I Am: Remix Your Web Identity explores methods of designing and developing a personal website with RSS feeds that aggregate blog posts along with posts on social networks, such as Flickr, YouTube, Goodreads, Last.fm, and Delicious, in order to regain control and ownership (as well as authorship) of one’s identity in one consistent and customized location. The book provides a short overview of the evolution of digital identity and the transformation of personal websites from Geocities to blogs, and discusses the relevance of RSS as a technology that frees content from publishing source constraints. It also underlines the importance of open source in providing power and control over one’s image on the Web. Furthermore, it provides an extensive example of a full customization of WordPress through standard languages such as PHP, HTML5, and CSS3, which can be adapted to suit one’s own personal identity.I Am: Remix Your Web Identity highlights new ways of being a blogger. While the old personal website or blog is fragmented and distributed across a number of social networks, this often leads to limiting one’s identity to a “walled garden” experience. Open-source content management systems such as WordPress work as flexible platforms that can give back a certain degree of control and ownership over what one publishes and distributes across the Internet, aggregating content and updating the notion of “blogging.” There are many WordPress and CMS-related books, but, with I Am: Remix Your Web Identity, readers will become not just web designers or web developers, but “web authors.” They will learn how to use RSS, content management systems, PHP, HTML5, and CSS3 as powerful, flexible, and savvy tools to produce, remix, and manage their whole life in the Web 2.0 space.
Paolo Sordi is the Digital Communications and New Media Manager at LUISS University (www.luiss.edu). His main professional and research interests are web design, social media, information architecture, content marketing and management, search engine optimization, and semantic markup. He also focuses on new media writing, publishing, and self-representation paradigms brought about by Web 2.0 tools. He is an Adjunct Professor at Tor Vergata University of Rome, where he teaches Web Design and Development as part of the Master’s program in Information, Communication, and Publishing Sciences (www.editoriaecomunicazione.uniroma2.it). He is the author of a book on HTML5 and CSS3, titled Progettare per il Web [Designing for the Web], as well as several articles. His website is www.ipertesti.me.
