The past weekend’s Indie Web Camp Brighton was wonderful! Many thanks to Mark and Paul for all their work putting it together.

There was a great turn-out. It felt like the perfect time for an Indie Web Camp. There’s a real appetite for getting away from ever more extractive silos and staking claim to our own corners of the web. Most of the attendees were at their first ever Indie Web Camp.

Paul asked me to oversee the schedule planning on day one, which I was happy to do. We made sure that first-timers got first dibs on proposing sessions. In the end, every single session was proposed by new attendees.

Day two was all about putting ideas into practice: coding, designing, and writing on our own website. I’m always blown away by how much gets done in just one short day. Best of all is when there’s someone who starts the weekend without their own website but finishes with a live site. That happened again this time.

I spent the second day tinkering with something I started at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg in October. Back then, I got related posts working here on my journal; a list of suggested follow-up posts to read based on the tags of the current post.

I wanted to do the same for my links; show links related to the one I’m currently linking to. It didn’t take too long to get that up and running.

But then I thought about it some more and realised it would be good to also show blog posts related to the link. So I did that. Then I realised it would be really good to show related links under blog posts too.

So now, if everything’s working correctly, then at the end of this post you will not only see related blog posts I’ve previously written, but also links related to the content of this post.

It was a very inspiring weekend. There’s something about being in a room with other people working on their websites that makes me super productive.

While we were hacking away on day two, somebody mentioned that they still find hard to explain the indie web to people.

“It’s having your own website”, I said.

But surely there’s more to it than that, they wondered.

Nope. If someone has their own website, then they’re part of the indie web. It doesn’t matter if that website is made with a complicated home-rolled tech stack or if it’s a Squarespace site.

What you do with your own website is entirely up to you. The technologies are just plumbing wether it’s webmentions, RSS, or anything else. None of it is a requirement. Heck, even HTML is optional. If you want to put plain text files on your website, go for it. It’s your website.

@adactio and I see you’ve started on your own text adventure as well! (or was that already there? I seem to remember you saying you’d started something similar)

Scraped my handrolled grid and colors for Utopia and Adam Argyle’s color scheme builder.

I’m still not sure how I want this site to look, but I’ve been more focused on a foundation and less on content and “design.” I like simple. I’m not sure if what I’ve done is simple, more like raw. But I have fallen in love wtih Utopia and this color scheme builder from Adam Argyle. What I like about both are they aren’t “frameworks” or “libraries”. It’s all just CSS custom properties that you can use in however you mark up your templates platform agnostic.

Utopia has a PostCSS plugin however it didn’t work for me. I put off debugging that for a future project and copied and pasted the generated properties. I also need to do some more reading about subgrid as I’m not sure it behaves how I expect.

I found Adam’s post after reading about color-mix palettes. But I like how Adam’s system has worked out text vs background and handles light and dark themes. All based on the HSL values for a primary—brand—color. I’m a prefers-color-scheme: dark user, so extra apologies to anyone viewing this in light mode. But now I can start to think about content and how I want to post. I’m thinking Indiekit. Paul just published an Eleventy preset plugin. Really just need to get it up and running.

Which I’ll end with a reminder from Jeremy Keith from his IndieWebCamp wrap-up (organized by the aforementioned Paul Robert Lloyd)—“What you do with your own website is entirely up to you.”

@todo: fix webmention display @todo: resolve permalink for notes (unix timestamp from gitCommitDate is fragile in CI/CD)