This was originally part of an introduction at IWC Online in 2020, but I’d never posted it. As my 10th anniversary of joining the Indieweb chat is today, I thought I’d post on it.

“Your high school’s yearbook club just graduated and knows HTML”—Chloe Weil

 

Making an Appearance

Good Afternoon, I am interested in your philosophy and wish to subscribe to it. – First visit to the Indieweb chat room.

I first heard about the IndieWeb on March 6, 2014 when Amber Case, who co-founded IndieWebCamps, appeared episode 80 of the now defunct podcast, In Beta, talking about the upcoming IWC SF.

The ideas meshed with what I myself thought…you should have a website and post there. I’d flirted with websites, and by 2014, I had been writing blog entries elsewhere under a variety of different usernames and identities regularly for years. I had tried to resurrect my website because I was tired of the only identity people could find being one on someone else’s site.

 

My First IndieWebCamp

I found out that there was an upcoming Indiewebcamp in my area. So my involvement with the Indieweb physically began on April 26, 2014 when I visited my first IndieWebCamp, IWC NYC 2014.

 

IndieWebCamps

The original IndieWebCamp, in Portland Oregon, which was later renamed the IndieWeb Summit, has been going on since 2011. A UK event joined in 2012, but 2014, the year I joined, was the first year we really took the idea on the road. We had events at MIT, Online, San Francisco, New York, the UK, and for the first time, the Portland event had counterparts running concurrently in New York and Berlin.

I continued to participate in Indiewebcamps until 2020, when the pandemic put that on hold, and this past December, we finally got a US based one together again.

Evolution

Here is an early screenshot of my site from April 2014. My site has changed its look many times, but the data still remains the same.

This is what that post looks like today…

What Has Changed

Not much. When I joined in 2014, I wasn’t much of a developer. I have gotten better, building my knowledge of IndieWeb and WordPress concepts and helping to maintain Indieweb plugins for WordPress.

As a community, when I started we had Microformats and Webmentions, IndieAuth was only something one person had implemented. We’ve added Micropub and Microsub and continued to iterate on the other building blocks.