HWC Baltimore 2017-08-23 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second August 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 23rd.

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

jonathanprozzi.net (Jonathan) – Had been working on a wedding site with Hugo and making progress. Got really frustrated with adding image galleries, which required a lot of extra tools. Realized that he could accomplish the same thing in WordPress really quickly. So, spent quiet writing hour starting over in WordPress. At this point, just wants to have it done, rather than spending time learning something new along the way.

martymcgui.re (Marty) – Since last time has been thinking a lot more about delivering transcriptions with audio content. Did more experimenting with Audiogram, and found the BBC's fork, which supports subtitles and transcription editing, but also depends on a lot of private BBC infrastructure out of the box. Is now able to get timestamped transcripts by combining an audio file and long-form text transcription using a tool called gentle. Then by feeding that into a hacked-up copy of the BBC's Audiogram can generate video with hardcoded subtitles. Here's an example from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb. Pretty neat! Also experimenting with providing a text transcript of the audio newsletter along w/ the audio via a simple HTML details/summary elements with an iframe. Example here.

Other things:

• We talked about use cases where static sites are great (simple project sites) and not-so-great (lots of media files).
• We also chatted a lot about the future of the This Week in the IndieWeb audio edition, making the content more accessible, making it more engaging.
• We also talked about being aware of when it makes sense to use manual tools vs. trying to creating automation, such as the tradeoffs with using "manual" video editing tools vs. tools like Audiogram.
  

We hope that you'll join us for another HWC Baltimore, which will next meet on September 6th and again on September 20th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!