Andrés Cárdenas

For the past month I have put more hours into this website than I ever have. I didn’t make huge changes in the design, there’s isn’t much to do anyways as my colorblindness and a pinch of paranoia have led me to settle with black and white as the “trusted colors.” So I’ll stick with it. I did, however, made sustancial changes on how the website (me) interacts with the interwebs, but this is not a post about the my website setup, who needs another one of those?

I must say however that it took me more than I expected to implement IndieAuth, microformats, webmentions and eventually a micropub end-point, but after a weekend of trial and error, I have finally done it.

Why did I even bother? Well, the motivation for these changes came as I dived into the IndieWeb, and the above mentioned are building blocks, the technolgies and design-patterns on which the project is built on. The truth is I am fascinated by this community of people that refuses to let the tracking giants take over the whole Internet and they do so by owning their content. How come I didn’t find them sooner? I don’t know.

Even though I always owned my content by keeping all posts and pages stored as markdown files and in recent years by owning a domain name as well, two months ago I had decided to let Tumblr host my presence online, crazy to me now that I’m so determined to maintaining it independently for as long as I can.

But you know what’s the best about this whole “journey”? I’m revisiting a warm and fuzzy feeling I thought long lost in the memories of the late 2000s, it’s the joy of finding an inspiring and personally crafted website. For me the best thing about the IndieWeb is discovering people that are using their website as an extension of their personality and not just sharing words on a generic online profile that depends on the decisions of corporate people.

The IndieWeb has inspired me and I’m here to stay.

All of this is to properly say:

Hello, IndieWeb!