Hidde de Vries (@hdv@front-end.social) is a web enthusiast and accessibility specialist from Rotterdam (The Netherlands). He currently works with the NL Design System team and is a participant in the Open UI Community Group. Previously, he worked for W3C (WAI), Mozilla, the Dutch government and others as a freelancer. Hidde spoke at 64 events, most recently in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Buy me a coffee Follow @hdv on MastodonJan 3, 2021, 7:00 PM -05:00How I turned my Goodreads data into a self-hosted website with Eleventy
In the last week of 2020, I decided to export my Goodreads data to display it on my personal website. This post is about what I did and how. Screenshot Why export? First, I quite like Goodreads. It lets me see the reads of friends and acquaintances. It lets me share my own. This is all splendid, but it is still somebody else’s site. Somebody with very different life goals from my own, in fact. For more control on what I display and how, I decided to create a new section of this website ded...
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Dec 27, 2020, 7:00 PM -05:00IndieWeb, Revisited
A couple of years ago I started building an IndieWeb website. Then I got painfully busy at work, stopped improving it, and basically ran out of free time to even post to it. Fast forward a couple of years, and I've got a new job that's somewhat more manageable, and during the holiday break I'm trying to get this thing going again. I've made a couple of changes: For the static site generator itself, I replaced Gatsby with Eleventy and am happier with it; it's basically just a pile of simple t... -
Nov 17, 2020, 4:08 PM -05:00 I use Piwigo. My gallery: https://photos.desmondrivet.com/ I'm interested in the idea of statically generated galleries but it's unclear to me how this would work if you have GBs of photos. Where would you store the images?
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Aug 30, 2020, 11:30 AM -04:00Structured data for book reviews
Bookshelves crammed with lots of books Almost a week ago, I noted a blog post by Ana Ulin: Adding Structured Book Data to My Blog Posts. Ana added a section to the front matter of her book posts that contains information about the book in question, including her rating. She was kind enough to share her example and the partial template that displays the information on her site. Because I use Grav rather than Hugo as my CMS I couldn’t just steal Ana's template, but I was more than happy to ba... -
Aug 24, 2020, 8:02 AM -04:00 My personal website is https://desmondrivet.com I have a blog on it and a kind of microblog as well. It's not wildly beautiful. I write about whatever strikes my fancy, so I definitely wouldn't call it "cohesive". But it's there and I use it and it's mine.
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Jul 15, 2020, 3:34 PM -04:00 
Matthias OttMay 12, 2019, 7:05 AM -04:00Into the Personal-Website-Verse
Social media in 2019 is a garbage fire. What started out as the most promising development in the history of the Web – the participation of users in the creation of content and online dialogue at scale – has turned into a swamp of sensation, lies, hate speech, harassment, and noise. Your Unfriendly Neighborhood Craving for attention and engagement, our timelines have changed. Algorithms now prioritize content from people with a huge following and everything that is loud and outrageous. It’... -
May 3, 2020, 10:39 PM -04:00 Bookmark of https://doubleloop.net/2020/05/03/read-feeder/
May 3, 2020, 8:31 AM -04:00Read feeder
Ton made a post recently about federated bookshelves, sparked by a post from Tom. It’s an idea that Gregor has done a good bit of thinking about from an IndieWeb perspective. Book recommendations is something I’m always interested in. At base, all it needs is a feed you can follow just of what people have been reading. I’ve set up a channel in my social reader called ‘Good Reads’, and subscribed to Ton’s list of books, as the sci-fi focus looks right up my street. If anyone else has a feed of... -
May 1, 2020, 6:24 AM -04:00 On Gardens and Streams
I attended my first IndieWebCamp session last week, on the subject of "gardens and streams", otherwise known as wikis and blogs. Given the current global situation, the entire thing was remote; I participated via Zoom. It was fun! I'm glad I got to meet everyone.
Wikis, and how they differ from blogs, is a topic that interests me. You may not know it, but my domain sports a wiki, powered by MoinMoin. I mostly use it to store technical notes and recipes.
(Edited 2024/12/25: I no longer use MoinMoin, opting instead for an org-roam based digital garden, but the concepts are the same)
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Apr 28, 2020, 12:01 PM -04:00 Pieces of Thinking
Jan-Lukas Else recently asked the Hacker News community why most of them don't have blogs, and published his thoughts on their answers to his own blog. The conversation was interesting and got me thinking about my own motivations for maintaining this site.
The first thing that stands out for me in the responses is the number of people who said that they quit blogging because they didn't have any readers. It was more than I expected. I don't think I fully realized how important readership was to some people in the technical community, probably because I think can safely say that it's not of great importance to me.
