indieweb.txt
This page is largely historical, there was no further iteration or interest in this topic. Kept for posterity.
indieweb.txt was a brainstorm proposal (discussed at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2015) for a plain-text-based something.txt approach to allow IndieWeb site owners to share information about their tools, strategies, features, and motivations; there is at least one known implementation.
E.g.:
- IndieWeb tools they are using (e.g. The aarongustafson/jekyll-webmention_io webmention plugin for Jekyll-based sites, https://www.brid.gy/, etc.)
- IndieWeb 'strategies'
- IndieMark score (and potentially details of 'compliance' with each item within each level)
- notes on relevance of IndieWeb to personal web life (why one is embracing IndieWeb strategies, etc.)
Why
- Sharing information on tools and practices across a growing movement, enabling interested people to discover which tools and strategies IndieWeb site owners are using
- Self-reflection: personal motivation to review one's own IndieMark occasionally
- Contributing to a better understanding of the evolution of the IndieWeb (also see: https://snarfed.org/indie-stats)
Why not
There is already existing use and adoption of about and colophon pages that seem to satisfy most of these use-cases, including in practice.
Examples
- Mike Sass has an indieweb.txt published and linked from the main navigation:
- https://shellsharks.com/indieweb.txt (archive)
- includes URL of this wiki page and sections for Tools, Strategies, IndieMark score, and Why
Matthias Pfefferle: https://notiz.blog/indieweb.txt
Inspiration
- robots.txt
- humans.txt
- The Setup: "A nerdy little interview website, asking people what they use to get stuff done" (source code available: https://github.com/waferbaby/usesthis/)
Implementation
- Could be a free-form text file
- But ideally should at least have some basic structure (like robots.txt or humans.txt)
- Shouldn't probably be at a fixed, hardcoded location - a rel link tag could probably be used: e.g.
<link rel="indieweb" href="/some/where/indieweb.txt" />
Brainstorming
From the brainstorming session at IndieWebCamp Brighton 2015:
- point to multiple structured resources describing tools/strategies/IndieMark 'compliance'
- see RingMark - both in terms of running automated checks and of visualizing in a very intuitive way the level of compliance
- extend the advertising items to include API endpoints to interact with the site (e.g. to post content, replies, etc. - this is mostly covered by existing strategies, but could be useful for ad-hoc APIs)
Feedback
- 2015-07-12 tommorris.org: HTML perhaps? Indie Web. 😀
- 2024-02-29
Anthony Ciccarello: I prefer using my colophon page but would prefer an HTML page over TXT (discussed in #meta chat)