When I first started developing websites back in 2000 the internet was a much simpler place. Google existed, but most people still used Yahoo or Ask Jeeves to find sites on the internet.
My personal website, which was hosted on my ISPs web hosting, contained a collection of jokes, links to friend's websites, games and of course a guestbook. There was no social media, not even MySpace existed yet, so people created their own websites as a way to express themselves.
With MySpace and later Facebook, and Instagram, people now had a way of communicating on the internet without needing to know how to write HTML. As a result, personal websites seemed to die out or at least it appeared that way to most. I doubt any of my friends that had websites when I was at school still run one now.
In last week's newsletter, I mentioned the stages that most platforms go through that eventually lead them to join the likes of MySpace in the internet history books. When those platforms die so do all the posts that you spent hours of your life creating.
My MySpace page used to feature a photo of a teenage me, with highlights and spiky hair, wearing a Jack Daniel's t-shirt, while the Foo Fighter's song "All My Life" played automatically in the background (no you couldn't turn it off). I don't remember deleting my MySpace account when I joined Facebook at University, but it is certainly no longer there (luckily).
Unless you own your data, eventually it will disappear from the internet and there is little you can do about it. I have had alexhyett.com since 2015 and all the posts I have written there still exist.
As always the main thing that drove people to the social media platforms was human connection. It is an ability that these old static websites lacked. You could add comments or sign their guestbook, but there was no two-way conversation happening. If you linked to someone else's blog post they wouldn't be notified it had happened.
In 2002, trackbacks and pingbacks were released, but it didn't take long for spammers to abuse them so much that they became unusable.
Today social media is full of fake news, influencers trying to sell you something and a whole lot of adverts.
So what is the alternative?
Introducing the IndieWeb #
In recent years people have started moving away from these big centralised platforms to a more decentralised internet.
More and more personal websites, written by actual people, and not AI, are cropping up you just need to look for them. The IndieWeb movement is largely to thank for this.
The core principle of the IndieWeb is to own your own data and control how that is posted on the internet. The IndieWeb is built around some key open standards that can be used to make your website more social.
Webmentions #
The IndieWeb page describes webmentions as:
Webmention is an open web standard (W3C Recommendation) for conversations and interactions across the web, a powerful building block used for a growing distributed network of peer-to-peer comments, likes, reposts, and other responses across the web.
Webmentions allow you to link conversations about content across the web. If someone shares a link to your blog post on their site or on their Mastodon instance you get notified, and you can include it on your site.
Although it is possible to display other peoples social media replies on your website, as with all things it doesn't mean you should. There are a few arguments against the privacy of webmentions that are worth keeping in mind before you implement anything yourself.
As part of my website redesign I plan on implementing webmentions, but I am not sure yet what, if anything I will show on my website. I may just include a link back to the source.
IndieAuth #
What good is a decentralised web if you still need to log in everywhere with your Google, Microsoft, GitHub or Facebook account?
IndieAuth aims to fix that by allowing you to authenticate using your own website domain. Naturally it is going to take a while (if ever) for other websites to support this, but at least the functionality is there.
WebSub #
I still think RSS is probably the best way for people to get updates about your content, but you can also send notifications as well using the open WebSub standard.
IndieWeb pages #
The IndieWeb is more than just a bunch of open protocols, it is about personal websites, human written content and a fallback to a time before algorithms, GDPR pop-ups and spyware spreading adverts.
It is a place to share your lives and the things you are interested in without feeding the pockets of some big corporations.
They also tend to include the following pages:
- Blogroll - Links to other sites that you enjoy reading, so other people can discover them as well.
- Now - I believe Derek Sivers started the now page to let people know what you're currently working on.
- Links/Bookmarks - Share the links to pages that you have saved for later. Essentially a public list of bookmarks.
- Uses - A list of the software and tech that you use on a daily basis.
At the end of the day it is your website, your space to share whatever you feel like.
If you want to read more about the IndieWeb and getting started I recommend starting here:
❤️ Picks of the Week #
📝 Article - Full of Themselves: An analysis of title drops in movies - This is fantastic one man project. How many times in a film do they say the title of the film. I love the animations as you hover over the filmstrips. Really well done.
📝 Article - Please, enough with the dead butterflies! - If you have ever seen a picture of a butterfly on a product or film poster there is a good chance it is a dead butterfly. A fascinating write-up and I am going to be seeing dead butterflies everywhere now.
🛠 Tool - Ente - Private cloud for your photos, videos and more - End-to-end encrypted, self-hostable, open-source Google photos alternative. I am definitely going to try this out on my new NAS server once it is built.
📝 Article - bash debugging - I write quite a lot of bash scripts to automate things at work and on my home server. For years, I have just been using echo when debugging. Turns out you can do a lot more.
📝 Article - Using Eleventy to Gobble Up Everything I Do Online - I plan on using Eleventy for my new site and this will likely be useful. Remember those "personal websites" I was talking about, this one's Robb Knight's and its worth bookmarking.
👨💻 Latest from me #
I am moving this newsletter over to Buttondown from next week. This means you will get an email from alexhyett@buttondown.email rather than alex@n.alexhyett.com.
Why the move?
My Ghost setup wasn't quite what I wanted it to be. The plan was to have all my writing on www.alexhyett.com but instead I have it duplicated there as well as on newsletter.alexhyett.com.
The other reason is cost. It is currently costing me $13/month to host Ghost and another $35/month for Mailgun. So $48/month, and it isn't even the setup I was after.
Buttondown on the other hand is only $29/month with my current number of subscribers, and I can treat it as a truly headless email sender.
Who knew sending email could be so expensive! I will be adding in an optional "pay what you want" plan this year to help cover the costs as they are only going to go up from here.
As I mentioned last week, I finally finished my course SOLID Principles for C# Developers. A 15% discount using the code SOLID15 is still available for the first 200 people who buy it. There is only around 55 spaces left though.
💬 Quote of the Week #
Meta thought: you radically underestimate both a) how much you know that other people do not and b) the instrumental benefits to you of publishing it.
From a Thread by Patrick McKenzie