Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence ![rw-book-cover](https://img.youtube.com/vi/jwmmWHGEZn4/maxresdefault.jpg) ## Metadata - Author: [[YouTube]] - Full Title: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence - Category: #articles - Document Tags: [[video-notes]] [[youtube]] - Summary: Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence - URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwmmWHGEZn4 Ana Rodrigues: Hello.Hi.Um, so thank you all for being here.I'm quite excited to talk about this, as this is my passion.So I’m going to ramble about what a safe, personal online spacefocused on creativity, community, and self-expression could look like. In sociology, the third space refers to the social surroundings that areseparate from your two usual spaces: your home, the first space, andthe second space, the workplace.As someone who codes for a living, but also as a hobby,attending meetups and conferences is my third space, and frequentattendance at these can build relationships and community. My understanding is that LoopConf also strives for that.You may be here for training for work,but there are also people here who want togather, interact, and build relationships.You may be looking at familiar faces you've seen before at previous events. I want to share how my personal website became my online third space.It's not a social media account, it's not a Discord server.It's not a private Slack channel.It's not a forum or a Facebook group.It's just my website, and by extension, how other people's personalwebsites became the same for me. My name is Anna Rodrigues, and I'm a front-end developer at theTech for Good Agency, Hector.Our office is literally a three-minute walk from here, which is quiteconvenient for me to be here today.I built my first personal website over 20 years ago,but unfortunately for me, I have no other hobbies other than coding.So I learned to code by building fun sites as a pre-teen in the early two thousands, and that became my career. And my home on the web is my blog.This website was originally created sometime in 2014, but in the pastI've had multiple websites and blogs.I even had a very popular blog back in Portugal while I was in university because Iwas blogging about university life, but then I had to take it down when I needed a job.Uh, which, you know, thankfully most of these things are not aligned anymore because I was young.And as we know, we're all very mature and wise when we're young. When I first began to draft this talk, I realized that I was kind of stuck on how to build a storybecause I know the end of it, and the start is a bit long and muddy, and my cognitive dissonance was not helping.So in a slightly unorthodox strategy, I will share, I'll start by sharingwhat one of my main takeaways is.Everything takes time to build, understand, realize, and appreciate.So I'm going to attempt to start with the basics. What does it mean to have an online presence nowadays?For the majority of people, to be online or to have an online presencemeans to have an account on a website owned by a corporation orby someone with too much money.You may have a personal account somewhere, a professional accountelsewhere, maybe a silly account in another place, but most people actuallyrarely open their browser nowadays.It's frightening. We don't go online anymore or surf the web;we're always on.We're always on hold for a push notification.We go from the big screen on our desks to our little screen on our phones, andopen the same four websites or apps.Most of them, you can't even access the content unless you have an account.These are websites or apps that give you no transparency on how they use your data. No ownership, no privacy, and no safeguards, the landlords of theinternet. But still, what does an online third space look like to most people?It may be one of those websites; it's fine.It's most likely a group that they're a part of inside ofthose internet wall gardens. What does an online third space look like in 2025?Could it be a Discord, a Slack channel, a Facebook group, aTwitch stream, a subreddit?What does an online third space look like?In the past?A-P-H-B-B forum, that was great,a live journal, an old chat room. But regardless of the tools and companies mentioned when answering these questions,they all seem to have something in common: a community to participate in.The other thing that kept coming into my head was a place to wander about likeyou would do physically — a park, a garden, a community center, a library. So let's go back to 2017 when it actually all began for me.I was feeling a frustration that I couldn't really explain.Um, tech.Twitter was at its peak.My interest in Facebook was long gone.Instagram was still bearable.Snapchat was king, and I had forgotten I had a LinkedIn account. But yeah, I remember feeling stressed that I wasn't keeping up with all the cool techposts from all the cool people on Twitter.The tech FOMO was real.I had a blog starting in 2014,but who the hell was I even to dareto blog about anything technical?That was my thought at the time.I missed the whole web. I, the web I experienced that I knew when I knew I could exist that Icould share without feeling afraid of carrying on being employable or cringe.I had nostalgia.I missed how I would share fun CSS tricks and all the other teenagers who were myage would be like, "Yeah, this is great."I'm going to steal that.It was fun, and the current web experience gave me so much anxietyand it brought up all my insecurities. That year I went to a conference, and I learned about the Indiewebcommunity from a talk by Jeremy Keith called Building Blocks of the Indieweb.At the time, he