More Indieweb

I wrote about the Intro to Indieweb yesterday. Reading up on it, starting to read the people behind it or using it, I feel a similar rush as I did back in the days when I started blogging. This is the evolution of the Web I remember, this feels right. (And it also feels like a tiny bubble in the huge silo dominated web-simulacron we have around us today). Time to beat the drum, I guess and start on working on making it more accessible for people that aren’t as technology savy as the early adopters.

Watching Jeremys video yesterday, I got the idea to write something that would allow me to upload images and have them posted to the website. This is a bit of a problem, as this site is a collection of static HTML that lives in a Git repository and gets rebuilt whenever I push. I researched the Github API and found a way how I might be able to create a commit programmatically. Then I thought that I should be able to use a serverless approach, using some sort of FaaS technology. In my day job, I build SWITCHengines, a IaaS cloud. Since a couple of months, we are betaing OpenShift and I saw a presentation on OpenFaaS at GotoCPH. Turns out, that there is an old way to install it on OpenShift, but RedHat is favouring OpenWhisk. I managed to install OpenWhisk in a couple of minutes (Yay), and then found out, that Netlify, where this site is hosted, also supports Lambda Functions. It probably is more sensible to use that service than to rolling my own. (Ed: Why not try both?).

Further research led me to the website of Vincent Pickering and specifically his article on Implementing the Indieweb on a static website - exactly my use case. He uses a JS server, Master Cntrl that runs on Heroku that handles all the dynamic aspects of Indieweb. A more recent post of his, Adding a Media Endpoint not only describes what I wanted to do, but also provides code. I will try to see, if something like this could be ported to the Lambda Functions - either on Netlify or on OpenWhisk.

Finally, via Vincent, I found the IndieWeb Directory, a website that looks charmingly 90s, and also added myself to it.

There is work to be done, hopefully it will result in some code soon.