The 2018 IndieWeb Summit is now less than a week away, and I'd like to personally invite you, (yes, you!) to join us there.

IWS kicks off with a pre-party on Monday evening at the Pine Street Market where you can enjoy some great handmade food and drinks. More importantly, you can meet and befriend some of the most earnest and clever folks I know when it comes to having fun being yourself on the web. You're likely to share stories about how awful silos like Facebook and Twitter have become, get inspired to build things you didn't even know you wanted to put on your website, and hatch schemes for what you'd love to learn, discuss, and build over the next two days.

Tuesday is a day of discussions and, while there will be some extremely great keynote talks and a chance to show off your favorite feature on your own site, most of the day is reserved for discussions chosen by the folks who attend. I've seen sessions range from the extremely technical (build a Micropub server in 40 minutes) to the extremely personal (what is the meaning of identity on the web?). If you've got burning questions, you can volunteer to lead a session on a topic even (especially?) if you're not an expert. If you're not sure sit in on whatever feels interesting to you! There is no pressure to be clever.

Wednesday is all about creating. Take something you learned from Tuesday, or just something you've been meaning to do, and build it! There will be some optional HowTo sessions for some of the technical IndieWeb building blocks, and lots of knowledgable folks who would love to answer questions and even collaborate on projects. At the end of the day, you can show off what you've got. Or not! It's your website, no pressure.

As the producer of a weekly informational podcast about the IndieWeb, I would love to chat with anyone who is willing! I'll be conducting one-minute interviews on what inspired folks to get involved in the IndieWeb and what they're working on for their personal website. If you want to be interviewed, but we don't find time during the Summit, I'll be around Portland on Thursday, and on Friday I'll be around the Open Source Bridge un-conference.

IndieWeb Summit was one of the most inspiring events for me when I attended my first one in 2017. In the year since I have been inspired to add tons of new things to my website and built out some new IndieWeb-related tools, which I've (sort of) kept track of. Additionally, Homebrew Website Club Baltimore celebrated our 1-year anniversary, and hosted Baltimore's first IndieWebCamp!

So, no matter where you are in terms of technical skills, what your website currently looks like or does, or whether it even exists yet, I encourage you to join us at IndieWeb Summit!

It’s time to make IndieWeb commitments for 2018!

I commit to hosting an IndieWebCamp in Baltimore in 2018. I hope to knock this out pretty early in the year, actually! My co-host Jonathan Prozzi and I will be choosing a date in the next week or so, based on the feedback we have received so far.

I also want to work on a new design for my site and to contribute more Micropub-based tools for other folks to use on their IndieWeb sites. To that end, by 2018-01-01 I hope to finish reworking much of my site’s automation and deployment to replace my current Jekyll configuration, which relies heavily on custom plugins that run on every compile and takes about a minute to rebuild the site. I aim to replace the core static site generation with Hugo, and to replace custom plugin logic with tiny services that run only when posts are created or updated, along the lines of morris, a simple receiver that stores webmentions from webmention.io in data files that static site generators like Hugo (and Jekyll) can consume.

For comparison, I looked up my (vague) commitment for last year which I easily met but was so vague about that I never posted it. I think I was cleaning up my Jekyll configuration to pre-compute metadata about images and other files in my posts. I would end up scrapping that in January when I switched to a micropub media endpoint for hosting my uploads.