Today I wanted to discuss a really cool piece of Indieweb “plumbing” that I use on this site, the micropub protocol! This nifty tool specified how a micropub server and client can communicate in order to create, update and delete posts for your website. What’s great about this, and a lot of other Indieweb protocols, is the loose coupling between frontend and backend. Essentially, you can create your own micropub server (like I did) and use it with tons of different clients developed by other people! Some of them focus on just general plain text posting, while others enable things like check-ins, likes, bookmarks or keeping track of a book you’re reading! This also works the other way around too! You can use someone else’s micropub server on your own site to update posts and create your own client. Or use both a client and server developed by someone else too! Whatever you decide is up to you and that’s the beauty of interoperability. It gives you choice.
This protocol isn’t just an idea, it’s used by countless people all the time. There’s clients for your phone, and browser so you can post from wherever you are. If you want to implement your own versions, micropub.rocks makes it super easy to see if you’re following the specifications, which are the rules that all the clients and servers follow. If you can pass all those tests, then your implementation will probably work with anyone else’s!
If this piques your interest, I highly recommend you give it a look! Implementing a compliant server or client, drawing up a design or writing about the protocol are all great projects you can give a try with. Good luck and until next time!