Trying to Explain the Indieweb

It’s been a while since I’ve updated on some of the work I’ve been doing. A lot of it has been behind the scenes. I’ve been working on improving some of the things I’ve built. Some of the work is rather subtle. For those of you not interested, feel free to skip this.

So, since 2014, I’ve been working toward getting certain building blocks available in WordPress, along with several other people.

• A webmention is a way to notify another site that you’ve linked to their site. Once you have that notification, there are things you can do with it. Webmentions have been developed as a plugin for WordPress.
• Linking itself has utility. But by marking up content, the receiving site can take action.
• Microformats would be the markup you can use to have cross-site commenting and other forms of communication.
• That would be the purpose of the Post Kinds plugin. It allows posts to be marked up as Likes, Bookmarks, etc. These things could be marked up manually, but some people would prefer a more automated solution.
• Separately, there are two theme options now that mark up WordPress theme elements with microformats.
• On the receiving end, the Semantic Linkbacks plugin takes incoming mentions and tries to interpret them….turning them into comments, likes, etc. This would be how you would derive value.
• Finally, Micropub support. Micropub is a standard to create posts on a site from a third-party client. It means that be it WordPress on the backend, or something else, you can create with the same tools.

There is slow but regular improvements in both the Indieweb in general. Nothing is ever as fast as one would like it to be. But think of what can be done…