former projects
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former projects are projects that may have been used by indieweb community members in the past, but are either unmaintained, have been abandoned, or failed to implement any key indieweb building blocks — if you’re actively using one of these for your primary personal site, please add yourself to its specific page, and bring it up on the #indieweb-dev chat channel!
Brainstorming
Page Update
This page needs updating to provide a more useful sorting of former projects.
A few goals: (some ideas from 
Tantek Çelik, feel free to iterate/expand/refine):
- Kindness to creators of past projects. How can we improve documentation of past projects to be particularly kind to creators, especially to folks formerly active in the community, in the hopes that they feel welcome to rejoin at any time, and contribute at any level, not necessarily the way or form they did before, and in explicit consideration that life happens.
- Be easily navigable and understandable by casual readers. When a new person visits this page, can they easily browse it and understand why some project (perhaps a project they’ve heard about or maybe even used or been involved with in the past) is in a particular section, and/or what it might take to revive the project and make it active instead of former.
- Be transparent and direct about potential utility. Can we be very direct, real, and clear about which former projects were useful to how many people, for what kinds of use-cases, so that folks looking to solve similar problems can focus on browsing/re-using code accordingly. Or on the other side of the spectrum, make it clear which things were ideas/aspirations that didn’t quite get off the ground (which is also ok), or which maybe were useful to one particular person (who does or does not wish to be contacted about it — if we know).
A few thoughts on approaches: (some ideas from Tantek Çelik, feel free to iterate/expand/refine):
- start with a section of projects that might still be useful to folks, by merit of their past utility (functionality), and past set of community members that used them
- These could reasonably be labeled Unmaintained
- It would useful to distinguish single-user indieweb projects (abandoned by the one person who was primarily developing & using it), from projects which had multiple participants and users
- Abandoned since it was a clear choice by the single user/developer to give up on it, perhaps help provide motivation to new devs to not just try creating something on their own (by evidence of past efforts that attempted that).
- Projects where there is no sign of open source or project site (or it died) should perhaps go on an even separate page, since there's nothing that a new person can really do with them, they’re historical at best
- This make may make sense for Unreachable, or perhaps even move them to a separate project-deaths page.
Once we've figured out how to distinguish different former projects, then we go through the existing lists and reorganize them accordingly.
Another way of separating projects, there is a possible distinction between abandoned projects that were:
- "indieweb usable"
- Readers, like full on readers like Woodwind
- CMS projects, that people in the community actually used on their own sites
- some subset of both of those that were only ever "single user"
- "indieweb tangential" (like libraries that could be used as part of an indieweb supporting CMS etc.)
- "other" that didn't really try to support Indieweb building blocks, perhaps worth moving to their own page
Abandoned
Projects that may have supported IndieWeb sites in the past but that appear to be abandoned. In alphabetical order by project name.
- Converspace
- "Federated Community" - The idea here is to use pop-based email, generic Python scripting, and static HTML to set up a dynamic microblogging and photohosting site. Current workflow includes sending an email to a pop email account. Then when the Python script finds the new email it downloads the email to my static HTML server and also sends out an email to my facebook and twitter accounts for syndication. Currently, the Python script is located here and an example of the static HTML is located here. Next up is adding in the ability to upload photo albums. After that, comments. Former user: George Em on geo.gs (dead link 2018)
- Glow
- Pants
- Social Igniter
- Storytlr an open-source lifestreaming platform.
Unmaintained
These projects appear to be unmaintained, but they're still open source so you may be able to find something to re-use or a starting point for a new project.
Hello, world.
An open-source tumblr/blog/rss reader/wordpress-like thingy. Post your content easily and collect content from other rss/ostatus capable sites. Also, lets you syndicate what you post onto other sites like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and grab their content as well (backwards-compatibility ;) Technical-wise: it uses the Ostatus stack, passes SWAT0, BrowserID for authentication, written in Python but meant to run on shared servers.
- Code at Github.
Indie.js
Indie.js is an IndieWeb framework for Node.js currently being abstracted and released as a set of modules for building your own IndieWeb-compatible site.
Nucleus CMS
Nucleus CMS is an open source blogging platform. It allows maintaining multiple blogs and is quite extensible through its plugin system.
IndieWeb enthusiasts previously using it on their own site:
gRegor Morrill used it on gregorlove.com from 2002 to 2015, then migrated to ProcessWire
- Contributed several plugins and core developments.
- Given the current development status of Nucleus, I do not recommend using it.
Red Wind
Red Wind is IndieWebified blog software written in Python and running on Flask. It is intended to be clean, lightweight, and amenable to experimentation. Red Wind is open source and fairly new with minimal documentation.
Examples:
Kyle Mahan (author) on kylewm.com (selfdogfooding)
Past examples:
Tent.io
- http://tent.io suite of distributed networking protocols, alternative to OStatus
No IndieWeb community members are using it on their own site.
Trovebox
Trovebox (formerly The OpenPhoto Project) is a server-side photo application that lets you store your photos on Dropbox, Amazon S3 or in your garage, and serve them from URLs on your own domain.
IndieWebCamp participants who are using it on their own site:
- User:Upon2020.com (Johannes Ernst) is running a private instance for his family pictures
- ...
Words
Words is an open source blogging tool (fork of nornagon/words)[1].
IndieWeb enthusiasts currently using it on their own site:
- None currently
Formerly:
Unreachable
These projects appear to be offline, unreachable, or have broken permalinks which need fixing and should be considered for adding to site-deaths.
StatusNet
StatusNet is open source software you can setup on your own server for real-time publishing.
IndieWebCamp participants who are or were using it on their own site:
- Evan Prodromou (2012): http://evan.status.net/ (2012(?)-2013 - being converted to pump.io)
- ...