Skywalker

Last month I went to my first IndieWebCamp, in Düsseldorf. After years of Homebrew Website Clubs, this was a big step up.

IndieWebCamp?

The IndieWeb is a community of people who run their own websites – their own domain, their own content, their own identity online – instead of renting a room inside someone else's social platform. An IndieWebCamp is where that community meets in person. It runs over two days. Day one is discussion, in a BarCamp format where the participants propose the topics and build the schedule on the spot. Day two is Create Day, when everyone makes, designs, codes, and improves their own sites, and then demos what they built at the end. You bring a laptop and whatever you want to work on. It's organised by volunteers, and open to anyone.

If you've been to a Homebrew Website Club: an IndieWebCamp is a Homebrew Website Club on fire. Same spirit, but two full days, more focused, with people travelling in from all over the world for it for it. That changes the energy completely. It is intensely social and intensely productive: introductions, nerd talk, getting to know each other, heads-down work, more talk, food breaks, repeat. Intense, but also a lot of fun and very motivating.

It was my first bar-camp too. I'd expected something improvised and a little chaotic; instead it felt structured and supportive while staying completely fluid. Nobody forced an agenda, the schedule grid filled itself, and the sessions simply happened.

A colourful community

What stayed with me most is the community. The IndieWeb is a colourful, whimsical, positively weird crowd, and not once did anyone consider themselves superior, because they had a better website. People with years of writing and self-built publishing systems sat next to people who had just put up their first placeholder page. And that was completely fine! Everyone was supportive and genuinely appreciative, no matter where you stood on that path.

I rearranged my homepage

I also got real work done, which surprised me.

The push came from a session on homepage design. We were talking about your homepage as a conversation with someone meeting you for the first time – you wouldn't unload everything about yourself on them at once. James (capjamesg) described an almost ”one in, one out“ policy to stop his homepage from growing forever. And I kept meeting people who blog like crazy, with regular personal updates on their sites. I want that for myself!

So I brought my microblog at knot.tilman.me back to more prominent place, side by side with my digital garden. And I decided to post the digital garden updates there too, where they would otherwise be hard to find. Two main buttons, the right wording, a clearer invitation to read on. Small changes – but it was the opportunity and the people that finally made me do it.

One more thing I carried home: James's site has a cat mascot, and the session wandered happily into cat pages, 404 cats, even a ”CatGPT“ that only answers in meow and purr. He adds a little whimsy without interrupting with the content.

All those people, all those sites

I met so many people in person for the first time - James (capjamesg), Jeremy, Schepp, Daniel, Tantek, Jo of dead.garden, Nora, David, Matthias, and many more. All those websites … and all those people behind them …

Come to IndieWebCamp Nuremberg!

If you have a website – or want one – this is the friendliest room on the internet to walk into. You don't need to be technical. You don't need a finished site. You just need to show up.

And here is the good part: the next IndieWebCamp in Germany is in Nuremberg, my own city, on 27-28 June 2026. I'll be there. Come build, talk, and demo with us.

And if need another opportunity to mingle with friendly IndieWeb folks: We also do a special extra Homebrew Website Club for Nürnberg Digital Festival on July 1!

I will never tire of meeting nice folks, on their sites or in person.

I vibe-coded a mobile camera web app, because I miss the old days when mobile photography was such a great creative field. Surprisingly the Snapseed app is still around, so I used it for additional layering.

I published a new garden page one week ago documenting the Platformer Game Jam 2026 – students building games in Godot at the design faculty. (Godot's web export is genuinely great, by the way!)

I used it as my first proper test of POSSE-style publishing. A long form text on my digital garden first, then a link post on this microblog, then cross-posted to Bluesky and Mastodon. This feels right! The garden is the home, the platforms are just for distribution to the other platformed-based audiences.

I also set up Plausible Analytics – EU-based, privacy-focused and open-source. Nice service, easy to set up, but will cost me 9€ per month after the 30-day trial. After the first week the analytics show 11 unique visitors and 34 pageviews, which is pretty bad, but exactly what I'd expect after years of not posting consistently!

Which brings me to the thing I actually believe: online traffic follows consistent, worthwhile posts. I learned this with my web-based Geometry Daily project starting in 2012 – first weeks of nothing, then gradual pickup, eventually 80,000 followers. The take-away: Post something good, stick to a topic, then just keep going! I'm not sure the old social media dynamics still hold in 2026, but the logic seems durable.

More soon!

16 Bachelor of Design students at TH Nürnberg built a platformer in the faculty's project week. Only three had ever used a game engine before. Three days later, ten games were finished — solo or in small teams, all playable in any browser.

The most interesting part isn't the speed. It's what made it possible. Godot has become a solid open-source engine that students learn in hours rather than days. And the web has quietly grown into a remarkably universal free and open platform for interactive media — built on open standards, no media platforms or app stores in sights. WebAssembly lets compiled engines like Godot run in the browser at near-native speed. A finished game ships as a folder of HTML, WASM, and assets. You just send a URL. A good time to be designing digital things.

→ Full write-up, photos, all ten games: tilman.me/garden/Platformer+Game+Jam+2026

I managed to squash some tricky bugs with the help of Claude code. Does that mean I can reactivate development of the Knot system? I don’t know …

Thanks go out to Daniel, who I met at IndieWebCamp three weeks ago. In a very friendly and supportive manner he introduced me to the embarrasing truth that my web feeds were utterly and completely broken. He knows a lot about feeds, because he runs FeedCity.

www.inkandswitch.com celebrate their 10 year anniversary with a great piece of interactive creative coding on their website. Make sure you activate the ampersand shaped circuit in the upper left …

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.

No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.

youtu.be/tkUgOT22F5s?si=bRzAv1HOxSwn9gWD

Bitframes is a generative art project by Matt DesLauriers. Inspired by punched cards and early computer art
Matt coded this open source artwork in 32 bytes of data. After randomly generating a piece you can ”mint it to the blockchain“. I don't really care about this part, but the graphics are surprisingly varied and beautiful! I wish I could download the graphics in high resolution.

Please pardon the mess …

John Provencher, independent artist and image-maker based in New York City. He is very deep into generative graphics, creative coding and glitchy digital aesthetics. His website is equally great: Definitely not easy to navigate first, but the graphics are so interesting that I dug along until I understood it. You can switch between two modes by clicking on the upper left box. One mode shows text info and an overview of the graphics, the other all graphics in a slideshow where you navigate by clicking anywhere left or right. It works beautifully, even on mobile.

johnprovencher.com

Patrik Hübner visited us yesterday for a guest lecture and Q&A. He talked about »Co-Creating With Technology«. His website is chock full of great examples of creative code thoughtfully applied into brands and stories. Great web design too, built on WordPress, check it out: www.patrik-huebner.com

weirdweboctober.website

WWO is using a technology called Octothorpes, which introduces hashtags and backlinks that can be used anywhere on the web across a network of domains. I have to check this out in depth.

I first came across Daniel Eatock’s art on his website back in the 2000s. Today, I revisited the site and was surprised to find that he’s still using the same software (www.indexhibit.org). No design updates, no modern features, no trendy new layouts—just the same, simple structure. He only kept on filling the site with new work, some of it dating back to 1991. The website’s design is as minimal as it gets, yet easy to navigate and still functional after all these years. It’s inspiring to see a website system work so seamlessly for so long with such minimal effort.

eatock.com

Such a nice bunch of nerds. I think this is the best group shot we ever had! – If you are passionate about anything, no matter what … Meet up with like-minded people regularly!

indieweb.org/events/2024-09-11-hwc-nuremberg