Hello, World

I read about the IndieWeb project last week. I’ve followed them at a distance in the past, but I ended up watching this video, and it really struck a chord with me:

Having my own website means that I have a ‘real’ online identity. Businesses will come and go, incredible journeys will come to an end, and servers get neglected, hacked, or shut down. But even as I churn through social media accounts, my personal domain will always represent me.

There’s also the appeal of ownership. The web is one of the most influential networks in the history of the world, and by putting this site online, I’m staking a claim to some part of it. I’m not renting space from Facebook or Medium or Reddit, I own this tiny slice of our web.

Writing on your own website associates your thoughts and ideas with you as a person…Writing for another publication you get a little circular avatar at the beginning of the post and a brief bio at the end of the post, and that’s about it. People will remember the publication, but probably not your name. (write on your own website)

Some of the most useful and meaningful things I’ve read have been written by people on their own sites. Maybe I can try to repay that favour.

Technical details: This site is built using Hugo. The theme is a customized version of one. Since this is a static site without comments or pingback support, I don’t think I’ll be using Microformats and instead will just include some rel=me tags so that I get nice checkmarks on other websites.

Update: I gave up on Hugo because it seems to introduce breaking changes too rapidly, and instead wrote a markdown-based generator in Python. It’s easier to use for me since it picks up publication dates and slugs based on file paths, which makes posting on mobile easy.