Here’s a brief interview with Tantek Çelik from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb Podcast.
🎧 Full Episode: https://martymcgui.re/2017/10/29/163907/
Here’s a brief interview with Tantek Çelik from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb Podcast.
🎧 Full Episode: https://martymcgui.re/2017/10/29/163907/
Thanks to guest Kim Le for keeping it 💯 in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!
https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2017-10-31/
It is amazing that we have made 100 episodes of this little podcast.
Thanks to all of our guests over the years for being their shining selves.
Thanks to Jonathan for starting this ball rolling and all the work he puts into booking guests, editing every week, and being an all-around great co-host.
Thanks to the Peak Sloth Podcast Network for making us feel at home.
And, of course, thank you all for listening. ❤️
Officer Aaron “Tweet” Twillson reporting for duty! Join us tonight at 8pm ET for the Season 3 finale of Lawful & Orderly: Special Visions Unit!
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for October 21st - 27th, 2017.
This week features a brief interview with Tantek Çelik recorded at IndieWebCamp NYC 2017.
You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.
Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
So our Sonos locked us out this morning until we let it update its firmware.
This is a dark UI pattern which strongly suggests they are holding the system hostage until I agree to let them remove features or add anti-features like sharing what we listen to or surveiling our home network.
Anybody know of an alternative, free/open source Sonos firmware?
Here’s a brief interview with Oliver Baptiste from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb Podcast.
🎧 Full Episode: https://martymcgui.re/2017/10/22/094640/
🎧 Listened to The Contrafabulists Episode 70: Where the Sidewalk Ends.
It’s October, the season for spooky ghosts and/or spooky ghosting in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!
Things are gettin’ wild for the detectives of @DnDSVU! Check out part 1 of our Season 3 Finale: Deep Poison.
A “photobooth” picture of me meeting a Matt at a birthday party for another Matt. 🙃
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for October 14th - 20th, 2017.
This week features a brief interview with Oliver Baptiste recorded at IndieWebCamp NYC 2017.
You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.
Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Great write-up of the wonderful work by the amazing folks at the Digital Harbor Foundation. So happy just to know them!
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/10/19/what-works-baltimore-tech-schools-215727
I love the Laundry series, and I love the way everything is leveling up. Gaaah!
Baltimore's second October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.
Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.
martymcgui.re — Recently posted about his IWC NYC hack day project - showing subtitle and caption tracks for audio files in the browser by marking them up as a video element. Showed off his new personal site, a note-taking and planning site with an audience of one. It lives on his laptop and on a protected Tor hidden service so it can be read from his phone. Also been working on porting his podcast website to Hugo, learning how fragile his micropub server is about mapping URLs to flat files on the server.
bouhmad.com — Started a new job recently, so been working to find time to work on his new site. Wrote an outline and a list of resources about what the site will be about and what content will be on it. Hoping to publish in the next two weeks!
maryreisenwitz.com — Our venue host for the evening! Been writing a lot of stuff and working to organize it. Outlining story points for a narrative piece, consists of lots of dream pieces, which she has been logging for a few years. Been organizing those in Google Keep, cataloging and tagging them by time. Found it really interesting to look over her dream notes for this time past year. Also finding searching incredibly useful. "When did I dream about a horse? There are two dreams!"
rhearamakrishnan.com — Has a set of projects she wants to finish before updating her website. One of them is a podcast that will require lots of collaborative elements, so been planning that.
angelosresu.me — Has been on the job search and realized he needed a website. It's currently a programming demo of a CAD app that uses Paper.js and supports boolean operations over primitives.
Other things:
Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! Look for the announcement soon!
Photo for tonight’s HWC Baltimore
Join us for an evening of quiet writing, IndieWeb demos, and discussions!
Any questions? Join the #indieweb chat!
Optional quiet writing hour starts at 6:30pm. Meetup begins at 7:30pm.
More information: https://indieweb.org/events/2017-10-18-homebrew-website-club
Facebook events: https://www.facebook.com/events/174931906396754/
“Boost your post.” “Publish a post.”
Facebook, you sound desperate and pushy.
