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.