Indie Web Migration

For years jamiltron.com was a Jekyll blog on GitHub Pages — which was fine, and free, and I ignored it for about five years. But I kept reading about the IndieWeb and got a little itch: I wanted to host the site on one of my servers, backed up, and using slightly more flexible technology than I felt GitHub Pages afforded me.

Indie Web

The whole pitch of the IndieWeb is simple: your website is your home on the internet, and everything else: Mastodon, Bluesky, the sites and platforms that will inevitably enshittify next is an outpost. You post on places you own first, then syndicate out. If a silo dies, your writing doesn't go with it.

So this site is now:

• Self-hosted.
• The identity source of truth via rel="me" links, so I can log into IndieWeb services as jamiltron.com.
• Marked up with microformats2 — there's an h-card for me and an h-entry around every post.
• Wired for Webmentions: when someone likes or replies to one of these posts over on Mastodon or Bluesky, Bridgy forwards it here and it shows up under the post.
• Replies from across the web, on my own page.

Stack

For the redesign I leaned onto a series of semi-humorous sites such as this: a little semantic HTML, a handful of CSS declarations, no framework, no tracking, no megabytes of JavaScript. The only script on the page is a tiny theme toggle.

The stack, for the curious:

• Eleventy builds it from Markdown to plain static files. No client-side anything.
• Catppuccin for the colors. Mocha by default, with a toggle for Frappé and Latte.
• Self-hosted Jost for type (no Google Fonts phoning home).

It's a couple hundred kilobytes and loads quickly.

Bringing the old stuff along

I also dragged a bunch of old posts from the original jamiltron.com site, and I am half debating moving aboleth-overlords here... that's still up for debate, though.

If you want to say something about a post, reply to wherever I've shared it and it'll find its way back here.