I'm going!

Looking forward to another Homebrew Website Club Baltimore, tomorrow!

It’s an IndieWeb! Come learn some ways to free your content and your social sharing from the social networking silos!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of September met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 18th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Has been travelling and getting married and had lots of time to think about things! Not to work on them, though. Catching back up on things like Gatsby pages for Digital Harbor Foundation. Feeling some maintenance pains now with Gatsby's GraphQL queries pulling HUGE amounts of data from a WordPress backend – about a 5 minute process for each site build. Upgrading to Gatsby 2 would also require a bunch of changes that he isn't wanting to do. Also, something in the Gatsby build process just broke, without him making any code changes. Wishing now he had built the site in Next.js, which uses REST over GraphQL. For his personal site, he is thinking about how much effort he wants to put into things. He typically uses his personal site as a way to learn new technology, but is now wary of force-fitting things that aren't a good fit. Maybe tweaking his current WordPress site would be a better use of time than rewriting the site. Particularly since he hasn't posted since July.

rhearamakrishnan.com — Not much new on her personal site, since it's working well for her purposes. Posted some new stuff she made over the summer, including a micro chap-book called It Makes More Noise Than I Thought It Would. Been working on other summer projects, like writing poems on postcards for people. Photographing and typing those up to make a mini-collection. Wants to build something on Twine, if she can include a form so people can write letters back to her. She's gonna write out the adventure as she wants it and then think about what kind of interactivity she'd like from readers. Thinking about designing a mini-course for DHF around Twine for students to build stories around it.

martymcgui.re — Hasn't really made much progress on any personal or IndieWeb projects since the last HWC meeting. Had a couple of out of town trips and projects that were good and fulfilling experiences, like going to Camp Improv Utopia East. Those experiences highlighted that maybe he is feeling burned out about some IndieWeb things! For example, he has been letting the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition slip more and more each week and finding it hard to focus. He's trying to figure out what to do for the upcoming IndieWebCamp NYC, which he is excited about, but feeling a bit overwhelmed by project ideas, things he should be doing to help organize, etc.

Other discussion:

• https://twinery.org/ is great for creating interactive stuff - and it seems like the output is plain HTML? So it should be possible to add a form from some service like Formspree or Firebase to an exported project, if the tool doesn't offer exactly that kind of thing.
• Dealing with burnout and feeling stuck on things. Sometimes it helps to get energized by doing something else. Sometimes doing those other things really highlights that you have energy, just not for those things you're burned out on!
• Principle of Least Power is another big thing, here. Jonathan and Marty have both been struggling with projects where the tooling or the plumbing may be taking all the energy available.
• Semantic HTML and CSS can do so much, now. We looked at this CSS-only TODO MVC proof of concept. Talked about HTML definition lists, summary/details tags, figure/figcaption, and more.
• Talked about the pyramid of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and the inverted pyramid of overbuilt JS-dependent frameworks.
  

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you again at our next meetup on Wednesday, October 3rd at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of August met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 22nd!

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

shawngrimes.me — Shawn has been working on teamruby.dog. Specifically, collecting content. It's a new WordPress site. Thought about Squarespace because of ease of maintenance but can't justify the pricing. Also trying to find a way to post some 360 panorama photos from a recent road trip through 19 states.

martymcgui.re — Finally started the grueling work of translating his site's data from Jekyll into Hugo. It involved writing lots of little scripts to do things like maintain redirects for old date-based URL slugs, RSS for podcast feeds, and other plumbing. Next up is to port his existing templates over, which should be a big process. Also started a tribute site to his cat Nitro at nitro.rocks. Hoping to make it an IndieWeb-project by getting folks to contribute fun cat memories by posting to their own site and syndicating to nitro.rocks.

Other discussion:

• Ways to showcase 360 photos. Ricoh apps can (could?) post interactive panoramas to Facebook/Twitter. Marty posted some interactive panoramas on his site back in 2016 (example), but isn't super happy with the experience.
  
• RSS (and Indie) readers
• Webmentions and notifications
• Badging (and politics)
  

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday September 5th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of July met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on July 25th!

