Paul Tibbetts

Hello 👋

If you need it my sparkline is {{paultibbetts}}.

Website(s)

Blog

My website, built with Hugo, is where I publish:

• articles at /articles
• resume at /cv

and various other pages.

It's using a theme I made myself. It's readable in a browser and via RSS.

I've written a few posts about making it, they can be found under the IndieWeb tag.

The source code is available on GitHub.

IndieMark

I have a dedicated page to record my IndieMark progress. I use it as a checklist and log of when and how I add building-blocks.

Tag-based feeds

I generate individual RSS feeds for each of my tags and display the address at the bottom of each tag page, e.g. at the bottom of my IndieWeb tag page I display /indieweb/feed.rss.

This label is wrong, the address is actually feed.xml, but I hope that feed.rss is helpful for those unfamiliar with RSS and those who are familiar with it will understand why I label it this way.

I do this so people can follow just the tags they are interested in, a theme that will continue throughout this page.

I have no way to combine feeds, nor do I have any categories or "top level" tags, so this system is fairly basic and incomplete.

Web feed preview

I use the pretty-feed code by About Feeds to style my RSS feeds.

This is so that users who click on the link to a feed will see a styled page with help text instead of a wall of confusing code.

You can see an example by visiting my IndieWeb feed in a web browser.

I got the idea from Jeremy Keith's site.

microblog

I have a separate microblog, running on Micro.blog, where I publish notes.

This fully embodies the pluralism principle and is known as multi-site indieweb.

I am still undecided on this setup, but it's an experiment I've been running for a while and I have no immediate plans to end it; I have other things to work on right now.

Benefits

Some benefits to my multi-site setup are:

• Micro.blog is indieweb friendly and comes with features out of the box, so I was on the social indieweb immediately
• it has a built-in community that were welcoming and said nice things about my holiday photos
• it has better uptime than my site has historically had
• it lets me use my own subdomain so it's still part of my domain's identity
• it cross-posts to Mastodon and Bluesky for me
  • it also cross-posts content from my blog
• I use it as a social channel, where I write shorter content that is more conversational with other people in mind
  • whereas my blog is is more deliberate writing and all for my own amusement

Problems

To be clear: I think Micro.blog is excellent, Manton runs it very well, and I would recommend it to anyone.

Some problems with my multi-site setup are:

• I effectively have two profiles on the indieweb now
• I have split my content
  • but I still own all my data - Micro.blog backs up to a GitHub repo so I could merge it into my blog in the future

P in the wild

I also use Micro.blog to host my outdoors blog.

This was done intentionally to isolate my outdoors content from my regular stuff, so I could give out this address to hikers I meet on the trail without them needing to read about keyboards or database sharding or whatever else nerds talk about on their blog(s).

History

2014

Discovered the IndieWeb

I've been following the IndieWeb since 2014.

I know this because I wrote it on my CV under "interests" to show that I was a learned person.

2015

IndieWebCamp Brighton

I went to IndieWebCamp Brighton 2015 and it was great. I'm not in the photo because my friend and I had been talking to two other attendees who suggested we all go to Burger Brothers for lunch and we returned later than intended. I am a little upset we missed out on the photo but that was the best burger I've ever eaten - I still think about it regularly.

It was here that I heard Jeremy Keith proclaim:

posts are just things

and several people, including me, rushed to write that down. That may have sounded flippant but I meant it sincerely.

Jeremy was very helpful, stopped us from overthinking things, and was an excellent host.

2016 to 2017

HomebrewBrum

Myself, Dave Redfern and Marc Jenkins organised the Birmingham UK chapter of Homebrew Website Club for a while.

Firstly, the name. I had sold the other two on the idea of a website meetup, and before I knew it one of them had purchased the domain and designed a website and a logo. I didn't have the heart to tell them the name was wrong, I didn't know them all that well and just wanted to meet up with like-minded people to talk about websites and stuff. To be clear, I am not passing some of the blame, I am passing all of it.

Secondly, organising is difficult, so I have the utmost respect for those that do it. It's hard logistically, mentally, and even emotionally, when venues keep turning you down and people don't show up mere hours after telling you they will.

Thirdly, now that I've stopped drinking alcohol, I can see that hosting our meetups in a pub was not very inclusive. At the time we didn't have access to an office or other neutral venue, so we took what we could get. Dropping the "Website Club" from the meetup's name actually helped here, but confused the bar staff when we turned up with laptops.

