Bringing the indieweb!

As part of my move towards the indieweb, I've been creating a system on gerben.dev to create notes, posts, likes etc.

This started out as a new project, but for now I'm just creating it internally.

Kindy

I've named the system Kindy, because I'm making different kind of content. I also discovered that Australia and New Zealand use this word to mean kindergarten.

My Kindy however, is a JSON format for which I've created a Go template/html that turns those fields into HTML with Microformats's h-entry.

Which works nicely for likes and notes, but for posts, which ideally includes quite a bit of HTML it was actually quite difficult. Can't have multiline support in JSON.
So I switched to YAML and while that worked, I was not getting formatting help. So time for, yet, another solution.

I now put a filename in my content field and when I detect this (hardcoded to .html for now) I load that file and replace the content.

Customization

The reason I stopped with making this an open source project, is that I early on noticed how many decisions need to be made in regard to mark up, styling and overall design of the product.

When I talked with my wife about this, she mentioned that it is a lot of work and probably only developers can deal with it, defeating the purpose of the project.

The thing about customization is that if you want to implement this properly, your product will have a lot of configuration. For which you need a lot of code and even more documentation.

But this means regular users always have to have some sort of compromise on how their website looks, unless they themselves become tech-savvy enough to basically create their own.
Which brings us back to indieweb: everyone should have their own website.

Bridging and syndication

Meanwhile, I've been actively trying to get fed.brid.gy to work, and while it does work for webmentions and Fediverse bridging, I'm having a lot of trouble with getting the Bluesky stuff to work.

Then I read Jeremy Keith's blog and notice how he's doing the syndication himself, by use of some simple PHP scripts. So should I start doing it myself too?

Being a programmer actually makes it way more difficult with all these existing indieweb solutions, because you technically can learn how to do it... and then roll your own, a programmer's favourite pastime.

Anyway, I should probably continue with finishing my content management system and see what kind of data it creates. Syndicating can come later... 🐊

P.s. What should I do with permalinks? For now, I got /posts/{YYYYMMDD}-{slug}, but I also would like to just have the slug. But can I trust myself to always come up with unique titles?