HWC Baltimore 2017-06-28 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's June 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on June 28th.

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

jonathanprozzi.net - Been very busy with work. Wrote a couple of posts since the last meeting. Tonight started a reflective post about his decision to use Hugo for his site vs Wordpress, which he already uses a lot for work. Feels like he has learned a little bit of Go (which Hugo is written in), but mostly has just learned Hugo and felt that's held him back. Interested in the Wordpress API and maybe move his site over because he wants to post more and still learn.

eddiehinkle.com - Been working on his site rewrite in Angular Universal. Today worked on micropub media endpoint. Is saving files successfully, now needs to add file extensions and return the Location URL. Also been working on Indigenous, his iOS micropub client. Been switching back and forth between the two as he makes progress or gets stuck on one or the other. Other stuff since last time: adding OwnYourSwarm, OwnYourGram. Having a micropub client on his phone has enabled him to send lots and lots of likes - enough that he decided to move likes out of his main social stream page and treat them as a reply.

djfalcon23 (domains currently expired) - been learning web development on and off for the last year. Now building a portfolio site using Bootstrap and trying out React, but it is a lot. Also trying to (re-)learn Android development.

martymcgui.re - Went to IndieWeb Summit and it was amazing! Added checkins to his site w/ OwnYourSwarm while there because of jealousy of seeing other folks checking in with Swarm. Really attracted to the gamification, but wants to make a checkin client so he doesn't have to give them his data. Also been cleaning up microformats on his site so that reply contexts on other site and in readers like Woodwind look better.

Chatted a bit about:

• "Double-dipping" - choosing side projects that involve technology you already need to use (or learn) for work
• Angular Universal, basically a server-side render of Angular which includes a static rendering of markup as well as all the scripts and data to "hydrate" the page
• Saving posts on Facebook and trying to PESOS to a bookmark post, but the Facebook API seems to have those locked down.
  
• Learning React is pretty overwhelming, lots of tooling and stuff up front that doesn't feel connected to a project.
• Guided learning w/ online systems with guided courses like Pluralsight have been really helpful for Jonathan.
• Gamification of Foursquare - coins for photos and random things, comparison with friends, weekly generated summaries with titles like "Weekend Getaways"
• Talked about how some aspects of the "design language" of web sites have converged and solidified several years ago. djfalcon23 likes looking at the designs on the welovewebdesign Instagram page. Wants to see more like that in the world.
• Talked about IndieWeb Summit and the videos available, particularly the Wordpress sessions.
• Spent a lot of time on the Personal Web Sites examples.
  • Awesome suggestion by djfalcon23 to bring an inspirational website to the next meetings.

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore, which will meet on July 12th and then again July 26th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!