We had a lot of fun, and I'm glad we did it. I learnt a lot about tech, meetups and organising from that experience. Thank you Stuart for teaching me how to do requests in JavaScript without jQuery, I will never forget that look of horror on your face.

I only regret that one time I live-tweeted things people were saying about their website, with no prior notice that I would be doing it (that's not cool), and not updating the wiki after we stopped hosting meetups.

2017 to 2024

The Redesigns

My website's been a lot of things over the years. It's ran on Wordpress, Ghost, Jekyll, and even something called îles. One thing it has not been is consistent; I've never been any good at sticking with it.

It was my testing ground for new ideas, and I regularly threw it all away to start again. Because of this, I don't have a deep catalogue of content, and it was easy to go several years forgetting all about it.

I don't know exactly what triggered it, but in 2024 I signed up to Micro.blog, received a warm welcome, and started blogging again.

I am yet to learn how to write concisely.

2025 to present

Born again blogger

Which brings us to now; look how far we've come together.

In 2025 I left my job and took the rest of the year off for personal and professional development. During that time I created my current blog, the one I talked about briefly at the top of this page.

As much as I love working on it, it is not my priority to add features to it. I can write posts and those posts are then readable on the web and via RSS. That's all it really needs to do right now.

Working on

• writing more
  • to create a catalogue of content
  • to get into the habit of blogging
  • to work out what I want my website to do
  • to help me decide what kind of Software Engineer I want to be
  • to aid me in getting The Right Job this time
• writing less
  • because need precision
• sending and receiving webmentions
  • so my website is part of the social indieweb
  • probably using webmention.io
  • or the Micro.blog hosted version

Itches

I'm also considering:

• publishing bookmarks and likes
• adding previous/next navigation at the end of a post
  • maybe even related reading
• formalising a changelog
  • and making it (or another version of it) human readable
• setting up Micropub
  • probably using Indiekit - it already has a Hugo plugin
• adding light mode to my site because it's currently dark mode only
• investigating social readers
• using Bridgy to backfeed replies back to my site
  • as well as reacji 👍

Brainstorming

One day I might get around to solving these. They need some more thought first.

What if your Index Page was Smart

I really like What if your Index Page was Smart? by swyx. It articulates the biggest problem I have with putting everything in one place.

I've tried to solve this by putting my outdoors content on a dedicated site, but now it's not on my main site at all.

Do I link to it? Repost it?

The reason this post resonates with me is that I'm into

• programming
• homelab
• gaming
• outdoors

and those things have very little overlap, readers of one category might not want to see content from the others - although that's a pretty basic list of "Software Engineer" interests, so it's a bad example.

Topic based feeds

Related to the above, I'd like to be able to subscribe to topic-based feeds.

For example: I really like Jeff Geerling's content, I subscribe to his blog and watch most of his videos, but I am not as interested in accurate time-keeping as he is. I'd like to take his homelab content and read it next to other homelab content.

Jeff tags his content very well, so I could filter his feed to only homelab content, but I want to see everything he posts, and only sometimes view just some of it. Also, some feeds I subscribe to are for dedicated topics, like the selfh.st feed, which means they don't tag it as "self-hosting", even if that's what it is to me.

Maybe this is a solved problem that I haven't yet found the solution for, but currently I use FreshRSS as an RSS backend and NetNewsWire as an RSS frontend and I cannot get them both to co-operate on this.

To clarify I do subscribe to individuals and enjoy consuming everything they share, even if it's not a topic I'd usually be interested in, but I would also like to categorise content as a reader.

Maybe I should split my feed consumption into feed readers for topics and social readers for people. This needs further investigation. Until then I will keep learning about clocks. Thanks Jeff.

Distributed Digital Garden powered by webmentions

I am yet to implement webmentions on my blog, but when I do I would like to use them to create backlinks in the various projects I have scattered around the web.

For example I have a documentation site for the scripts that set up my developer environment, and I would like to write about it on my blog and have these posts show up in the relevant parts under a "what links here" section, similar to the way this wiki or tools like Obsidian, Logseq or Notion do it.

I could manually update each project to reference the new content I have written on my blog, but why wouldn't I want to over-engineer an automation to do that for me?

Social indieweb

I've written this a few times on this page now without even considering it.

Is there a name for "socially capable indieweb sites" that isn't "IndieMark level 2"?

I've been on "the indieweb" for years now but my site still has no social capabilities.

When I add webmentions does it go from indieweb to IndieWeb?