User:Evgenykuznetsov.org

Evgeny Kuznetsov

Introduction
My name is Evgeny Kuznetsov and I have been running a personal blog jumping from one siloed blog platform to another since 2003. My day job is in no way connected to software development, I teach at a medical university.

I first heard of the IndieWeb in late 2014 or early 2015 when Ben Werdmuller presented Known on one of the TWiT.tv podcasts. Consequently, I've been running my personal blog on https://evgenykuznetsov.org ever since, first as a hosted Known site, then briefly as a self-hosted Known instance; in 2020 I moved it to Hugo.

I do some programming in my spare time as a hobby, but I'm far from qualified to do any serious website development. My contributions are mostly limited to occasional bugreports, translation and spreading the word. However, as I moved to Hugo, I wrote myself a little tool to facilitate sending webmentions and WebSub pushes.

My site
Being a muggle in regard to web programming, I've been attracted to Known's IndieWed-out-of-the-box concept from the beginning. Unfortunately, Known Pro has been dead in the water for a long time, and the hosted version hasn't seen updates for even longer, so in 2019 I have finally migrated to a self-hosted instance. It didn't help too much, and I found not being able to fix little glitches on my own (due to my PHP illiteracy) even more annoying now that I supposedly had things in my own hands.

Eventually, in 2020 I moved on to Hugo, and am happily continuing to live the IndieWeb life.

Itches and Goals
Having very little technical expertise myself, I sympathize for people who have none. Hosting my own instance of Known was made possible by the fact I've been a desktop Linux user for a long time and know my way around the system a little; for a lot of people around me this barrier would be almost impassable. To become a participant in IndieWeb is (at the time of writing this) orders of magnitude harder than to put up a Facebook profile. This is exactly what Known originally intended to fix, and what my contributions, humble as they are, are ultimately targeted at.