HWC Baltimore 2017-10-18 Wrap-Up

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:

• We talked about aligning audio/video content and content in a web page, like this course on O'Reilly. Would be useful for DHF's learning system courses. Could also be fun to have This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition show previews of the pages being discussed as they are being discussed.
• We discussed capturing notes with the lowest friction tools then moving them into more useful/durable systems later.
• We talked about podcasting tools. Dedicated recorders for in-the-field recording, Audacity for editing.
• We talked about the recent announcement from Adafruit's founder/owner/engineer ladyada finding herself locked out of her Facebook account with no apparently recourse. This led to general discussion of silos and monopolies, systems that are secretly bad for you because they stalk you or share you or your contacts' data, systems that are directly bad for you like Candy Crush and other addictive apps.
• Talked about some decentralized systems, like MaidSafe (decentralized p2p filestore, incentivized w/ a cryptocurrency), and Beaker's new decentralized Twitter-alike Rotonde (decentralized p2p websites, host it yourself or pay someone to mirror).

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!