I Want My IndieWeb (and I made something to help)

I've been a WordPress user for a very long time. Long enough to remember when it felt like exactly what it was supposed to be: a blog engine. Clean, simple, get out of the way and let you write. I loved that about it.

What I've come to love much less is what it's become. Gutenberg. Jetpack. WooCommerce. A plugin ecosystem that grows faster than anyone can tend it. Themes that look great in a demo and fall apart the moment you try to make them your own, and worse, themes you build yourself that are quickly rendered useless by the shifting ground beneath them. The sites are bulky, slow, and increasingly expensive to host and maintain. Every update a small gamble. Every new "feature" something else to turn off. The further you dig toward the simple blog engine at the center of the thing, the more layers of someone else's priorities you have to cut through to get there.

I got tired of it. And since I like making things, I decided to make something.

The new site is built on Python, Django, and Wagtail: a content management framework that's honest about what it is. It's not trying to be everything. It gives you a solid foundation and gets out of your way, which is all I ever wanted. I couldn't be happier with those choices.

So what does the site actually do right now?

The Notebook is where you're reading this: my writing section. Posts, process notes, thoughts. Think of it as the blog, because that's what it is.

The Works section is the portfolio: a place to show finished pieces with proper context: medium, dimensions, date, the story behind them. Works can be grouped into Series, which lets me connect related pieces and tell a larger story across individual works.

The Roll is my alternative to Instagram. Rather than routing images through a platform that filters, tracks, and buries them in noise, it's a simple, independent image stream, one image at a time, with a little context, and nothing else getting in the way.

Of course, there's an RSS feed for the Notebook, and one for The Roll. If you're not already using a feed reader, I'd encourage you to look into it. RSS is, in my view, the most underappreciated tool on the internet, and the most elegant solution to almost everything wrong with social media. Follow the sites and people you actually care about. Read on your own terms, at your own pace, with no algorithm deciding what you see or when you see it. No sponsored posts. No engagement bait. No platform quietly reshaping what you read based on what keeps you scrolling longest. Just the things you chose, delivered cleanly. The model is simple: people publish on their own sites, others subscribe directly. No middleman, no manipulation. It's the foundation of what's sometimes called the IndieWeb, the idea that the internet works better when people own their corner of it. We had it, but we largely abandoned it for the dopamine shower of platforms that turned out not to have our interests at heart. We can just... go back.

Coming eventually: a shop. I'll say more about that when it's closer to ready.

For now, I'm just glad to have a site that feels like mine again.

I'll be adding a lot of new content in the coming weeks, including older notebook posts that haven't made the move yet. And several new portfolio works and series. There's plenty still to migrate.

One thing I'm particularly happy about is that the whole thing is built to be reproduced. The codebase is designed so that features can be included or left out depending on what a given site needs. Since the site is built with Wagtail and Django, the templates and styling are completely separate from the content and data structure. This means the features and functionality can be visually redesigned to almost any design. If you're an artist, a writer, a photographer, or anyone else who wants a site like this that is clean, fast, and 100% yours, get in touch. I'd be glad to talk about it.

In addition to the shop, I'm building a React Native app for my own use. I am increasingly curious about personal software, that is, tools that put the publisher first rather than the platform. Not everything needs to scale. Some of the best apps are the ones that solve a specific problem really well, without routing you through someone else's infrastructure to do it. This one connects directly to the site so I can post new images to The Roll from my phone without needing to open a browser.