Engine attribution

This site is (right now) powered by the WordPress open source blogging engine. If you hit “view source” in your browser, somewhere near the top, this is what you’ll see:

<meta name="generator" content="WordPress x.x.x" />

(Where x.x.x is the current version.)

I’m in the process of moving away from WordPress. More about that another time. But as part of this, I’ve been wanting to check out the sites of folks who participate in the IndieWeb community and figure out what they’ve been using. The IndieWeb community believes in owning your own content and pushing out to silos, and many of its participants create their own publishing platforms and release them as open source. (Again, more on this from me another time.)

So here’s a proposal. Let’s use that “generator” metatag to link to our home-spun platforms, and include a link to the repositories for those platforms, or at least pages that ultimately link to those repositories. For example:

<meta name="generator" content="My platform http://github.com/myplatform/core" />

That way, while there’s no need to place a visible link where it might not be relevant, people who are interested can always find a way to your software, where they can make use of it, learn from it, or even help extend it.