Yesterday early in the morning, with the help of Claude, I finally figured out what prevented me from logging into indieweb.org. It was something stupid really, one of those things that most people who register their own domains will probably understand.

IndieWeb uses IndieAuth for members to sign in. IndieAuth, to put it in simple words1, uses your website to sign in rather than the usual username/password combo that we see everywhere. IndieWeb is all about folks who build their own websites, so it makes sense to use your own indie website to sign in to their site.

Obviously the simple words above are too simple to explain how this actually works, but the core idea is that you add a specific HTML tag (it’s called a REL tag, or a rel HTML attribute) to your main page on your website and then IndieWeb knows it’s really you.

The problem I had was that I tried to sign in using my website’s URL, www.taonaw.com, instead of taonaw.com. I wanted to use the www, because that’s the actual website, right? World Wide Web and all of that?

Ehh. Not quite. Everything gets complicated when you look a bit deeper. The www part is what’s called a subdomain2, and it’s not really the website. The website is at the root domain; in my case, it’s taonaw.com. When you register your own domain, you essentially forward people from www.whatever.com to whatever.com. Your browser does it in a second, so you don’t even realize it, but for IndieAuth, there’s no website at www.whatever.com, because well, there isn’t.

What was interesting was the way Claude proved it to me. It suggested using curl, a command we’ve all seen thousands of times around the internet, to get this information. Or, specifically: curl -sI https://www.taonaw.com which will show a few things (the index of the URL), but particularly location: https://taonaw.com/, where it redirects to.

“Huh?” I asked myself, “Isn’t curl used when you want to download something?” Well, yes, sure. That, and as it turns out, many other things.

I got curious (I don’t have anything much better to do at four in the morning when I can’t sleep) and went to read about curl. Turns out it has quite a history, a website, and a lot of bait-click tutorials on YouTube. It’s one of those things I always knew about but never explored.

Footnotes

1 : My simple words here are too simple. There is a lot going on behind the scenes, and I don’t have a good grasp of it yet myself, actually. Learning in progress. IndieAuth is based on OAuth, which is the commercial brand that usually comes with OpenID, which is all the “sign in with Google/Apple/Facebook/Whatever” stuff you usually see.

2 : See the above, same here. There’s an A record and a CNAME record when you register a domain, and I remember I knew more about them at one point when I registered the domain. A record points to the actual IP, and a CNAME points to a subdomain (the www, but it can also be blog.website.com, or whatever you’d like).