spoke to me on a deep level because I've always beenthe type of person who is very keen on learning and sharing publicly aboutcode and my experiments in general.Since I started to work professionally, I lost that passionand that was mostly due to fear. In 2017, my blog wasthree years old. From that talk, I learned about the Homebrew website club, whichexists under the Indieweb umbrella.It's a regular meetup for people who are passionate about or interestedin creating, improving, building, and designing their own websites. One evening, sometime in 2017 or 2018, I turned up.I was like, "Well, well," but I'm so glad I did because I wouldn'tbe here today if I hadn't. Later on, I became one of the organizers.I found myself the following year on the same stage as Jeremy Keith,sharing my frustration on how I wish the front-end community would blog more.I try to encourage people to do it.My arguments were simple.If you only post on places like Twitter, the moment it isGone, all your content is gone. If it isn’t gone, it isn’t findable.You should own it.You can have both.By the way,I’m not saying one or the other.And little did I know at the time that I was actually going to be proven right.Because Twitter, as we know it, is kind of dead, and the front endcommunity is now split between places like Blue Sky and Mastodon. I was writing about how we blog so little nowadays, but in 2018, I had less than20 blog posts in the four-year-old blog, which is, you know, better than zero.But that’s like five blog posts a year, roughly.But it was a subtle sign that something wasn’t right for me. So what is this Indieweb?The Indieweb community is about creating or improving your personalwebsite, while also helping others to build theirs, either by documentingor creating tools to help create an alternative to the corporate web.Members of the Indieweb community have built tools that anyone can use ontheir personal websites that help create interaction and communitybuilding between personal websites. The Indieweb community believes that you should own your content,have your content and interactions first posted on your personal website,and then shared on other platforms.These include things like your articles, your status images, likes, comments,which could forever be in your ownership with a permanent link, and you can keep a recordof it forever in case a platform or social media is deleted, or you are banned.That happens. And you can look something like this.Imagine you have a blog.It shows the latest content published. In this case, Anna's blog is called "Anna."She posted an article called "My New Article."It also has a post of type RSVP, a post of type "liked" where she liked and linkedto another article in another blog. There is also a post of type "reply" or"comment" which replies to her own websiteto another post called "Hello World" from another website.Okay.This seems like a simple, typical blog.On a random social media platform, Anna can post as normal,sharing the new article. It gets four likes and one reply.Great.Smudge says, "Thank you for writing this."This is what we mean by posting on your website first and syndicating elsewhere. There may be ways of automating this, but I won't betalking about them in this talk.You can chat with me later about this.In the actual article, once you open "My New Article," youcan backfeed interactions receivedon that social media and show themon your own website. This means that anyone, even if theydon’t use that social media account,can actually see all those interactions.So in this case, the likes you’ve receivedon that social media could be backfedto your article and show them.This includes the reply that Smudge made originallyon this walled garden.Imagine Jasper; he read Anna’sarticle and has an opinion on it.So they create a blog post on their own website, a post of type "reply,"and they own that response. Using web mentions, that responsecan also appear on your article. My understanding is that web mentions may be a familiar term to you,because if I'm not wrong, it's the recommendations featurethat is built on the standard.Yes, I got it.Yes, that's it.Got it.Nailed it.I've previously done a slightly more detailed version of this flow,which you can see, and it’s available on the article I wrote about theIndieweb for Smashing Magazine.It goes quite a bit more into detail, especially with technical pointers andexisting services that you can use so that you don’t have to code this from scratch. But we are at LoopConf, which is great because you don’t have to.WordPress folks have it easy; they have their life very easy.Unlike me.All that flow was possibly quite overwhelming.But the good news is that you don’t have to worry about it.The Indieweb community members have worked on some plugins to facilitatethis interactive flow, but these may not work with the recent stuff.The block themes.I was told that, in particular, the web mentioned plugin has a really nicefallback that should work anyway, so visit the Indieweb WordPress profile to checkthese out, and these are all open source.You can contribute to it as you wish.So maybe also have a look at indie blocks XYZ as it may suit your needs,oh, I’ve just realized the QR code is being cut off by the code.It’s okay.I have the link to the slides at the very end of this.All this information is available on our weekly updates as well, but you will also be ableto get some clarity on our dedicated WordPress channel where members of the community are active. The community was like, "Hey, this is what I experimented with, and you can have questions about it, and people will gladly help."But one core message from the community is that we like to document