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Apr 27, 2020, 2:06 PM -04:00 
Apr 26, 2020, 1:32 PM -04:00A short post mortem, video and note links, and challenge from The Garden and the Stream IndieWebCamp Pop-up session
Thank you everyone! For those who attended yesterday’s The Garden and the Stream IndieWebCamp session, thank you for participating! I honestly only expected 4 or 5 wiki fans to show up, so I was overwhelmed with the crowd that magically appeared from across multiple countries and timezones. I’ve heard from many–both during the session and privately after–that it was a fantastic and wide-ranging conversation. (I never suspected memory palaces or my favorite 13th century Franciscan tertiary to ... -
Apr 23, 2020, 1:06 AM -04:00 Well, this is quite embarrassing. Thank you for the information! Actually, my blog entries on my feed page did have p-names but I think I accidentally made them part of the e-content, and I suspect that's why they were not showing up. And, yes, my published date was embedded in my h-card for silly reasons that I won't get into. Anyway, I think (hope) I've fixed both issues if you want to try again.
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Apr 4, 2020, 9:30 PM -04:00 How to Have a Conversation on the IndieWeb
If you've read my previous articles on the IndieWeb, you might be forgiven for thinking that its members are, by and large, loners who keep to themselves.
Consider the concept of a "like", for example. On a site like Twitter, a like is an action you perform against another person's content; you click the heart icon next to someone's tweet, and the like counter for that tweet goes up. It's an implicit connection between two people - the one who did the liking and the one who received it.
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Mar 6, 2020, 12:19 PM -05:00 I do something vaguely similar with my media endpoint, except I use a server that I rent out from from kimsufi, where I also host my webmention and micropub endpoints. But...does it ever bother you to split your content like this? I use a static site generator, and one of the nice things about this is that your entire site can be generated from the contents of your local folder. When part of your content (your photos) live somewhere else (a media server, or a CDN, or whatever), that's no longer the case. This bothers me somewhat, though I don't lose any sleep over it. I don't really have a good answer for it.
Mar 6, 2020, 5:58 AM -05:00I use BunnyCDN as storage for my Micropub media endpoint, where I upload all the photos and other media files I publish on my blog. When I upload a new photo the media endpoint first uploads the original file with the name of it’s SHA-256 hash value (so when I upload the same file multiple times, it doesn’t create multiple files). When I upload an image (JPEG or PNG) it also gets optimized and resized to a maximum width of 2000 pixels using the Tinify API (and then uploaded to BunnyCDN too), ... -
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Feb 24, 2020, 3:39 AM -05:00Exploring Pine.blog
I’d noticed Pine.blog before at a previous IndieWebCamp, but not had time to delve into it very deeply. Seeing some of what Brian Schrader has been working on while following IndieWebCamp Austin remotely this weekend has reminded about the project. As a result, I’ve been spending some time tonight to check out some of the functionality that it’s offering. In part, I’m curious how similar, or not, it is to what Micro.blog is offering specifically with respect to the idea of IndieWeb as a Servi... -
Feb 12, 2020, 10:27 PM -05:00 Your Website Is Your Passport
One of the themes that crops up again and again in the IndieWeb community is that your personal domain, with its attendant website, should form the nexus of your online existence. Of course, people can and do maintain separate profiles on a variety of social media platforms, but these should be subordinate to the identity represented by your personal website, which remains everyone's one-stop-shop for all things you and the central hub out of which your other identities radiate.
Part of what this means in practice is that your domain should function as a kind of universal online passport, allowing you to sign in to various services and applications simply by entering your personal URL.
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Jan 17, 2020, 3:14 PM -05:00 That's probably a good way to think about it. Or at least about establishing an alternative.
X (formerly Twitter)
Bill Bennett (@billbennettnz) on X
@desmondrivet Hi Desmond, I think of the IndieWeb as being less about "knocking Facebook off its perch" and more about establishing a resistance movement. -
Jan 5, 2020, 11:39 PM -05:00 Thank you! The link should work now :-)
Jan 5, 2020, 5:02 PM -05:00Thanks for the write-up on the Indieweb principles Desmond. Looking forward to the other posts in the series. I did notice that the initial link to your previous post is not working. It seems the URL is wrong. Shouldn't it be this: https://desmondrivet.com/2019/12/08/intro-to-indie-web ? -
Jan 5, 2020, 11:06 AM -05:00 Your Website Is Your Castle
In a previous blog post, I gave a very brief introduction to the IndieWeb, hopefully giving a sense of what it is and why it matters. In this post I'll try and zoom in a tiny bit and explain something of the mechanics of how the IndieWeb actually works and what it means to "like" a post or "share" a status update.
I'm deliberately trying to avoid too much detail in this post because, frankly, there's a lot to write, and it's easy to get lost. So I'm going to try and give a rough idea of what an IndieWeb enabled website looks like at a very high level, without going into the weeds. Further posts will go into more detail.
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Dec 8, 2019, 12:46 PM -05:00 In the Beginning Was the Website
I don't think I've ever felt quite as old as I felt when, last year, I discovered the IndieWeb, an online community of people dedicated to resurrecting the personal website.
This makes me feel old because I've maintained some sort of personal web presence/site/blog since around 1998 or so, when I made my first hand-coded HTML pages available online at U of T. Apparently, enough time has past not only for the concept of a "personal website" to have become quaint and old-fashioned (displaced by a cluster of much more convenient social media sites) but also for it to have been picked up again by an enthusiastic band of hobbyists with a taste for the retro and a fondness for old-school fan pages.
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Jan 23, 2019, 12:01 PM -05:00 I think I've hit IndieMark Level 1 #indieweb