Kevin Marks and the Indie web

First up here is Kevin Marks’ talk on “the web we found”; the web 10 years ago, the web today and the future of the web at LeWeb’13.

The talk starts by looking at the web in 2003 and a compares it to the web in 2013. This was just the background and foundation to lay out the ideas of the indie web and the future of the web.

The bit I found really relevant

When Marks was discussing the future of the web one of the points that resonated with me was about building tools that you want to use. I think this idea will colour most of the decisions about how this blog engine is developed (for now). It’s easy to go down a rabbit hole of second guessing what other people want in a tool. But while it’s just me, I’ll stick to a few rules of thumb:

• In the core development, I’m not going to worry too much about breaking what I already have.
• With one big caveat, when I update the the distribution version of the engine that is powering this blog I’m not going to overwrite any theming or content I already have here.
• Going from writing a new post to publishing, I want that to take minimal steps. Ideally one but I’ve not decided on grunt powered commits.

Bonus Feature

Here is a follow-up interview with Kevin Marks where he discuss and expands on some of the ideas from his presentation and gives a bit of background on the history of video and the web.