I'd really love to get micropublishing up and running on theAdhocracy. I've recently started dabbling in Flickr and it would be great to upload here and automatically have my photo's fired over there; I'd also definitely get way more out of Twitter if I felt like small "thoughts" thrown up here could just get flung out as a tweet. I love the core concept as well, keeping control of your content and protecting against potential future service outages or (god forbid) full on closures.
So every time I read about the an Indiewebcamp or someone like Jeremy Keith throws up another interesting insight into their own methodologies and progress, I get excited. I want to start trying stuff out, so I start Googling. I pretty much always end up back here, at the main site for Indiewebcamp itself. And then I hit a wall.
Reading through the wiki page regarding Micropub is equivalent to reading through the pilots manual for the Millenium Falcon. I understand that the ultimate end result of my grasping this knowledge can only lead to awesome future adventures, but honestly it may as well be written in Xhosa. I get a headache, I close the tab and I go do something else, defeated once again.
One day I will actually spend a weekend getting my head around this. Much like learning to fly the Falcon (I wish), this is something I will continue to get excited for and, ultimately, that excitement will result in learning actually happening. But I do feel my frustration is warranted, and I feel that's a great shame. The idea of the indie web is, to use Jeremy Keith's own words:
about having your own place on the web so that you have control over what you put out in the world.
It's just a shame that understanding the how is quite so buried under a whole raft of new terminology, much of which is needlessly obfuscated in its naming (I mean, what exactly is an h-card? What does that actually mean?). Maybe, in the future, once I've bent my own understanding around all the h-names, microgizmos and selfdogtreats out there I'll find the time to right down some plainer, simpler instructions for others in the same situation. Then again, maybe there is some internal logic and once it "clicks" I'll never think twice about it again. Only time will tell.
