Mildred Marianne asked How do you define #IndieWeb? and a couple of us weighed in. My own brief answer concluded "More a state of mind than a thing, I'd say" but Chris Aldrich went into a lot more detail. His piece is well worth checking out in detail, as it offers a bird's eye view of all the different things the IndieWeb is and could be. I might take issue with singling out the country of America for his metaphor as being a tad parochial, but one could choose any reasonably democratic place instead.

I want to respond to a little thing. In questioning the closed nature of the big silos, Chris asks parenthetically: Would you use your phone to only call friends who use AT&T?

One of the key problems online is to prove that you are who you say you are. If you are, then I can allow you to do certain things.

These two things are usually called authentication and authorisation.

After patting myself on the back for adding an h-card to my page of latest posts, friends pointed out that I could use the <data> element rather than choosing not to display the h-card information. One good reason to do this is that screen readers ignore this information, which must be a bonus for anyone who accesses my stuff that way.

The Partial template now reads:

<div class="h-card">
<data class="u-url" value="https://jeremycherfas.net"></data>
<data class="p-name" value="Jeremy Cherfas"></data>
<data class="u-photo" value ="https://www.jeremycherfas.net/user/plugins/aboutme/assets/avatars/zoot.jpg"></data> 
</div>

And all the other logic remains exactly the same as before.

Another little tweak: because all my bookmarks from reading.am are now automatically brought back to my stream, I am removing them from the sidebar here.

I spent a little time fixing up the way this site presents my h-card on the summary of blog posts. In case you're wondering, an h-card is a way of presenting information about yourself or your organisation on your website that makes it easy for other websites to identify you with your work, for example in webmentions.

One of the difficulties of trying to be IndieWeb is that because there is no One True Way, only a set of useful building blocks, lovingly assembled, when something isn't working well it can be hard to know which bit is responsible for what. I had that problem recently with micro.blog waiting a long time before a post here appeared there. Then today, a post I published this morning popped up on micro.blog, and I had time to think about fixing things.

It was trivial, but I fixed it. Here's how.