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       The IndieWeb & that blog roll
       
       16 April, 2025
       
       QUOTE
       This post was translated from HTML, inevitably some things will have changed or no longer apply - July 2025
       END QUOTE
       
       The IndieWeb's something I've known about for a while, but never really engaged with. I mean this is very much part of The Indie Web, the very thing, you're reading it right now. But in terms of the camel cased movement, not so much. To me they seemed a bit hung up on levels of achievement. Maybe that's a mistake on my part, but there is a site to work out what level of IndieWeb you are. Mh, the I don't care what level level please & thank you. But they've been working away at a bunch of different things, one of which it turns out is blog rolls.
       
       In case you're not also ancient like me, just what a blog roll is might bear explaining.
       
       This site's always had an RSS &/or Atom feed. You might have seen a link to them in the footer of each page, or you might even read the site via one of those feeds. Feeds are a way of subscribing to content, they were popularised by blogs, but when the blogs (mostly) faded away feeds lived on, finding a new life allowing people to subscribe to podcasts. In addition to the feeds, back in January last year I also added a link to a blog roll there in the footer.
       
       A blog roll's from the same ancient era. It's a list of the sites that I read via their feeds, the ones I subscribe to if you like. The twist, it's not much of a twist, was I put the list up in OPML format. OPML being the format feed readers use for lists of feeds. Back in the day blog rolls were lists of links to click on, but with OPML you can import that list straight into a feed reader & read the blogs I read. My blog reading list's there to share.
       
       OK, so back to the IndieWeb. An idea that's come out of that world has to do with finding & sharing these lists. Web pages can have link tags in their headers to advertise a feed's location. This page does right now, to make the feeds discoverable by feed readers. Robert Alexander had the idea to do the same sort of thing, but for blog rolls. Boom. You can also see that in use in the headers on this site now too:
       
 (HTM) Robert Alexander
       CODE
       <link rel="blogroll" type="application/xml" href="https://mikekreuzer.com/assets/blogroll.opml">
       
       
       END CODE
       
       Once feed readers are able to follow lists of blog rolls on sites you subscribe to via their feeds you can get a whole social network recommendation thing happening. That feels like a great use of all this ancient tech to me. Ancient in a good way. From a time before the current madness.
       
       So, thank you Robert Alexander, & thank you too to Reilly Spitzfaden on whose blog I first read about this.
       
 (HTM) Reilly Spitzfaden
       I feel like I owe the IndieWeb folks a thank you too, one good turn & all that. So, I've also marked up the templates that generate this site with the IndieWeb h-card & h-entry classes. So now I'm IndieWeb too, level... nah, I still don't care what level.