Indieweb 2014 End of Year Summary

I found out about Indiewebcamp in March of 2014, so I have not yet been involved with it for a complete calendar year. But, I’ve decided, with the end of 2014 approaching, to take stock on how I’m doing, and can reassess next year.

As part of this evaluation, I am using the Indiemark system, a set of metrics for measuring the indieweb-ness of a site, and a step-by-step approach to incrementally adopting indieweb features.

Identity

Level 2

I own my own domain, and I post h-card contact info and an icon on`my page.

I have given much thought to people-focused communications, which falls under this category. Need to develop this more.

 Authentication

Level 1

I have set up Indieauth, which allows me to authenticate to sites using my domain name. But this exposed a bug in one of the libraries indieauth runs on, which has gone up the chain for repair. There is currently no level 2, but a level 2 may include two factor authentication, which I am trialing as a security measure…

Posts

Level 3

My Post Kinds/Taxonomy plugin supports different kinds of content. And while I support the following types, I am actually planning to limit myself due overlap.

  • note
  • article – longer form content
  • reply
  • like or favorite, depending on your preference – I have the hardest time with deciding
  • photo – post where the primary content is an image
  • repost – this is a complete reposting of the original, haven’t really done those
  • rsvp – only used once. I really need to go more places.

Syndication

Level 2

I syndicate(POSSE) my posts to applicable silos(Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus). I am not currently linking back to the originals, as I previously did, unless relevant, as I haven’t gotten my syndication working the way I’d like.

 

Posting UI

Level 3

It’s hard to say where I am with this. I have a UI for posting, the WordPress interface, one I created for adding context information for replies, but I’m still not happy with the UI for syndication.

I’d like to work on a simpler UI for the future. The WordPress one is very useful, but has a lot of ‘stuff’ to finish a post. Great for an article, not so great for a note.

Navigation

Level 4

I have previous/next navigation, time based archives, and tag based archive pages, so I’ve covered this category as of now.

Search

Level 4

My site is searchable using the built-in WordPress search functions.

Aggregation

Level 4/5.

Thanks to the work of Matthias Pfefferle, I receive webmentions and show comments and mentions from other people on my site. That achieves the notes for Level 5.

However, I’ve spent a lot of time on reply-contexts, which I am manually entering. My project continues with plans to pull in more of this information automatically, which is more of a Level 4 goal.

Web Actions

Level 3, but not Level 2.

I had hard-coded actions and web actions on my site. They were removed for now, as they didn’t work the way I wanted. They will likely be back.

I do provide syndication links on posts of all other places the post can be found.

Security

Level 5/6

I serve the site now exclusively over https, and redirect anyone requesting a plain unencrypted site. The site supports SPDY for increasing speed over an SSL site.

The site has an A rating with Qualysis SSL Labs. It uses an SHA-2 certificate and supports Mozilla’s Intermediate Compatability Cipher List. This makes it fairly up to date in this category, but I am holding out for the A+.

 Miscellany

This site is also now delivered over IPV6 as well as IPV4.

The site runs on Nginx, and uses a caching system I wrote.

Conclusion

One of the most interesting things about getting involved in this group has been building things. I have always loved making things, and have never been good at it. I still think I am a reasonably good idea person, but a horrible programmer.

I still have 4 days in 2014, if I want to build something else.

David Shanske

My day job is in training for an airline. I also develop Indieweb WordPress plugins so that others can take control of their online identity.

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