in the open, share examples, and help out others.The community members have put a lot of effort into sharing their experience in the Indieweb Wiki, and we know it's not perfect.Don't come for us for that.This is my profile in the Indieweb Wiki.It's quite shy, and it pales in comparison to the other profiles.But that's okay.You do what you can.It's not like you have to work for free all the time.It's very overwhelming for anybody who doesn't understand the tech jargon at first, but the community tries really hard in their free timeto bridge that gap by suggesting services like WordPress or Micro Blog that support the Indieweb by default.This is an example. Don't read through this because it's not the point.The point is that this is just a page where we share how we build things.People in the community won't share how and why they build any feature on their websites.This is for the privacy policy.My example is at the bottom.We do that because we simply want to make everybody's lives easier here, andfor example, if I build something, we'll add ourselves to the list.We say, "Hey, this is how I build," so that anybody can go and pick up anexample and be inspired or copy.You can copy mine for all I care.So it's 2020, the cursed year.I'm writing more and more frequently on my blog and I was like, I wasn'tI wasn't necessarily producing a lot of original content, but I was creatinga roundup of links, a small meta post. I was writing a lot about the Indieweb.I was excited, but then there was something I should have been happier about.I was part of a community.I was satisfied, but I wasn't there.There was something wrong; something was missing, and it tookme a while to figure out.I was overwhelmed, and I didn't notice it.Uh, no one was putting pressure on me, but working on my blogstarted to feel like a chore.I really wanted to do all these things that my Indieweb peers were doing.They had so many cool things on their website.I wanted to blog more, but I didn't know what about, and at the time, the landing pageof my blog was just a list of blog posts.And I was constantly feeling behind unnecessarily.I remember, do you remember the cool flow I showed you before?Yeah, I wrote about it for Smashing Magazine, but I actually haven'timplemented the majority of it. When I first started to participate in the community and attend their meetups andcamps, I created this really unnecessary pressure on myself that I had to do itall; that I had to use all the protocolsand all the cool APIs in order to create thefull-fledged Indieweb experience from my website to corporate silos to everywhere.And I wasn't achieving anything.So I had to take a big step back, and I've been saying this for a while:you don't have to over-engineer.Since 2018, I've been saying my goal is to have a micro pop endpointevery time I go to an Indieweb camp.And I end up only focusing on that and not doing anything else. So I believe this stops a few people from fully embracing the fact that they too arekeen on doing things, but they're stuck.Like myself in the past, there's a lot of people who may fear thatyou're only a fully Indieweb person if you build it all, and as lame asit is, I'm going to quote myself:I'm not less than the other people in the Indieweb communityfor not having a fancy automotive cool setup on my personal website.Nobody has ever made me feel that way.It doesn't matter if all you have is a simple page with your name and email.There is no right or wrong way. Just what works for you. And yeah, it took me an embarrassing amount of time to realize, accept, and believe in this.If there is one place where you can do whatever you want and how youwant it, it is your personal website.And a bit like turning a house into a home,I decided to let go of big ambitions and make the website cozy.I redesigned it. I imagined what it would look like, what my digital home could look like.I wanted sections to enter and explore like a digital garden,and they're not finished.But the intention is there.I let go of design trends and experimented, even if the codeis rough and unprofessional.Personal websites are the perfect playground for experimentation.They offer a space to explore new technologies that may not yet be suitable for professional projectsand a safe space to fail. I wrote a blog post called "In Defense of Unpolished Personal Websites" as a kindof letter to myself, where I believe that my imperfect and unpolished code on mypersonal website isn't the full reflection of my technical abilities or knowledge. Of the web development standards.I forgot how to surf the web.Another problem.I was still stuck doom scrolling on places like Twitter, and to be fair, nowadays,mostly Mastodon, Blue Sky, and TikTok.But still, I was mostly going back to the same handful of websites.So I carved out time to add websites to my RSS reader. Reading posts not limited by character limits, posts not engineeredto be promoted by an algorithm; LinkedIn is awful for this.Reading other people's long thoughts without hashtags.What a joy having to go beyond bookmarks and blog rolls.What a joy it is to click links in 2025, and so I forced time to manuallyvisit other people's websites. Either via web rings or blog rolls.Admiring people's homes makes me want to work on mine, not because I want to keep upwith them, but because they inspire me.They made me admire humans and their craft becausewebsite making is a digital craft.Exploring little Easter eggs is truly a pastime. This meant that I added things like a guest book to mine and signed others.I took the time to tell someone I thought their website was beautiful and brightenedmy day, and slowly I built online friendships.We started to