This is a write-up of my Sunday hack day project from IndieWebCamp NYC 2017!
You can see my portion of the IWC NYC demos here.
Feel free to skip this intro if you are just here for the HTML how-to!
I've been doing a short ~10 minute podcast about the IndieWeb community since February, an audio edition of the This Week in the IndieWeb weekly newsletter cleverly titled This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition.
After the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, each episode of the podcast also featured a brief ~1 minute interview with one of the participants there. As a way of highlighting these interviews outside the podcast itself, I became interested in the idea of "audiograms" – videos that are primarily audio content for sharing on platforms like Twitter and Facebook. I wrote up my first steps into audiograms using WNYC's audiogram generator.
While these audiograms were able to show visually interesting dynamic elements like waveforms or graphic equalizer data, I thought it would be more interesting to include subtitles from the interviews in the videos. I learned that Facebook supports captions in a common format called SRT. However, Twitter's video offerings have no support for captions.
Thankfully, I discovered the BBC's open source fork of audiogram, which supports subtitles and captioning, including the ability to "bake in" subtitles by encoding the words directly into the video frames. It also relies heavily on BBC web infrastructure, and required quite a bit of hacking up to work with what I had available.
In the end, my process looked like this:
You can see an early example here. I liked these posts and found them easy to post to my site as well as Facebook, Twitter, Mastodon, etc. Over time I evolved them a bit to include more info about the interviewee. Here's a later example.
One thing that has stuck with me is the idea that Facebook could be displaying these subtitles, if only I was exporting them in the SRT format. Additionally, I had done some research into subtitles for HTML5 video with WebVTT and the <track> element and wondered if it could work for audio content with some "tricks".
Let's skip to the end and see what we're talking about. I wanted to make a version of my podcast where the entire ~10 minutes could be listened to along with timed subtitles, without creating a 10-minute long video. And I did!
Here is a sample from my example post of an audio track inside an HTML5 <video> element with a subtitle track. You will probably have to click the "CC" button to enable the captioning
How does it work? Well, browsers aren't actually too picky about the data types of the <source> elements inside. You can absolutely give them an audio source.
Add in a poster attribute to the <video> element, and you can give the appearance of a "real" video.
And finally, add in the <source> element with your subtitle track and you are good to go.
The relevant source for my example post looks something like this:
<video controls poster="poster.png" crossorigin="anonymous" style="width: 100%" src="audio.mp3"> <source class="u-audio" type="audio/mpeg" src="audio.mp3"> <track label="English" kind="subtitles" srclang="en" src="https://media.martymcgui.re/.../subtitles.vtt"> </video>
So, basically:
But is that the whole story? Sadly, no.
In some ways, This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition is perfectly suited for automated captioning. In order to keep it short, I spend a good amount of time summarizing the newsletter into a concise script, which I read almost verbatim. I typically end up including the transcript when I post the podcast, hidden inside a <details> element.
This script can be fed into gentle, along with the audio, to find all the alignments - but then I have a bunch of JSON data that is not particularly useful to the browser or even Facebook's player.
Thankfully, as I mentioned above, the BBC audiogram generator can output a Facebook-flavored SRT file, and that is pretty close.
After reading into the pretty expressive WebVTT spec, playing with an SRT to WebVTT converter tool, and finding an in-browser WebVTT validator, I found a pretty quick way of converting those in my favorite text editor which basically boils down to changing something like this:
00:00:02,24 --> 00:00:04,77 While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, 00:00:04,84 --> 00:00:07,07 I sat down with some of the participants to ask:
Into this:
WEBVTT 00:00:02.240 --> 00:00:04.770 While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, 00:00:04.840 --> 00:00:07.070 I sat down with some of the participants to ask:
Yep. When stripped down to the minimum, the only real differences in these formats is the time format. Decimals delimit subsecond time offsets (instead of commas), and three digits of precision instead of two. Ha!
If you've been following the podcast, you may have noticed that I have not started doing this for every episode.
