Checking in at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg

Once I finished my workshop on evaluating technology I stayed in Nuremberg for that weekend’s Indie Web Camp.

Just as with Indie Web Camp Düsseldorf the weekend before, it was a fun two days—one day of discussions, followed by one day of making.

I spent most of the second day playing around with a new service that Aaron created called OwnYourSwarm. It’s very similar to his other service, OwnYourGram. Whereas OwnYourGram is all about posting pictures from Instagram to your own site, OwnYourSwarm is all about posting Swarm check-ins to your own site.

Usually I prefer to publish on my own site and then push copies out to other services like Twitter, Flickr, etc. (POSSE—Publish on Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere). In the case of Instagram, that’s impossible because of their ludicrously restrictive API, so I have go the other way around (PESOS—Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to Own Site). When it comes to check-ins, I could do it from my own site, but I’d have to create my own databases of places to check into. I don’t fancy that much (yet) so I’m using OwnYourSwarm to PESOS check-ins.

The great thing about OwnYourSwarm is that I didn’t have to do anything. I already had the building blocks in place.

First of all, I needed some way to authenticate as my website. IndieAuth takes care of all that. All I needed was rel="me" attributes pointing from my website to my profiles on Twitter, Flickr, Github, or any other services that provide OAuth. Then I can piggyback on their authentication flow (this is also how you sign in to the Indie Web wiki).

The other step is more involved. My site needs to provide an API endpoint so that services like OwnYourGram and OwnYourSwarm can post to it. That’s where micropub comes in. You can see the code for my minimal micropub endpoint if you like. If you want to test your own micropub endpoint, check out micropub.rocks—the companion to webmention.rocks.

Anyway, I already had IndieAuth and micropub set up on my site, so all I had to do was log in to OwnYourSwarm and I immediately started to get check-ins posted to my own site. They show up the same as any other note, so I decided to spend my time at Indie Web Camp Nuremberg making them look a bit different. I used Mapbox’s static map API to show an image of the location of the check-in. What’s really nice is that if I post a photo on Swarm, that gets posted to my own site too. I had fun playing around with the display of photo+map on my home page stream. I’ve made a page for keeping track of check-ins too.

All in all, a fun way to spend Indie Web Camp Nuremberg. But when it came time to demo, the one that really impressed me was Amber’s. She worked flat out on her site, getting to the second level on IndieWebify.me …including sending a webmention to my site!