respond to each other whenever we posted, sometimesvia email, which is now the equivalent of a nice postcard. But there was still an itch, and I still had an online vague persona.Many of my past decisions were based on trying to cultivate a personal,professional online persona, and I had this rule of sandwiching,a personal post in a technical post to make sure I looked cool and employable.And this was caused by our horrible capitalist landscapeof viewing yourself as a product. I still wasn’t happy, and not everyone has this choice, but it wasn’tworking for me, so I had to fix it.I listened to a great podcast called Hurry Slowly, and they asked thequestion, "Who are you without the doing?"And I couldn’t answer.My personal life took turns in recent years that made me wish I couldjust run to a cabin in the woods.But I knew that part of the answer to my happiness was to live authentically.And to me, that meant not being defined by my job title.So I stopped saying, "I’m a front-end developer," to "I work as a front-enddeveloper," and I applied these changes all over my website andsocial media, except LinkedIn. I stopped pursuing my own archive from a tech gaze point of view.After all, it turns out my most engaging posts are my personal posts.This led to deeper connections, more caring emails from readersand new friendships blossoming.Things like my miscarriage, my dad passing away, the brutality ofthe pandemic, Brexit, et cetera.And tech trends come and go.The call you share might be updated by the next,but do it anyways because it cements your expertise.But don’t overthink it.And I want my personal website to be like visiting the living room in my home.Come hang out with me.Look at my bookshelf.Come see my bookmarks.Come.Let’s talk about it.On my personal website, I can experiment, share, delete, and moderate as I wish.It’s my comfort zone, and I don’t need to see analytics, engagement, or lack of. Of number of likes, comments, or whatever.I don't want to.So it's now 2025, and my website's a constant work in progress,but it is now where I have joyspending time at it. No longer feels like a chore, just somethingto look forward to, like gardening, cooking, reading, baking, et cetera.It is now 10 years of archives that are findable that I can link to even onthis talk that I can quote myself on.I know it was quite liked to quote myself, but I can, I can back myselfand I can browse and relive memories, and I now have a better understandingof my goals with it, and I can change those goals anytime as well. If in 2015 you had asked me to delete the whole thing, I would’ve,'cause I would never have appreciated it.You can't make me delete it now.Slowly but surely, scrolling on both screens became exciting.I have dozens of tabs open at once, and they don't feel like a chore.My website links to other homes, my website receives likes from other homes.My website sends likes to other homes, and we can reduce it to this.It's fine.I don't mind it, but my website exists alongside my first space,my home and my workplace, my second place without belonging to either.I receive and send interactions from the front end;community ideas and relationships are built through informal public interaction.I now find it playful, relaxing, and it allows me totransition to my personal focus.That's the third space.Everything takes time to build, understand, realize, and appreciate.Yeah, sure.You may think, okay, you took it 10 years to probably reap the benefitsof a personal website and blog. It could take me longer.Then let me show you my favorite gem from one of those hell websites.It doesn’t matter.Time will pass anyway, so why not?What else can I tell you?Oh, I don’t have content to put on a personal website.That’s not true.It doesn’t matter.The goal of a personal website is to be reachable.Your content might just be your name and your email. That’s fine.You can change it anytime as well.Things I’ve shared might not apply to you today.That’s okay too.You don’t have to be a content creator to have a website.Recently, Paul Robert Lloyd shared a presentation that is a beginner’s guide to the Indieweb, and he made it all available on his website,truly living in the Indieweb spirit, and I really recommend it.It gives a bunch of technical pointers if you want to get into it.The indie, small, cozy, fun, personal, whimsical web isn’t gone.You’re just not going to find it on Instagram, X, LinkedIn,Facebook, Reddit, etc.If you want a starting point, People in Blogs is a weeklynewsletter created by Manu.I’ve been privileged to be one of the people who was interviewed,interviewed in the first series, in the first chapters.It’s been over a hundred interviews so far.That’s a hundred blogs for you to put under your belt.They also run the Ye Olde blog role, which manually creates nearlya thousand personal websites and blogs that are active and beautiful. Manually created by humans.Phil created this wonderful directory that expands beyond tech.They have categories for you to browse and spend hoursperusing and admiring other people.The Good Internet is a physical and digital magazine dedicatedto artists who just want to build for fun, and it's a wonderful joy.It's a joy to have.I got the physical copy at home, and it was such a joy to actually go througha magazine about my hobby, website making. The 32 Bit Cafe is a community of hobbyists and professionals helping to make thepersonal web fruitful and beautiful again.That's a lovely message and mission to have.I found this website after I started to do this talk.A website is a room. This person collated a bunch of websites.They found and described why they make them, why they make them feel nice, and theysaid, "I