Peter Stuifzand

A tour of my Indieweb projects

Earlier this year I started to rebuild this website to work better with the Indieweb. At the same I build a new website P83 with Indieweb support from the start.

This website is generated from static files with a system that I created the first time when I started writing in the website. Not much has changed, except that I some point a few years ago I rewrote the whole system in Perl.

The only actual changes to this website, was adding some support for smaller posts, and having a better view of multiple posts on the same day. I also added microformats to the posts.

I still think there is a lot to like in a static website. It’s even possible to combine the static nature of pre-generated pages with the dynamic properties of the Indieweb like webmentions and comments. Quite a few people support that usecase. Some even use Micropub to write new posts for their blog.

This blog doesn’t support any of that, except webmentions.

P83 is the new name of the other blog. It started out from an old code base, that I was working on a few years ago. The software running it is called publog (from something like publishing log). It’s quite a bit more dynamic software. It supports webmention and microsub. It supports projects, different channels, syndication to other websites (like Indieweb.xyz, Twitter and Github), Bridgy and all kinds of small experiments.

In the last few months, I have build out the functionality for connecting with the Indieweb. I improved the presentation of the posts, the microformats and the parsing of microformats. The microformats organization on Github gathered many parsers together and have a repository with tests. This helps a lot when you want to work with microformats in your own projects. I have written my own version of a microformats parser for Perl. But I’m sure it’s not very complete compared to the parsers for the other languages. I should add the test suite to this parser and see how far it gets. Perhaps I should even rewrite it, as it could contain a lot of unused code. The microformats parser is the weak link in the website. I should try to improve it.

When I found that there was no Android client for Micropub, I dusted of my Android developer account and started working on the client. Android Studio helps a lot. Today the client works pretty well, and I hope that it can be moved to a production release in the coming weeks. I only still need some confirmation from people using it with some of the more popular systems (like Wordpress).

I’ll mention the Microsub server (Ekster) in my next post.

© 2023 Peter Stuifzand