The primary reason is that the BBC audiogram tool becomes verrrrry sluggish when working with a 10-minute long transcript. Editing the timings for my test post took the better part of an hour before I had an SRT file I was happy with. I think I could streamline the process by editing the existing text transcript into "caption-sized" chunks, and write a bit of code that will use the pre-chunked text file and the word-timings from gentle to directly create SRT and WebVTT files.
Additionally, I'd like to make these tools more widely available to other folks. My current workflow to get gentle's output into the BBC audiogram tool is an ugly hack, but I believe I could make it as "easy" as making sure that gentle is running in the background when you run the audiogram generator.
Beyond the technical aspects, I am excited about this as a way to add extra visual interest to, and potentially increase listener comprehension for, these short audio posts. There are folks doing lots of interesting things with audio, such as the folks at Gretta, who are doing "live transcripts" with a sort of dual navigation mode where you can click on a paragraph to jump the audio around and click on the audio timeline and the transcript highlights the right spot. Here's an example of what I mean.
I don't know what I'll end up doing with this next, but I'm interested in feedback! Let me know what you think!
Great insights into how people, technologies, and entrenched power structures have been shaping one another in the era of the social network. Lots of hard work ahead for folks that don’t want a depressing future.
“In practice, inspiring and satisfying pieces of content are dead ends for user actions. Thoughtful pieces of content that take twenty minutes to read get one vote in the time it takes for pretty pictures and amusing memes to get dozens.”
Thanks to our guest Nick Smith for his strong stance in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast.
I believe you.
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for October 7th - 13th, 2017.
This week features a brief interview with David Shanske recorded at IndieWebCamp NYC 2017.
You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.
Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Thanks to the members of the Baltimore Improv Group who sat down with us to talk fundraising strategies in the latest We Have to Ask Podcast!
https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2017-10-10/
Since recording, BIG has indeed crossed the line into a successful Kickstarter! But there is more to be done and a few days left! Help us if you can!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1652109225/help-build-the-big-theater-in-baltimore-md
Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for September 30th - October 6th, 2017.
This week features a brief interview with Emma Hodge recorded at IndieWebCamp NYC 2017.
You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.
Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11
Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!
Baltimore's first October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.
Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.
martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC last weekend! Had a really great time (that he really needs to write up). Figured out how to show closed captions / subtitles on audio content (and needs to write that up). Recently decided that Jekyll was slowing him down too much and decided to jump to Hugo. First steps there - use a sacrificial website to learn on that is much simpler, in this case the We Have to Ask Podcast. Also showed off Rob Weychert's website as one that impressed him from IWC NYC due to the really nice typography, spacing, layout.
djfalcon23.github.io — Added a new slideshow feature. Can now show a model slideshow of past projects. In true HWC fashion, he pushed this feature live during the demo. Will be adding similar modal displays for PDF documents and videos.
lizboren.art — Been changing her art portfolio site. It's hosted on ArtStation which has a pretty affordable "pro" level with good editing tools. She's been happy with it for now. Slightly more problematic is that her .art domain was registered on her behalf by her school and now she doesn't know how to get access to manage it. We tried to use the WHOIS info to track down who to contact at the controlling registrar.
jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on a site for work at Digital Harbor Foundation. They are relaunching blueprint.digitalharbor.org educator resource portal. They've been working on a clear structured landing page for people that are not registered for it, as well as cleaning up navigation for users who are registered. It's a WordPress site and they've been moving their content into "Sensei", a WordPress add-on for education content from WooCommerce.
Other things:
Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you on October 18th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!
Photo for tonight’s HWC Baltimore
Join us for an evening of quiet writing, IndieWeb demos, and discussions!
Any questions? Join the #indieweb chat!
Optional quiet writing hour starts at 6:30pm. Meetup begins at 7:30pm.
More information: https://indieweb.org/events/2017-10-04-homebrew-website-club
Facebook Event: https://www.facebook.com/events/1726627160978658/
Jonathan reflects on our 100th Episode Fiasco in his ongoing meta-series deconstructing the We Have to Ask Podcast.
We’re open for #IndieWebCamp NYC day 2! Here with @emmahodge @tantek @dshanske. Caffeine on the way! Pass the film crew outside and join us!