came to this conclusion sometime during the quarantine when I realizedthat certain websites give me a sense of shelter and rest more than others."How beautiful is that?And it's all handmade by people like us. I would love to see any of you pop by to our chat and say hi.But it's okay if you don't feel like it; I know I'm biased.Join whatever community or safe space that feels better for you.And all I can wish for is that you find some time to embracecreating your personal website.This is an audience of engineers; you all know how to do this.You already have the perfect tool to start, and you have the knowledge.Most people wish they had that.They didn't even get that stage. So whether you participate in the web community or not,Having your own personal website, you are as indie as it gets. In 2014, I started a blog. I didn't know then, but my lifechanged completely because of it.And funny enough, it was built with WordPress.Thank you.Brian Richards: Absolutely brilliant.Before I ask any of you the question that I know you're anticipating,do you have any questions?I want to take just a few more seconds to reintroduce Ana, because I couldn’ttell you this part without giving away some of the power of her talk.In 2014, she started a blog. In 2015,she was invited to speak at this event. My event isn't our event.Uh, it's a lot to write home about.She's spoken at many events.She's now a well-known international speaker.Technically speaking.Uh.And all of that happened becauseshe was writing a blog.So, if you need another testimonial for why you should bemaintaining your own website, ta-da.Ana has done a lot of incredible stuff, and it started from this seed.Like maybe I should write this down in a place that I can controlwhere I might expand on the narrative and share my perspective.Now that I’ve given you some time to pause and reflect,do any of you have any questions?Beautiful.Okay. I saw this name first comingback andcatch.Question: Uh, how do you hit the published part?Because when you are talking about,your site, your site isyour living room, and I look around my living room and think, yep, itmimics my site, which is a mess. Ana Rodrigues: Yeah.Huh?Yeah.Mine is a mess.I have a bug.If you open my blog on the phone, there’s a scrolling bugand I talk about CSS the whole time.I haven’t fixed the CSS bug and it still works, and nobodycares, so actually nobody cares. Brian Richards: Nobody cares.Ana Rodrigues: And nobody cares.And that’s a good thing.Brian Richards: Yes, yes.They care about what you write.They don’t care that the site is a mess, and like, oh, ohno, I gotta fix the thing. Ana Rodrigues: You can edit.Like after I publish, all the typos appear.It’s like, oh, bizarre.So I always have to go back and just constantly edit, addmore nuance, add explanations. If you don’t hit publish, you’ll never know. Brian Richards: Yeah.Did all of you know that there's an edit button for the poststhat you publish in WordPress?It's magnificent.Great advice.Okay.There were a bunch of hands.Uh, who else right here?York.Question: Thanks.Uh, very inspiring, especially from someone who's been aspiring to do thatkind of thing for a long time, with a few, lots of failed attempts.But I was just wondering, in terms of separating your professional andpossibly your personal, is there a kind of tips for that?Is there a kind of tips for that?And also, I just have the idea of an anonymous website where you are. Ana Rodrigues: So I went through all those lives.Yeah.Yeah.So I went through a phase that I didn't want anyone to know my last name.I don't know, which explains that my current domain is OLO Ana.'Cause I didn't want to, for some reason, I was trying to separatethe personal and professional life.So that's the domain that stuck,because I didn't want people to find me by my last name.I've changed my mind since; this may not apply to everyone,but I'm not gonna lie, I have another domain that is just basically, um,a little bio with links to social media, a bunch of social media, and the link to my blog.That will be probably the link that I use as my main email. And if I was to be honest, I've been in the same job for eight years.I haven't been looking for a job.If I was, that would probably be the entry point.I would send them.If they want to know me as a person, they can go to my blog. I've been through that phase.I didn't feel happy.This is not going to apply to everyone, but I do feel like now more than ever,I've decided to be more authentic about how I show myself on the internet.'Cause I also want to match my personality to the culture of wherever I work.If they can see me for who I am and still accept me,that takes a lot of barriers out of my way.I also recognize that this is a privileged way of thinking.I'm quite lucky that I've always been employable, that I can go in this direction and be my true self.Not that I'm being too silly, but I think we all…To me, it's about connection.If I were to think about the professional angle, it's also about connecting with the right people.'Cause I don't want to work somewhere that doesn't let me be who I am.So that's how I see it. Brian Richards: Amazing.Uh, Tim, I also wanted to comment on your question.I've seen a lot of the stuff that you write; you should just hit publish on all of those drafts.Put them all out simultaneously,and then go back and clean them up later if you feel compelled, or don't because it's fine. Ana Rodrigues: Then again, I'm here all day.Come chat to me. Otherwise, the babysitter would have been a waste.Brian Richards: Yes.Amazing.Uh, please give another round of applause.Thank you., Building, Sharing, and Owning Your Online Presence, YouTube, 01k9avehqa303ks6h1x4z1ggv9.