In my last post I stated that I was making a commitment to making this site my “home” on the internet the place where folks can find me and see what I’m up to.
The trick is to that is less about making the statement and more about how I’m going to change what I have been doing, posting all over the place. As I’ve started to review things I’ve noticed that I have items that I post automatically, things that I share as I find them interesting, along with the occasion new thought or idea, but I haven’t posted that stuff here, and if this is to be my new “home” it need to change that.
In my research (ok, mindless searching on this topic) I revisited a movement that I looked at long ago – I know as I have several bookmarks about it – the IndieWeb.
At its core the IndieWeb is about owning your own data, publishing on a platform you control and have ownership of it so that at the end of the day it’s yours and not some big tech company’s. That core idea continues to resonate with me. The internet I grew up on was all about tinkering with things and then sharing what we found. It was about having your own site and sharing links to other sites that were interesting or articles that we found valuable. Somewhere along the way we all lost site of that.
So one of my first goals it to shift away from posting elsewhere first, post here and then share it to other sites. The IndieWeb community has a term for this, POSSE, which means to Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere, and they have several members who have paved the way on this. There are a number of tools and protocols that can be used to help you do that. Unfortunately it’s not quite plug and play and will take some setup but I believe it’s a good next step to take to get where I want to be.
Let me apologize in advance as it’s likely to get a bit bumpy over the next few weeks as I work on getting it all setup and running – but it should make it interesting.