Topics

March 7, 2026

Using your website as a social space:

• Do you look at your website as a space for individual expression, or do you consider it a social space that connects you to other parts of the IndieWeb?
• What are your feelings around comments on personal websites? Have you enabled them on your own blog? Do you leave comments on other blogs?
• Have you reached out to your favorite bloggers over email? Have people reached out to you? How are these interactions fundamentally different from public comments?
• Have you experimented with social features like WebMentions, social media integration, or ActivityPub?
• Have you ever participated in a blogchain — a series of posts spread across multiple personal websites, where writers respond to and build on each other’s ideas? What do you think of the form?
• Have you ever participated in an IndieWeb Carnival? What do you think of the form?

February 8, 2026

Do you enjoy reading or writing reviews for the media you engage with (books/movies/games) on your blog? Why or why not? What makes for a good review? What do you accomplish by writing one? What are you looking for when you read a review of something? How do reviews work differently on the web vs. in print? Do they still have value in a world of abundance? Do they increase your enjoyment of the art you’re engaging with?

Following from the above, what do you feel about being overly critical, mean, or downright inflammatory in your writing on the web? It can be easy to get page views by writing something clearly inflammatory, but do you want to put your name on a post that comes off as angry or frustrated? What if your anger is justified? What if it’s valuable to write that post? How do you call something out without seeming like a person who just complains about things? How do you criticize a work of art/company/product/person constructively?

January 3, 2026

• What is a blog post, really? The world of letters is full of different formats and genres of writing:
  • essays,
  • journalism,
  • fiction,
  • scientific papers,
  • manifestos,
  • diary entries,
  • travelogues,
  • memoirs,
  • biographies,
  • news updates.
• How is a blog post different from all of these traditional forms of writing? Is it similar to one of these forms or an amalgamation of everything? Or does it stand on its own as a completely new form of writing in the digital age?
• Strange intimacies people share on their website, as a form of archival and note keeping.

December 6, 2025

• Footers! It’s a design element that doesn’t get enough attention, so let’s talk about it.
  • What have you put at the bottom of your website?
  • Navigation?
  • A contact form?
  • Badges?
  • Social media links?
• Styles of personal blogging: from super raw to super polished, there’s a broad spectrum in terms of how you express yourself on the IndieWeb. From writing style and voice to typography and layout, many elements come together to form what we call “style”. Let’s talk about our personal style when it comes to showing up online.

November 1, 2025

• A rapid-fire history of digital gardens, evergreen notes, zettelkasten, and personal knowledge management systems.
• How to read a digital garden, and how to write one.
• Tradeoffs and constraints (what the format is good for, what it’s bad for).
• The ethos of writing that evolves.

October 4, 2025

• Weeknotes: what they are, how and why to write them, your experiences with weeknotes.
• The idea of working in public and whether it’s valuable.
• Other structured formats for writing on your blogs:
  • Photo dumps.
  • Link blogs with commentary.
  • Reviews.
  • Curated links.
  • Playlists.
  • Art blogs, etc.
• Is it valuable to publish short-form writing on your website?

September 6, 2025

• What would you never write about on your blog?
• What do you consider the voice of your blog?
• What are the editing standards of your blog?

July 19, 2025

• About pages.
• Now pages.

July 5, 2025

• Buy and set up a domain name.
• Set up an RSS feed.
• Set up an email newsletter with a subscriber form.
• Set up a tag system for your blog posts.
• Set up a link blog.
• Set up plugins to enable IndieWeb features such as WebMentions.
• Add a dark mode.
• Improve the design or typography on your website.
• Make it easy to post photos and videos.

June 22, 2025

• Topics to write about and how to figure out what to write about.
• What out websites can contain (blogs, FAQs, essays, photo blogs, etc).

June 8, 2025

• How to use RSS readers to follow blogs.
• How to discover the IndieWeb.