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IndieWebCamp 2014 — Thoughts Before The Gathering

IndieWebCamp 2014 is upon us. Gatherings of creators are under way in Berlin, New York, and Portland - the first time we've held our annual IndieWebCamp across three simultaneous locations. Here are some thoughts I had before we started today in New York City.

There have been so many IndieWeb developments & advancements in the past few months it's been hard to keep track! Here are a few:

micropub: a standard API to create and update posts on indieweb sites. Nothing short of a simpler and more secure (using IndieAuth) replacement for: AtomPub, the metaweblog API, and perhaps even WebDAV. Nevermind snowflake APIs.
fragmentions - a standard way to make URLs that refer to a selection of text on a page.
marginalia - an indieweb approach to paragraph-level comments (what some might call annotations) anchored by text selections (using fragmentions of course). Kartik Prabhu has an amazing experiment in progress that shows Medium-like paragraph commenting functionality, except on an indieweb site, with comments from other indiewebsites via webmention. Kartik is here in New York City.
Known — What was "idno" is now known as Known. Known is an indieweb site solution that has achieved a quite high IndieMark score and is being actively developed for people to install themselves on their own servers. The Known team is in Portland for the weekend.

In addition, I've had so many indieweb related topics come up personally that I haven't had time to blog about them all. Here are a few:

People focused mobile communications - I've been working openly on building blocks for using an indieweb site for mobile communications. Most recently blogged the markup for buttons and next have to work on the CSS to present it.
Twitter accounts being compromised - AKA silo profile vulnerabilites via web-interfaces to cell phone text messages (e.g. AT&T Messages site). One inquiry from an AT&T Network Security Analyst, to which I replied, with no further updates from him.
Bandwidth abusing robots - the past couple of months my site has seen highly increased bandwidth due to mostly web spiders/bots that either are pretending to be IE5.5/NT5.0 but are requesting numerous pages/permalinks *per second*, or bots that do self-identify but ignore robots.txt throttling. So I've had to block them in .htaccess. I need to document this further - hopefully to help others who run their own indieweb sites as well.
Indie Reposts - I spoke at the recent Personal Democracy Conference and during that conference wanted to "retweet" others tweets from the #PDF14 hashtag but from my own site rather than on Twitter. I've done a bunch of research and added to the indiewebcamp repost page and have a sketch of what an indie repost of a tweet could look like on my site (including how to POSSE it) but haven't had time to implement it. It's on my Falcon list.
IndieWebCamp Introduction session - lastly, having helped run and introduce several IndieWebCamps since the first, we've learned a bunch of best practices for how to start and IndieWebCamp. I finally wrote those up in a simple ordered list, and as background I'd like to write-up why for each point.

I did manage to at least finish that "how to do an IndieWeb Introductions" write-up and used it this morning at IndieWebCamp 2014 in New York City! From what I can tell, the Portland folks have used it as well. Hopefully this will help make it easier for others to start and run future IndieWebCamps in more cities.

microformats.org turns 9 — upgrade to microformats2 and more

Nine years ago we launched microformats.org with a basic premise: that it is possible to express meaning on the web in HTML in a simple way—far simpler than the complex alternatives (XML) being promoted by mature companies and standards organizations alike.

Today microformats.org continues to be a gathering place for those seeking simpler ways to express meaning in web pages, most recently the growing IndieWeb movement.

Looking back nine years ago, none of the other alternatives promoted in the 2000s (even by big companies like Google and Yahoo) survive to this day in any meaningful way:

Google Base
Google Data
Yahoo's CommonTag.org
too many XML approaches to count

From this experience, we conclude that what large companies support (or claim to prefer) is often a trailing indicator (at best).

Large companies tend to promote more complex solutions, perhaps because they can afford the staff, time, and other resources to develop and support complex solutions. Such approaches fundamentally lack empathy for independent developers and designers, who don't have time to keep up with all the complexity.

If there's one value that's at the heart of microformats' focus and continued evolution of simplicity, it is that empathy for independent developers and designers, for small consulting shops, for curious hobbyists who are most enabled and empowered by the simplest possible solutions to problems.

We now know that no amount of large company marketing and evangelism can make up for a focus on ever simpler solutions which take less time to learn, use, and reliably maintain. As long as we focus on that, we will create better solutions.

