I made a couple of updates to my site: microformats and webmentions. They’re mostly invisible changes, but hopefully they will make blogging here on neocities more fun and engaging.
Changes
My posts now use the h-entry microformat, which makes it easier for software to parse. Software such as … maybe your blog! It’s a format for making posts rebloggable. Going the other direction, I added some tools to my site-generator to embed posts. Now I can reblog other posts here! The embeds are generated automatically by (you guessed it) parsing the h-entry microformat.
I also set up webmentions. This is a way for me to notify other people when I link to their sites, and for other people to notify me when they link to my site. I handle outgoing webmentions through @remy/webmention, and incoming webmentions through webmention.io.
Inspiration
What’s the point of all this? The point is to have conversations! Right here on our very own websites, without needing to have Tumblr or Bluesky or Facebook act as the middleman. I was specifically inspired by what Natalie Weizenbaum is doing over at nex-3.com, and her essay on what she calls the “Sociable Web”. If everything went according to plan, maybe you’ll see this post in the webmentions list over on Natalie’s blog.
A Sociable Web
The deepest virtue of independent websites communicating with loosely-coupled conventions and protocols isn’t anything technical. It’s the fact that you can just do it. You don’t need a platform to exist, you don’t even need anyone else to be doing the same thing (although it’s more fun that way). You can write a blog and people can read it via RSS or just by loading it up every now and then. You can hook up as much IndieWeb technology as you want, or just focus on the cultural aspect by writing link roundups and leaving comments on the stuff you read.
Read more
The web is feeling more and more corporate every day, and the corporate web is feeling more and more hostile every day. It’s nice to have spaces that are our own. It’s nice that folks on the indie web are figuring out how we can do that without completely giving up the functionality of other platforms. It’s not, at this point in time, as convenient and easy to use. Maybe it never will be completely. But none of the technology involved is so arcane that it couldn’t be made easy to use.