I’ve decided I don’t iterate on the pieces on my site enough, so decided it was okay to try something really different with one block. It’ll get out of control soon but I hope to learn more that way. :}

An unexpected quiet afternoon means time to work on the ol’ website.

New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of April met at The Bean at Cooper Union on April 17th, with me playing host.

We didn't really have a "broadcast" portion of the meetup, but we discussed some things and worked on personal projects!

mfgriffin.com (new!) — Has been to IndieWeb events in the past, but is looking to get re-started. Went over his past notes about some of his hopes and plans for his site, and how he wants to use it for personal notes, writing, drawing, and blogging projects, and more. Got started on a stripped-down system of using Hugo to track plaintext notes, with tags, so he can worry about how to organize it more later.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Interested in being "done" with his notification system updates. In general, wants to be able to iterate faster on his site updates, and finds that a lot of his time is absorbed in HTML/CSS design processes. Started working on some text-only designs, which get a minimal amount of styling by being converted from Markdown to HTML. By using text and emojis, he was able to prototype a couple of quick things during the meetup.

martymcgui.re — Recently decided that he disagrees with how Granary processes his site's feed (which is HTML+Microformats2) into JSON Feed and Atom. The result is that his feeds often have missing info and show up as weirdly empty posts on micro.blog or in Atom feed readers. At the meetup, finished writing and adapter that will take his main feed and spit out a JSON Feed. Managed to break his site's build process trying to integrate it, but will get it working soon enough.

Other discussion:

• A couple Dmitri's cool game projects
• The recent release of the original source for Zork and other Infocom games, as they would have been worked on originally, for a compiler that no longer exists. Really neat to see how that info is organized.
• We want to start later! Folks often need until 6 or 6:30pm to arrive.
• We're also open to venue options!
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, May 1st from 6:30pm - 8:30pm!

Photo for tonight’s HWC NYC!

I’m also going to this Caveat show tonight: Flying University: Is AI Racist?

Looking forward to it because Anil Dash will be speaking! Also because AI can totally be racist. And I love Caveat shows.

I’d love to talk Glitch and IndieWeb with Anil but I will probably just play the part of polite audience member. 😅

Looking forward to another Homebrew Website Club tomorrow! I plan to fix my feeds as they appear for Atom and micro.blog.

Semi-bonus: the following day is an Internet Explorers comedy show about MEMES at Caveat. I plan to go to that as well!

Beetlejuice the Musical seems like a good anniversary celebration show

Thanks to Jonathan for playing with all of you so I could chase my aerial ursine dreams in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!

https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2019-04-10/

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at The Bean at Cooper Union on April 3rd, with me playing host.

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

zazzyzeph.biz (new!) — Learning about Progressive Web Apps and their features, like web app manifests. Started out wanting to learn ES6 and decided to roll back to some basics. Doesn't have a specific project in mind, yet, so doing lots of reading.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Continuing work on "v2" of his website, specifically notifications API. "v2" is more package-based than repository-based, as a single repo can hold multiple packages, and it's very helpful to reason about the projects individually. Demonstrated showing unread notifications from Gerrit and GitHub, new presentation to show

martymcgui.re — Re-organized his homepage to be much simpler, moving incrementally towards having easier ways for people to discover the newer parts of his site, like where he displays photos, listens, and more interesting ways than his main "river of posts" timeline view. Also added book cover photos to his reading posts (example) using the Open Library Covers API with lookup by ISBN.

Other discussion:

• Building your own organizational and self-management tools. Balancing time spent on that tooling versus actually getting things done.
• Updating, migrating, and archiving old behaviors and versions in APIs. "Gradual code repair". Making "v2" versions of pieces of an API while allowing "v1" apps to work, hybrid apps to work. Semantic versioning when "v2" could change wildly - is it "really v2-pre-0.0.1", for example? A name like that should warn away folks starting new projects that expect a stable API.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, April 17th at 6:30pm!

Photo for tonight’s HWC!

Thanks to Jonathan for this understated, yet scathing, take on everyone’s favorite critter that hates Mondays to hate in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast.

https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2019-04-02/

Loving the Adafruit PyPortal as an IndieWeb-powered photo device.

Code to come!