Last night I attended the Indieweb's Homebrew Website Club Meeting! It was lots of fun and I learned a lot more about Webmentions and the human.json protocol Beto Dealmeida wrote in the past weeks.

Website Changes

A few months ago I asked on Mastodon about integrating Webmentions and Gerben Jacobs was kind enough to write a guide as a reply. At the time I was using Jekyll for generating my website but I've since then moved everything over to a new VPS where I'm writing all the code by hand.

I've been relying on Emacs for regex-based search and replace, which has actually helped with "templating". I'll continue experimenting with the backend here before implementing any major changes, but it's nice to have these references as I slowly begin integrating more features. I've been wanting to write PHP for simple CGI-style scripts for a while, my time on the Gemini protocol lately has made it more exciting to return to a more classic setup (think nginx + rsync), and any excuse to break out Emacs is always welcome.

Naty also told me about Indiekit, a Node.js server with ready-to-go configuration for Indieweb publishing and syndication tools. I'm bookmarking this resource!

RSS Feeds

One of the things that became clearer as I receive more emails from people wanting to join powRSS, especially those who build their websites without static site generators on web hosts like Neocities, is not knowing how to get an RSS feed in the first place.

On Jekyll, for example, my feed was built for me any time I wrote a new post. But put yourself in the shoes of someone who is building their site slowly, progressively, equipped only with HTML and CSS. What do you do?

To better understand the painpoints of maintaining a website as simply as possible, I've also been writing my RSS feed by hand. I found an excellent guide called An Atom feed from scratch.

At this time I'm only adding links to new posts. I know some of you like reading everything in your RSS readers. Sorry!

Hermes

Speaking of RSS feeds and PHP, I want to briefly mention a project I've been working on called Hermes. Early in January I watched Downton Abbey and I kept thinking how cool it must have been to sit down with a newspaper and read the daily news with a cup of coffee. This is obviously possible with any RSS reader, but I was primarily excited about the multi-column form factor for each link, as I do most of my reading on my desktop and I prefer visiting sites for each post.

This is just a toy project and an excuse to write some cowboy code in PHP :-)