The famed Hampden Christmas Calliope

Always enjoy @violetblue spilling the cybersecuritea. Click for the Baltimore ransomware drama. Stay for the thrice-dunked Facebook. Then, learn how moralizing capitalists make bank creeping on and silencing sex workers.

https://www.patreon.com/posts/cybersecurity-4-27371489

A new year is coming! What stuff do you want to finish for your website before then? What goals do you have for your personal site in the new year?

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of November met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 27th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Spent quiet writing hour writing a post about his 2018 and 2019 commitments! He wants to finish some personal writing tasks, capture some of the things he's been working on recently, and do some development.

rhearamakrishnan.com — Edited a poem during our writing time. Nice! Been reflecting on HWC and how it allowed her to use the web and her website to focus and promote her work and writing. Has a lot of new material to edit together before publishing. Just went to an intensive writing workshop in New York and generated a lot of new writing to work through.

Rosco — Working on a browser-based game for students at DHF to learn programming concepts. Thinking about starting with physical versions of the game first, maybe translating to the web later.

ashturner.net — Also working the programming tutorials and experiences for teaching computing concepts. Arrays and for-loops are particularly tricky for beginners. Ash discussed some inspirational single-purpose websites for teaching concepts, like The Bézier Game, and KERNTYPE. Has a personal website built on Adobe Portfolio, but interested in moving off of that because she doesn't want to pay for Creative Cloud anymore.

martymcgui.re — Doing lots of unseen plumbing work on his site, nearly read to flip over from a Jekyll-powered site to a Hugo-powered site. It's likely that no one will notice the difference! Also been playing a lot with iOS Shortcuts (formerly Workflow) and built a Workflow to take an iOS Live Photo, turn it into an animated GIF, turn that into a looping video, and post the video to his site. Here's an example post. Being able to do this helps him feel less anxious about having Live Photos on his phone and feeling like they're inaccessible.

derekfields.is — Been going to conferences and talking to companies about jobs. Also working on his LED backpack for cyclists startup. Accelerometer detects braking, turning. Been playing with WebUSB a bit, like with gamepad controllers.

Other discussion:

• Commitments to complete before 2019
• GitHub Pages for hosting. Rhea built her site there, using some tutorials from Codecademy. Likes the simplicity of HTML and CSS, loads fast.
• GitHub credentials, SSH keys as "a password that gives your laptop the power to act as you".
• The dreadful state of JavaScript development tools, NPM dependencies, etc.
• How to advertise HWCs better (we missed posting it on FB etc last time). Particularly since we have a "weird" schedule, sometimes on Tuesdays, sometimes on Wednesdays, we should be consistent about advertising them. We should probably document our processes on the wiki.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, December 11th at 7:30pm!

Put those Thanksgiving calories to good use and give yourself the gift of control over everything you post online by working on your own website!

What will you finish before 2019? Will you help the IndieWeb community post something every day in December?

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of November met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 13th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Ran into an issue with his homepage. Some nginx rule was falling back to a default site. Got it fixed, though. Been doing lots of web dev for work, but none for his personal site.

martymcgui.re — Been traveling a lot! Went to IWC Berlin and Accessibility Club and had a great time! Grateful to catch up with and meet new people in the IndieWeb community. Worked on month/year archive navigation for the new Hugo version of his site, which is very close to being feature-complete compared to his Jekyll site.

Other discussion:

• IWC Berlin! Marty went and there were many good sessions.
• Changes in organizing HWCs (wiki stuff) and related events (travel sponsorships for IWCs, peripheral events that could bring people into the IndieWeb community).
• Replacing Flickr. Flickr dumping free content beyond the latest 1000 images. DHF relies heavily on Flickr albums, including using them for the homepage of their site. Will probably get a Flickr Pro account now, request an export to make sure their photos are safe.
• Web accessibility! So many fresh new JavaScript-based things refuse to use semantic markup, or otherwise break navigation or readability, making them unusable. Accessibility Club had a lot of good lessons. Hopefully the videos of the talks will go up soon!
• WordPress accessibility issues around the new Gutenberg editor, the problems with Automattic pushing it through without listening to community. Yikes.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, November 27th at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of October met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 16th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Worked today on a post recapping our last HWC meeting, focusing on ideas to get more people involved. For work at DHF, still learning lots of NextJS and ExpressJS. Getting back into writing content!

