HWC Baltimore 2018-02-06 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of February met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on February 6th.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup:

jonathanprozzi.net – Productive 2 weeks! Has a personal notes site running on Hugo on a subdomain after some adventures with git publishing hooks and a bug with themes that was causing it to render only as XML. Set up a separate site with Hugo and Reveal.JS and might be interested in that for IndieWeb-related learning activities going forward. Has been tracking everything he is writing, taking notes in his personal notes site as he goes so he can either clean them up for real posts, or just publish the notes. Worked tonight on more activity content on his personal notes site. Troubleshooting microformats on his main site WP theme. Also interested in GatsbyJS plus a WordPress backend... maybe? Also working with Gulp to make a build tool for P5.js sketches.

dariusmccoy.com – Tonight moved his domain from WordPress.com to Hover. Waiting on that to finish so he can set up new hosting and move his site in general off of WordPress.com onto a WordPress.org site which has more flexibility. Thinking about the direction of his site - resume / portfolio, or blogging, or posting his photography. Could blog personal projects, maybe sports blogging but worried about trolls.

derekfields.is – Set up his GitHub pages site to serve from his custom domain. Also put up a post about serving A-Frame virtual worlds from an ESP8266 microcontroller on Medium. Working on a PESOS copy of his post back to his site. Wants to work on a couple more posts for next time.

bouhmad.com – Working on bringing his site back up. Something went wrong on the virtual server running it and he is reinstalling and reconfiguring things. Has a blog post ready to go once the site is back up. (He got it back up before the end of HWC!)

martymcgui.re – Been working on IndieWeb-ifying some project websites, most recently ghostparty.today. It's a single HTML page hosted on Neocities that his improv partner created at IndieWebCamp Baltimore. It's an experiment in nesting microformats and permalinks, making use of links with anchors (example event, example RSVP). Also added mf2 markup to the site for his D&D livestreaming show (example, example reply) so he could reshare things on his site. Is excited about making a micropub server for the Neocities site as a goof, probably running on Glitch. Something like "IndieWeb like it's 1999".

Other things: 

• The Falcon Heavy test launch happened today and wow! We could not find a reference for the projected final orbit of the payload (a Tesla with a mannequin wearing a SpaceX space suit)
  • The livestream video was interesting. It offered multiple camera views, switchable with a "Switch Camera" button in the YouTube UI. The main view was the public facing talking-head discussion, telemetry displays, etc. The other was a static camera with audio direct from mission control.
• Transferring domains from WordPress.com is interesting. Apparently the registrar is listed as wildwestdomains.com?
  
• Managing DigitalOcean droplets is hard when you lose your SSH private keys.
• Glitch as a fun way to sketch in code. Neocities has an API.
• Really clever onboarding process on Glitch. Log in with your GitHub and it shows a welcome page with "Start New Project" and "Resume Coding" buttons. Even if you have never used Glitch before, clicking "Resume Coding" will take you to a new Hello World project. Nice!
• DigitalOcean recently(?) updated their pricing so that lower tiers are much better! You have to walk through a process to stop each droplet, resize it, and start it back up.
• The Brackets editor has a Confetti plugin and it is very eye-catching.
• .meme is a pending TLD??? Also talked .bot premiums on shorter domain names.
• GitHub Security Alerts now send out weekly emails. Maybe only for some accounts or types of vulnerability, but Marty has been receiving them about some old projects.
• JAMstack, the attractive bits about "reusable APIs" the dangers of those same APIs belonging to third-parties out of your control.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on February 20th, which is a Tuesday!