Adam Beckmeyer

Based on a true story

Adam Beckmeyer is a chemical engineer, a father, and a devout christian living in Vienna, West Virginia. My interests include programming, theology and generally learning new things. Hit me up any time at

I think I have most of the indieweb and microformats stuff I want working now. I'll start styling the site now.

Social mediate

As I've become increasingly aware of my own desire to keep information about myself (and even moreso my children) available only to those I have intentionally allowed access to that information and of the many intrusions considered normal by most modern internet companies, I've become uncomfortable to the point of paranoia with social media in its accepted form (mostly facebook if we're being honest). This has caused me to seriously examine both the utility and the cost of each service which I used.

The result of that examination is that I no longer have a facebook account. In the coming months I may soon no longer have a twitter account either.

It's not that I don't value the ability to easily connect with friends and family and also to know what's going on in their lives. In fact, those advantages are what kept me using facebook for so long. But I realized that I could not personally sell information about myself to facebook as the price of their service. That is not a deal I have any desire to make any longer.

I still would love to keep in touch with friends and family, so this website is an experiment with the ideas of indieweb. Basically all the content you see on this page is marked up in html in such a way that it could be consumed in a feed with content posted to other websites formatted in this way. If enough people did this it would form a kind of decentralized social network. So we'll see where that goes for me. Even though I own the data, I may still have too many privacy concerns to post very actively here.

Simultaneously I have been using Riot to keep in touch with my family and hope to have some friends begin using the service soon as well. It allows end-to-end encryption in communicating with others and so overcomes some of the privacy concerns I had with facebook.

So welcome to my website. Feel free to contact me on Riot where my id is and let me know how you're navigating the issues of privacy and data ownership.

You know, all of these thougts are really more deserving of a full-blown article. I'll write that real quick.

The hope is that this approach will allay some of my privacy fears and allow me to post more and interact more with my friends.

I've decide to move towards hosting all content I publish to the web here rather than in whichever silo it happens to land.