birthday
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🎂
A birthday is the date when someone is born; some IndieWeb sites display their owner’s birthday, or provide a special display or custom theme on the date and month of the birthday itself. Some silos’s user profiles have a birthday field that you can (or must) enter, and some prominently alert your friends on the month and day of your birthday, like Facebook’s "BIRTHDAYS THIS WEEK" feature at the top of their events page.
Why
Sharing your birthday on your website lets you inform the web of when your birthday is. More people may say "happy birthday" to you. If someone forgets your birthday, they can refer to your website.
Why not
Security risk
Birthdays are often used as part of the security information on various sites, and thus revealing your birthday may place you at more risk of your account on such sites being compromised.
How
Ways to share your birthday on your site include:
- Having a countdown to your birthday
- Publishing your birthday on your About page
- Sharing your birthday using a h-card
- Posting an announcement on your birthday as a post
IndieWeb Examples
Ashton McAllan on http://acegiak.net/ using dt-bdayin her h-card on her home page since (????-??-??)
Aaron Parecki publishes the month and day of his birthday using dt-bdayon his home page h-card since 2016-02- 🎂 since 2016-12-28, Aaron's home page will show balloons floating from the bottom when viewed on his birthday. (Copy this file if you want to use it on your site! https://aaronparecki.com/assets/birthday.js)
- 🎂
Sebastiaan Andeweg added some code to display a cake-emoji next to the profile picture on his main h-card, which also advertises his birthday in mf2, but only on the day itself.
<data class="dt-bday" value="--MM-DD">🎂</data>
Martijn van der Ven displays his age and a countdown to his birthday on his website. The countdown, when parsed for microformats gives the time-of-birth as bdayexact to the minute.
capjamesg has a temporary banner on his website counting down to his birthday. The countdown was manually updated three days in advance of his birthday.
Jacky Alciné publishes the month and day of his birthday in his representative h-card at https://jacky.wtf/about since 2022-02 as both dt-bdayanddt-birthday- 🎂 Since 2022-07-09, Jacky Alciné's site will show a big native cake emoji over his photo on his representative h-card and wherever else his h-card photo appears, confetti will fall!
- 🎂 Since 2022-07-09,
Jamie Tanna publishes the month and day of his birthday in his representative h-card at https://www.jvt.me and uses https://confetti.js.org/, as well as adding a link to Jamie's "Support Me" page- ...
Silo Examples
Facebook has had a birthday field in user profiles since pretty close to the beginning, including separate privacy levels for the date (day & month) and year:
Twitter as of 2015-07-06 has a birthday field in your profile visible just below your "joined" date:
with various privacy levels for the "Year":
Year dropdown privacy menu options:
- Public
- My Followers
- People I Follow
- We follow each other
- Only me
On your birthday, when people visit your profile page, balloons fly up from the bottom of the screen:
Sessions
IndieWebCamp sessions about birthdays:
- ...
- 2016-03-14 IndieWebCamp MIT
- ...
Issues
Security
Birthdays are often used as part of a person's identity and thus publishing a precise accurate birthday pose an identity theft security risk. As a result, people at some IndieWebCamps have self-reported as using non-real birthdays on silos.
Criticism
Birthdays are often used by social networks to create spurious notifications - see Friendster's line in this video
See Also
- homepage
- event
- birthdays
- Brainstorming: https://twitter.com/leahculver/status/998046555100860416
- "Lazy Calendar could also be a service that sends you a push notification reminder a few days before birthdays and holidays." @leahculver May 20, 2018
- Silo problems with using birthday literally for a project account: https://twitter.com/danprimack/status/1153385666593644546
- "Sigh, @Twitter.
I created an account for my podcast, @ProRataPod. Noticed the "birth date" was public, so changed it to July 2018, which is when the podcast launched. Now I'm locked out because I'm "too young" to manage a Twitter account." @danprimack July 22, 2019
- "Sigh, @Twitter.
- Silo problems with too young a birthday date for a company: https://www.jamesgill.co/dont-change-your-birthday-on-twitter/
changed the year to 2006 – the actual year we legally started the business (unlike 1991 which was the year I was born). […] I received a warning […] I went ahead and confirmed […] “Your account is locked.”
- Happy Birthday Christopher John Aldrich an example of a birthday post
- It’s a Boy