derekfields.is — Been a while! Last week in Minnesota for some networking. Met some cool people and talked to some companies, including Socrata, which was part of Open Baltimore. Also got back into bullet journaling after being away for a while. Working on legal and client-finding stuff for his freelance work.

pulianas.com — Also been awhile since he's been to an HWC! Moved all his sites to HTTPS. His podcast (overanalyzed.fm) is now on iTunes, so he added that link to the site. Also tried to track down an official Overcast button but hasn't found it yet. Recently in San Jose for API World. Very little talk about building APIs and more about pitching specific products/services. Did learn a bit about microservices and case-studies of moving to them. Did some general maintenance on his WP site, and has been working on his own plugin for podcasting on WP.

martymcgui.re — Been heavily porting his site from Jekyll to Hugo. Has had some fun porting things that he did as Ruby plugins for Jekyll into crazy Go template logic, like generating permashortlinks in NewBase60. Also had some fun setting up a new CSS Grid display for photos in posts with lots of them (example which apparently only works in Firefox). Also, after some struggling with his image proxy setup (because Hugo templating doesn't support HMAC signatures) is trying out Cloudinary's free tier for his image-resizing needs.

Other discussion:

• Podcasting on WordPress is... a pain. Apple Podcasts refused to accept their feed due to http vs https issues and that was hard to track down.
• Ferrite for audio editing on the iPad. Alec edits his podcasts there now. Some hiccups with the noise-cancelling and auto-levelling features being too-aggressive.
• Recording setups. Blue's new Yeti Nano looks cool.
• FF and Chrome starting to support the new dialog element. Maybe cool, maybe terrible?
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, November 13th at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of October met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 3rd.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — No updates since last time for his personal site. Was burned out after a lot of frustration with Gatsby + WordPress headless. Got to the point of feeling helpless and like he couldn't figure out how to progress. Started porting to Next.js and has some renewed energy because he is making progress and enjoying it.

martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC! Didn't do anything new for his site, but did manage to write a post full of project ideas that he came away with. Really interested in using free services like Glitch (for server-side processing), Neocities (static file hosting), and Cloudinary (make thumbnail images from those giant originals) to make IndieWeb building blocks that people without coding experience could combine to make their own sites. Currently thinking of building a Micropub Media Endpoint that handles dynamic image resizing to see how this approach works.

Other discussion:

• Ideas from the IndieWebCamp NYC Organizer's meeting about "messaging" for Homebrew Website Clubs. The name is often confusing or off-putting for newcomers, and oddly self-selecting for those that "get it". Thinking about rebranding to "Indie Web Meetup" – evokes "independent web" and a meetup is more inviting than a "club" which might have membership requirements.
• Talked a lot about how many folks who come to HWC are WordPress users and how we might do better by them if we made it more clear that we are here to help them power up their WordPress sites.
• Or even go a step further and simply offer to get people started with or improve their existing personal site. If we can get people to the meetups, no matter the skill level, we can get them started: sign-up for micro.blog to get going right away, put a simple static HTML page up on glitch or GitHub, dive into WordPress, etc.
• First steps may be to think of it more like an open hours help desk. The "price" of getting help can be to write up all the steps followed, as a way of documenting steps for future folks who might need it. The goal would be to have folks come and actually leave with something accomplished.
• Also talked about difficulties with estimating the limitations of tools before you invest a bunch of time in learning to use it and understand it deeply. Jonathan's experience with Gatsby was a prime example – ultimately he needed it to do something it didn't support well, but it took a lot of frustration to find out that the issue was with the tool being a bad fit for the problem.
  

This ended up being a very organizer-y meta meeting. It was nice to be able to check in with ourselves about this meetup and its future. We are excited to continue to evolve! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, October 16th at 7:30pm!