Community Changes

Speaking of taking less time, we've learned some community lessons about that too. Perhaps the most important is that as a community we are far more efficiently productive using just IRC and the wiki, than any amount of use of email. In fact, the microformats drafts that were developed wtih the most email (e.g. hAudio) turned out to be the hardest to follow and discuss (too many long emails), and sadly ended up lacking the simplicity that real world publishers wanted (e.g. last.fm).

Email tends to bias design and discussions towards those who have more time to read and write long emails, and (apparently) enjoy that for its own sake, than those who want to quickly research & brainstorm, and get to actually creating, building, and deploying things with microformats.

Thus we're making these changes effective today:

IRC for all microformats discussions, whether research, questions, or brainstorming
email only for occasional announcements and to direct people to IRC.
wiki for capturing questions, brainstorming, conclusions, and different points of view

We're going to update the site to direct all discussion (e.g links) to the IRC channel accordingly.

Hope to see you there: #microformats on irc.freenode.net

Upgrading to microformats2

Over the past few years microformats2 has proven itself in practice, with numerous sites both publishing and consuming, several open source parsing libraries, and a growing test suite. All the lessons learned from the evolution from original microformats, from RDFa, and from microdata have been incorporated into microformats2 which is now the simplest to both publish and parse.

It's time to throw the switch and upgrade everything to microformats2. This means three things:

Upgrading microformats.org

First, we're starting by upgrading the links on the microformats.org home page to point to the microformats2 drafts, which are ready for use.

We'll be incrementally upgrading the markup of the microformats.org site itself to use microformats2 markup.

Upgrade sites

Second, if you publish any kind of semantic information, start upgrading your web pages to microformats2 across the board.

If you're concerned about what search engines claim to support, there are two approaches to choose from:

Know that search engines are a trailing indicator, and as microformats2 usage grows, they'll index it as well.
Or: Use one classic microformat (supported by all major search engines) at top of your page, e.g. on the <body>, in addition to your microformats2 markup throughout your pages. Search engines only really care to summarize the primary topic or purpose of a web page in their "rich snippets" or "cards", and thus that's sufficient.

Check out the latest validators which now include some microformats2 support as well!

Upgrade tools

Third, this is a call to upgrade all microformats supporting tools to microformats2. As nearly all of these are open source, this is an open call for contributions, updates, patches, etc. for:

If it generates microformats, upgrade it to instead generate microformats2.

If it consumes microformats, upgrade it to also consume microformats2 (which may be most easily done by making use of one of the microformats2 parsers that has backward compatible parsing built in).

10th Year Goal

As we enter the tenth year of microformats.org let's make it our collective goal to upgrade our pages, our sites, and our tools to microformats2.

Our goal is to complete all the above upgrades by microformats.org's tenth birthday, if not sooner. Let's get to work.

Thanks to Barnaby Walters and fellow microformats admins Kevin Marks & Ted O'Connor for reviewing drafts of this post. Thanks to Kevin especially for some copy edits!

Did 2x800, stadium stairs, 800, 400, & stadium stairs lap. First time more than half an #npsf #trackattack workout. Today's full workout was: * 2x800, stadium stairs, 2x800, stadium stairs, 2x800 Look at these fierce starters: http://instagram.com/p/n8NpZlg9QJ/ http://photos-a.ak.instagram.com/hphotos-ak-prn/10358279_234439130079464_647660674_n.jpg Missy captured the path we took: http://instagram.com/p/n8QkeMldF-/# photos-c.ak.instagram.com/hphotos-ak-ash/10354467_776187112414770_734194172_n.jpg Thanks to running buddies Natalie, Missy, Lindsay, and Tammy for being just that much faster that I kept pushing harder to stay in their pack. And Natalie in particular for pushing us all to do that last stadium stairs lap. Four weeks ago I first ran a few #trackattack sprints. Six weeks before that I started showing up. Going to keep incrementally pushing and one day I will do a whole #trackattack workout. Previously: * tantek.com/2014/105/t2/kept-up-warmup-laps-ran-trackattack-levelingup * tantek.com/2014/064/t2/yesterday-npsf-track-kezar-trackattack