We had the second IndieWebCamp in Oxford on Saturday, hosted at the lovely Oxfordshire Central Library.

Normally these are run over two days, with a barcamp on day one, and building things on day two. Unfortunately I could only secure the venue for one day, so we had a compressed version.

I opened with a super super brief overview of the Indie Web, and then we had a quick round table chat about what people were hoping to work on. We had a good mix of first timers and old hands.

For my project I wanted to look at pulling in my bookmarks from Pinboard, using a PESOS approach to mirror them on my site. Pinboard has a great ecosystem of tools that already work for me, so there were a lot of wheels I didn’t want to reinvent.

I made some headway, building a Perch app to handle the content model and the syncing.

The app understands the content I want to pull in, and I have the code to talk to Pinboard working, but those two pieces aren’t talking to each other.

I’d like to think I have two thirds of the puzzle.

Unfortunately I had to leave before the end so didn’t get a chance to completely finish the build. My aim is to find some time in the next few weeks to finish it up and release it to the Perch community.

I’d like to thank Summer Of Hacks for inviting me to be a part of their program (I think I made them stretch the idea of "summer" a bit far), and especially Rich for finishing up the workshop in my absence, Oxfordshire County Libraries for hosting us, and Haybrook for their sponsorship.

Here’s to next year.

Some of the other attendees have written about their experiences of the day.

• Dan Q
• Marcus

I’ll link up others as they come in.

Unfortunately the weather gods were against us on day 2, with some pretty horrendous downpours first thing in the morning.

Although a few of us made it in, it was more difficult for others, so I classed it as a "work-from-home" exercise, and we kept in touch through the #indieweb channel in the Digital Oxford Slack. Despite this, everyone was still enthused and carried on with their projects.

A few of the participants wrote up their experiences:

• Beverley Newing - 2018 Oxford Indie Web Camp.
• Marcus Povey - #Indiewebcamp Oxford.
• Henry Blyth - IndieWeb is seriously cool.

As for myself, I'm very pleased with what I achieved over the last couple of days. My webmentions are a lot tidier now, and I did a lot of cleaning up behind the scenes, bits and pieces that have been on the to-do list for a while.

Overall it feels like the first IndieWebCamp Oxford went well and people got a lot out of it. It was good to hang out with a group all working on something personal. It's got me thinking that maybe we need something more regular. An Oxford chapter of the Homebrew Website Club perhaps?

I'm here at the first IndieWebCamp Oxford. I can't quite believe it all came together!

Listening to @garrettc kick us off at @indiewebcamp #oxford! #indieweb pic.twitter.com/4Pn1yetifA

— Dan Q (@scatmandan) 22 September 2018

After some introductory rambling from me, the group got down to planning and coding.

As I hoped, we have all levels of experience, with some implementing IndieWeb functionality for the first time, whereas others have larger scale projects in mind, including Ben's epic "document all the things" in preparation for he and Sarah's trip to New Zealand, and Dan Q moving his geocaching tools to a more POSSE model, with less reliance on outside services.

For my part, so far I've finished the webmention implementation I set up a few months ago, adding a Facepile for likes and reposts, and cleaning up the markup. Next up I think some improvements to the microformats around the site.

Save the dates folks!

On Saturday 22nd September and Sunday 23rd September we will be having the first ever Oxford IndieWebCamp!

It is a free event, but I would ask that you register on Eventbrite, so I can get an idea of numbers.

IndieWebCamp is a weekend gathering of web creators building & sharing their own websites to advance the independent web and empower ourselves and others to take control of our online identities and data.

It is open to all skill levels, from people who want to get started with a web site, through to experienced developers wanting to tackle a specific personal project.

I gave a little presentation about the Indieweb at JS Oxford earlier this year if you want to know more.

Huge thanks to our sponsors for the event, Haybrook IT and White October.

Last night I attended the always excellent JS Oxford, and as well as having my mind expanded by both Jo and Ruth's talks (Lemmings make an excellent analogy for multi-threading, who knew!), I gave a brief talk on the Indieweb movement.

If you've not heard of Indieweb movement before, it's a push to encourage people to claim their own bit of the web, for their identity and content, free from corporate platforms. It's not about abandoning those platforms, but ensuring that you have control of your content if something goes wrong.

From the Indieweb site:

Your content is yours

When you post something on the web, it should belong to you, not a corporation. Too many companies have gone out of business and lost all of their users’ data. By joining the IndieWeb, your content stays yours and in your control.

You are better connected

Your articles and status messages can go to all services, not just one, allowing you to engage with everyone. Even replies and likes on other services can come back to your site so they’re all in one place.

I've been interested in the Indieweb for a while, after attending IndieWebCamp Brighton in 2016, and I've been slowly implementing Indieweb features on here ever since.

So far I've added rel="me" attributes to allow distributed verification, and to enable Indieauth support, h-card to establish identity, and h-entry for information discovery. Behind the scenes I'm looking at webmentions (Thanks to Perch's first class support), and there's the ever-eternal photo management thing I keep picking up and then running away from.

The great thing about the Indieweb is that you can implement as much or as little as you want, and it always gives you something to work on. It doesn't matter where you start. The act of getting your own domain is the first step on a longer journey.

To that end I'm interested in organising an IndieWebCamp Oxford this year. If this sounds like something that interests you, then come find me in the Digital Oxford Slack, or on Twitter.

We were helping test Ruth's new site in the Digital Oxford Slack a few days ago, and the topic of easter eggs and silly little things came up. Ruth wanted some quotes from us to scatter in amongst the source of her site, and we helpfully obliged.

It reminded me of a little tribute that I added to the HTTP headers of this site when Terry Pratchet passed, and how your site should be a place to play, and experiment.

So I've added something else. You'll have to go find it though.

I'm going to play more.

(I'm amazed I haven't used that title before)

Apologies if anyone following had a huge amount of updates appear in their RSS readers, but I recently flipped the switch on moving this site to Perch and a new responsive design, something that's been in the works for quite a while now.

This is the start of some long overdue improvements around here, including more frequent posting and moving to more of a POSSE type publishing method.