websites possible, that allow any site to be an active part of many conversations, are much simpler though:
- Microformats2 so that computers know how to interpret our blogposts,
- some class declarations, so computers know why we link to some other web page,
- and WebMention, the protocol that lets a web page know another page is linking to them.
Making interaction possible between site authors, across sites, just by writing as they already do, is both the simplest to arrange and the most impactful. It’s not something that site authors should have to deal with though, it should be in your website’s engine. WordPress in my case, and an enormous amount of other websites.
Ensuring that WordPress Themes, and Gutenberg blocks would support and could handle Microformats2 and classes correctly therefore will have a huge impact.
Over 40% of the open web would then with a single stroke be the open social web. No need for data hungry silo’s, no place for algorithmic timelines designed to keep you hooked.
WordPress wants to be the Operating System for the Web. That OS is missing social features, and it’s not a big leap to add them with existing web protocols. No website owner would have to be a coder, be it home cooking style or professional, to use those social features and create conversations. It would just be there.
If you build WP Themes, if you create Gutenberg blocks, you’re invited to help make this happen.
Somewhat inspired by https://www.zylstra.org/blog/2022/09/wordpressindieweb-as-the-os-of-the-open-social-web/, I did some experimenting with WordPress’s new Full Site Editor. The result is this, still very hacky, Twenty Twenty-Two child theme. https://github.com/janboddez/tt2-mf2
Thanks Jan, Experimentation is appreciated!
@ton I just posted a link to the same post of yours ignoring that you’re on Mastodon too 🙂
I wish I knew how to do this. It seems that if you want to make your site the central place, you need to have some technical expertise to do it. I like the idea of webmentions and also the annotations. Any place where you can refer me to a bare basic simplistic guide (“idiots guide”) would be greatly appreciated.
@ton I loved reading your presentation – is there any video posted? I will be writing a post soon on this topic, thanks for sharing!
@AndySylvester It was recorded yes which will be posted (don’t know when)
/where), however I presented in Dutch
@ton thanks for the info
This Article was mentioned on cagrimmett.com