NYC Indie Web Camp Weekend

I’m at the NYC Indie Web Camp this weekend at the beautiful New York Times office in Manhattan. Tantek Çelik joined my team at Mozilla about six months ago to work on various Web Standards initiatives that we push forward on the Firefox Platform team. Although our bread and butter is Web Platform Rendering, Tantek is also passionate about advancing user-sovereignty to enable authorship outside of proprietary corporate silos (see POSSE.) I tagged along with him this weekend to learn more.

The Indie Web movement is in the midst of an exciting creative stage. There are people hacking on the building blocks and other folks dogfooding the code. At this point, I’m in the latter camp, looking to solve 2 problems that I have with my 3 web sites:

• junglecode.net – this blog for stuff about various things that I do with the geeks I hang out with (dare I say, my network.)
• junglecode.com – a site to catalog the products I make that happen to also pay my bills.
• junglecode.org – a site to describe non-profit activities (music and other hobbies) that I engage in. I haven’t found much time to write about this stuff lately.

Problem 1: When I first decided to split my online life into 3 top-level domains, I thought it would help organize my efforts into those 3 top-level buckets. It turns out that, in practice, I’ve just split my online persona into 3 sites in various states of intermittent activity. I’d like to try and organize the 3 buckets so that I can post content in any category (org,com,net) and have the posts go to the right site, while still aggregating on this blog. Fortunately, I met Jeremy Zilar this weekend and he works on the 200+ Blogs for The New York Times. My 3 site problem dwarfs in comparison to what the Times has to scale. I’m loving all the brainstorming going on this weekend.

Problem 2: I’d like to make a few bucks on these sites without the usual ad-generated methods. It’s not that I’m above receiving advertising revenue, I just think my audience is a very narrow slice of the geek population that is also very good at not clicking on ads. I would instead like to sell them my stuff. I might sell a single sweatshirt or an extra torque wrench that I happen to have lying around. I’d like to do this in an Indie Web way as I am, in effect, inviting you to a virtual private garage sale (VPGS?) I’m looking into various Web Payments solutions to do this.

I’ve added the IndieWeb plug-in to my WordPress sites so I can send and receive various notifications over IndieWeb protocols like WebMention. I expect to hack on various bits of the solution to these 2 problems as I learn more. I’ll share the code here, in case others may find it helpful.

I’m also interested in extending the Web Platform to enable more Indie Web capabilities at the core of the Open Web stack. It’s really exciting and fun to work on this stuff. What else can we do to make it easier for user-authors to raise their independent voice?