The IndieWeb has a ter­mi­nol­ogy for com­mon post types - such as ar­ti­cle, note, photo and so on. The au­thors have also fo­cused on de­vel­op­ing spec­i­fi­ca­tions as op­posed to a bunch of prod­ucts/​ser­vices. They en­cour­age the com­mu­nity to write prod­ucts im­ple­ment­ing these specs.

This is a dou­ble-edged sword.

However well-writ­ten the spec may be, the suc­cess of the idea is up to the com­mu­nity. Don’t get me wrong - this is great for the long term; but soft­ware in open source or open de­vel­op­ment of­ten moves slow, which in­creases the odds of fric­tion in the short and medium term for the av­er­age Jane set­ting up a blog.

For ex­am­ple, Omnibear does­n’t even ex­ist on the Firefox ex­ten­sions store any­more, IndieKit is a per­sonal pro­ject — of Paul Robert Llyod — open-sourced so one is pri­mar­ily on their own once an is­sue is en­coun­tered. Much of what I came across car­ried sim­i­lar down­sides or caveats.

Personally, I have had al­most no suc­cess im­ple­ment­ing all these post types on my sta­tic site. The only suit­able Micropub end­point I found for my­self was IndieKit, which I ref­er­enced above, but could not get it work­ing with Indigenous for Android. I am not in fa­vor of us­ing 2+ dis­tinct ap­pli­ca­tions to post in­di­vid­ual post types ei­ther, which seems to be the case when it comes to pho­tos, for ex­am­ple.

Still, I want to leave room for adop­tion of these post types in the fu­ture. With that in mind, in place of notes, I am go­ing to be writ­ing thoughts. They might lack fin­ish of course, but I also wanted to keep my ar­ti­cles sep­a­rate from my thoughts. The thoughts also syn­di­cate on my ex­ist­ing feed so you don’t need to do any­thing ex­tra on your end.

When I feel the ecosys­tem around IndieWeb is ma­ture enough for an av­er­age front-end de­vel­oper to use, I’ll re­tire thoughts and adopt the post types as men­tioned on their wiki, in­clud­ing notes.