, I (remotely) attended the IndieWeb Summit in Portland. I am still processing everything that has been said, and reading back through the sessions I missed. They have all been uploaded to YouTube, so you could be doing the same! That said, here are some take-aways:
- Our community is amazing! The amount of talk there has been about bugs and problems with certain tools, and the way people took time away from their own projects to help out with these amazes me. Never be afraid to ask questions, you are not a bother.
- Making things easy it hard… I urge everyone who is faced with bringing non-developer types into their project to listen to Scott talk during the IndieWeb.org Refresh session.
- While on the topic of making things easy, the Indie Events sessions was an eye-opener for me personally. If you watch it, you will hear me chime in that most of the things discussed are already available and possible with the current IndieWeb building blocks. The session made it abundantly clear that the problem wasn’t with the plumbing but with the way it is presented and made accessible to the wider public.
- WordPress has been the elephant in our room for a long time. It is the CMS of choice for a big part of the internet, yet ignored by a huge portion of the IndieWeb developers. (Maybe because of NIH-syndrom.) Change is clearly afoot. David was applauded for pushing bug fixes to WordPress plugins, Ryan was (happily) Tom Sawyered into adding features to the Micropub for WordPress plugin, and there was an entire session headed by the best the community has to offer to help others.
- Things got done. For this I will simply refer to the demos.
I would be amiss not to thank our organisers again: Aaron and Tantek, as well as all the other lovely people that made this work at their backs. Hope to see you all again soon.
This post was syndicated to IndieNews.