Update: The camp was organized by the awesome Marc Thiele and not by Aaron and Jeremy as I wrote earlier.

So, I guess this #indiewebcamp was quite a success for me as I have a site now. This domain has been mostly empty (the front page at least) for 7 years now, probably longer. Still it doesn’t feel as everything has worked out as I wanted, as I ended up with WordPress in the end.

The theme I have for now, SemPress, has the same problem as almost all WordPress themes have: They are just too complex, but yet not very customizable in it’s design. Why does a theme need 12 content pages, but only 1 CSS file (not counting the rtl one)?

On the other hand I saw a lot of people with not very well-known CMS’s or even custom made systems who were all doing the same trick in one way or another. These systems might nice, but how long will they be around? And how much support, extensions, etc. do they have? While all this stuff was already around for WordPress, and I haven’t done much more than configuring everything, testing, and re-testing it. I doubt I wrote more than 5 lines of code.

There will probably be a few systems I’ll try out, but for now I’m staying with WordPress I guess. These two days gave me enough stuff to think about and do, as I don’t fully understand half of what I have installed so far and neither does everything work perfectly yet.

The things I still want to change:

  • A nicer and more customizable design (hack SemPress, extend it, or build something myself?)
  • Post to app.net, ello? and Pinboard.
  • Get teacup running at a separate and private location, and find out how to permanently extend the default options.
  • Figure out why quill won’t work, it’s the only tool so far that can’t find the MicroPub endpoint.
  • Find out how to let all those tools post into draft, or at least not visible on the blog directly.
  • Do something with favourites on twitter (post them to instapaper) and retweets (separate page on the blog, or a separate tag? Although that means I need to make another exception for a certain tag on the main blog).

Before I forget it, many thanks to Marc for organizing this, to Aaron and Jeremy for presenting this, and to Amy for making notes. Will reference those quite a few times in the near future.