New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of February met at The Bean at Cooper Union on February 20th, organized by Tiara Miller and myself.

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

rootedfromnature.com — Finished a Python lab assignment! Felt like she was overthinking it. Also doesn't like that the particular problems are more math problem than coding problem. Plans to sign up for actual coding classes to get more practical coding experience.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Wants to visualize notifications from GitHub and Gerrit. He collects the data (sometimes by processing emails!) on his own site and wants to expose it. Spent some time thinking / brainstorming about how to design those things. Asked some fellow Go programmers about known ways to handle emails w/ Go. Wants it to work "forever" (the next decade) so is being careful about the design.

martymcgui.re — Played with layouts for his new /listens page. Looked at Pinterest and Dribbble and other design sites for "timeline" layouts and was pretty unhappy with what he found. Lots of "draw a line with labels and draw lines extending off to things." So, took some time to start extracting "listen" bits like podcast art, episode title, audio links, into simpler blocks to start playing with layouts.

Other discussions:

• Things that Go is really good at. Like being an http2 server!
• This new location! It... seems fine? It was crowded when we came in but we eventually got a table. No outlets handy as far as we could find. We'll keep looking for new venues!
• IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend!
• IndieWebCamp Online is also only a couple of weekends away!
  
• IndieWebCamp New Haven is at the end of March and planning is getting scrambly! There are wiki pages to create but there's a lot of missing information and content yet! Tiara has been co-organizing w/ wiki stuff. Marty volunteered to help, too. Being remote, we need Greg to fill in with his local knowledge about the area and venue though!
  
• What about IWC NYC! Yeah we'll do one too. Later in the year, though.
  

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

Inspired by Jonathan LaCour's January post about tracking his podcast listening habits, I recently decided to bring in my own listening history into my website.

Like Jonathan, I use Overcast to listen to podcasts on my phone, and I was surprised and delighted to learn that Overcast has an "All data" export option on the accounts page that includes per-episode details such as whether you listened to an ep, and when you last interacted with it!

I took a look at Jonathan's script to automatically log in and import his Overcast data and figured I could make something a little more minimal that would work with my Hugo site.

My process follows three steps: download the overcast.opml full export file, run a script to generate the Hugo posts, and run a script to grab extra podcast metadata like cover art.

You can find my scripts in this gist if you're interested in learning more, but they may not be that useful for anyone without my exact Hugo config.

You may notice in the scripts that I have a "block list" of podcast URLs I can add. That's because I wanted my listen posts to helpfully link to and embed audio whenever possible. However, some of the feeds I subscribe to contain private or for-pay content - particularly a couple of podcasts I support on Patreon. I do want to track my listening habits for these podcasts, so I will likely start handling them differently by leaving out the embedded audio and linking directly to Patreon pages where possible.

Running the script, I was able to happily show everything I listened to as just another type of post on my site. However, it turns out I had (and keep making) a lot of listen posts. Visually they were drowning out all my other activity on my site.

So I have sequestered them on a new Listens page where you can only follow my podcast consumption history, keeping it out of my main feeds.

Similarly, I have been interested in having a nice Instagram-like page that shows off my photos in a grid. So I made a Photos page to show off those posts.

Both of these pages have microformats2 feed information embedded, so if you have an Indie reader, you might be interested in following just those pages!

Time may be an illusion but relationships get real in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!

https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2019-02-19/

A miniature schnauzer

Thanks to Jonathan for putting our seasonal feelings into words in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!

https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2019-02-12/

Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show Agility Finals 🐕🏅

Trying out a new location for HWC NYC! Come work on your personal website and post silly things on the web together!

My first IndieWebCamp Online. The first one in ~5 years, in fact! Let’s build fun personal things for the web, together!

Duckpin!!

Ski-ball

Learning about Okta and other Os

Woah! The new custom themes for micro.blog look super powerful!

https://youtu.be/MLUWnrMKVdg

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of 2019 met at Aroma Espresso Bar on February 6th.

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

rootedfromnature.com — Was working on a Grav skeleton... thinking of throwing it out. Had a client site that received some praise, though! Spent some time this evening looking at flights to Germany

aaronparecki.com — Was working on fixing Quill's URL resolution for IndieAuth login (e.g. so you can login with a shortdomain like aaronpk.com and have it resolve to https://aaronparecki.com/). Got distracted by Marty showing an iOS Shortcut that works like Teacup to post ate/drank posts via Micropub. Made an iOS shortcut to allow him to upload videos to his site.

martymcgui.re — Spent quiet hour porting some old notes out of Evernote-like browser-based app Laverna into his personal notes site. Just housekeepin'. Current personal site project is probably getting event hosting up for his upcoming improv and livestreaming shows.

david.shanske.com — Wrote a post saying something is ready to test. Current project for his site: everything. Took a break for a few days and doesn't know what is next.

Other discussions:

• Aaron's cool tiny gimbal / timelapse camera
  
• Looking at flights to Germany for IWCs
• Bus vs subway/rail/driving between Manhattan and Queens
• What do you mean this coffee shop's hours have changed to close at 7pm?
• There's a Starbucks like two blocks away, I guess.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, February 20th at 6:30pm!

Photo for tonight’s HWC NYC

Thanks to Jonathan for his ruthless dedication to finding out the truth in this week’s We Have to Ask Podcast!

https://wehavetoask.com/episodes/2019-02-05/

Busy day! I’m only about 25 minutes away from the conference so I’d be happy to meet up for a food or drink! Also understand if you need to recharge, haha.

Have a fun conference. Looking forward to HWC tomorrow and your OAuth workshop Thursday! Got plans for this evening?

Had a super fun UCB 101 Showcase yesterday at UCB East!

Thanks so much to all my friends and family who came to see it!

Thanks so so much to all my wonderful and kind and funny classmates!

Thanks so so so much to our great instructor Chelsea Clarke!