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With IndieWebCamp West just about to start I figured this would be a good time to write up some of my thoughts on one of the missing pieces of the IndieWeb ecosystem: Micropub Queries.
The quick version is that Micropub is an open standard to allow publishing to your own website from a variety of apps or clients. It's great. I love it. But it's mostly a one way experience, publishing only.
The spec does define ways to query and update specific posts, but they are generally not implemented by very many clients - perhaps because they are more complex to design and develop or perhaps because it's not the most useful thing.
Recently we've also seen a couple of large projects add Micropub support in iA Writer and Thread Reader. Which is awesome, but I think if queries become more mainstream there is the potential for much better apps and a more convincing reason for Micropub to be integrated into more existing apps.
Proposals for Micropub Queries have been around for a while without a huge amount of movement. Maybe it's a chicken and egg type scenario, if no clients add support, then why add support to your site?
I've made a couple of things that use queries myself. My chatbot can query posts (although it's not very useful) and Together has a useful view of your published posts as well, and Indigenous for Android also can show a basic list of your published posts.
But for me all those examples are fairly basic, and there is a lot of potential for more powerful and compelling experiences.
There are so many possibilities for super useful experiences for Micropub Queries that I'm just going to list off a bunch of things I can think of:
There are so many more that I've thought of and forgotten or that I've not though of yet.
Although there are plenty of nice, usable apps on the Indieweb I still think we are missing a next level experience to really highlight the power and potential of Indieweb technologies, maybe Micropub Queries could help bring that about...