Alright, let’s talk about this Aaron Zalewski thing. I was messing around with decentralized identity stuff the other day, and his name kept popping up. So, naturally, I had to dig in and see what was going on.
First, I started by just Googling his name. Obvious, right? Got a bunch of hits related to ActivityPub, IndieWeb, and all that jazz. Okay, cool. Seems like he’s pretty deep into this whole decentralized web movement.
Then, I jumped over to his website. Simple, clean, and to the point. He’s got a bunch of posts about web standards, open source projects, and generally trying to make the internet less of a corporate playground. I liked what I saw.
Next, I decided to try and actually use some of his stuff. I grabbed his Indigenous plugin for WordPress. I’m already running a WordPress site, so it was pretty easy to install and activate.
Configuring it was a bit of a pain, I won’t lie. I had to set up my Webmention endpoint, which involved digging into my .htaccess file and adding some rewrite rules. That took a little bit of Googling and trial and error, but eventually I got it working.
Once the Webmention stuff was sorted, I started experimenting with posting to my site and seeing if it would automatically syndicate to other platforms. I tried sending a Webmention from my own Mastodon account. It actually worked! My post on WordPress showed up as a reply on Mastodon. Pretty slick.
After that, I tried setting up Micropub, which allows you to post to your site from third-party apps. I used Owncast as my Micropub client and was able to successfully post to my WordPress site. Pretty neat!
It wasn’t all smooth sailing, though. I ran into a few issues with permalinks and media uploads. I had to tweak some settings in WordPress to get everything working correctly. But hey, that’s part of the fun, right?
Overall, my experience with Aaron Zalewski’s work has been pretty positive. He’s clearly dedicated to building a better, more decentralized web. His tools are well-designed and relatively easy to use, even for someone like me who’s not a hardcore developer.
To wrap it up, I’d say if you’re interested in decentralized identity, ActivityPub, or IndieWeb, you should definitely check out his stuff. It’s a bit of a rabbit hole, but it’s a worthwhile one. Who knows, you might even learn something along the way.