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

derekfields.is — Derek wanted a couple new rules for sharing time, today. First, find and share a site with some cool tech that you like. Second, talk about why you're into web development. He showed off a demo of using the browser Gamepad API w/ a Playstation dual-shock 3 controller. It showed button state changes, including analog states for buttons and joysticks. Been thinking about lots of ideas lately but missing some focus. Looking at productivity hacks to focus more. Notices when he's not focusing, now trying prompts to figure out why he's distracted and get back on task. Derek is into web development because it changes rapidly and requires focus to keep learning. Been working on his VueJS class and it's been going well until today. His accountability buddy is on a trip.

jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on work stuff. Built a single-page app w/ Gatsby for deploys of some Digital Harbor Foundation content for use in remote schools with intermittent internet connections. Pulls course data from the central DHF WordPress and deploys it as a package on Netlify. Ran into his first deploy issues with Netlify due to case-sensitive filesystems (which he doesn't experience on his Mac dev machine). Been really inspired by the Susty WordPress theme which can deliver WordPress pages in ~6KB, compared with most themes, which are very bloated. Jonathan is into the web because of the problem-solving aspects of it, but also because it allows creative expression and productivity.

zach.oglesby.co — New! Welcome, Zach! Recently switched his Known-powered site to Jonathan LaCour's overview page (w/ location info and other nice things), but it doesn't have a representative h-card, yet, so working on that. Also working on making his read posts more compatible with IndieBookClub. In terms of "Cool Tech", just had occasion to use Bootstrap for the first time, which was interesting. Zach is into web development because there are so many ways to do things on the web, you can play and tinker with different things you might not have otherwise.

pulianas.com — New! Welcome, Alec! Has had this website for a while, originally as a portfolio, now as a WordPress site that powers his Micro.blog. Been working on a new site for a podcast, Overanalyzed, also WordPress. In terms of "Cool Tech" - likes Eddie Hinkle's website. Also, webrings "seem pretty cool". Isn't a web developer professionally, but likes how it makes publishing easy. Really also likes the concept of owning your own content, bringing his stuff in from Twitter. Sees his online identities as layers: website is most personal, Twitter next, and Facebook is sanitized.

martymcgui.re — Been working on the Baltimore Improv Festival website, a static site generator called Ruhoh that doesn't really "exist" as a project anymore, though the code and gems are still out there. Needs to spend time on the webrings site. In terms of "Cool Tech", likes this recent "Even More CSS Secrets" talk from Lea Verou. Marty is into web development because it is an amazing way to share content that anyone can access from anywhere in the world! "Can it be done on the web?" is an interesting, if sometimes difficult, lens to see the world through.

Other discussion:

• Code-of-Conduct issues with the recent Hackers On Planet Earth conference that Marty attended last weekend.
• Deploying things on Netlify! Marty tried his first Netlify site during quiet writing hour, as a potential host for the Baltimore Improv Festival website, which is currently on an old shared host.
• Tools for writing VueJS (and using Visual Studio Code for it). Like Vue Snippets for VS Code, linting tools, and Sarah Drasner's CSS tricks articles about VueJS.
• brutalist-web.design and the principle of least power when building things.
• Talked about how mobile designs can be better than "full" desktop site designs. E.g. Twitter vs. mobile Twitter. But also Facebook vs. mobile Facebook vs. "basic" mobile Facebook, the last of which has no Javascript!
• Getting around town. E.g. the new Bird scooters that are here in Baltimore.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday August 8th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

I'm going!

Looking forward to another great Homebrew Website Club Baltimore!

Join us at the Digital Harbor Foundation this Wednesday and take control of your identity and data on the web!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of July met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on July 11th!

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Been building static HTML/CSS layouts for fun! Some examples. Also started practicing turning those designs into layouts in Figma. Had a usability testing call w/ the folks from Gatsby that turned into a great discussion about how to better build community starters.

dariusmccoy.com — Was having some issues w/ his site, which is hosted on AWS. He is thinking about wiping his instance and starting a new one, since he has lost track of some of his passwords. In a tricky spot because AWS doesn't offer any tech support for free tier users. Talked about switching to Digital Ocean or something simpler but will have to balance his budgets to justify the costs.

derekfields.is — Been taking a Udemy course on VueJS. Before that has been working on a schedule for developing his website. Has a friend doing the same and they mutually keep each other on track to spend a certain amount of time on developing their skills and sites. It's kind of working!

martymcgui.re — Brought a bunch of stickers and other fun things home from IndieWeb Summit! Had a great time seeing folks he met last year and meeting new folks. Lots of great discussion sessions, hacking projects, wild ideas, and more. He really needs to write it up on his site! His hack day project also desperately needs to be written up – it's an IndieWeb-style web ring, available at 🕸💍.ws ! This week he added support for indielogin.com, which lets people sign in using their own websites by setting up only a couple of links.

Other discussion:

• IndieWeb Summit! Marty went and loved it. Next year would love to bring more folks from HWC Baltimore, and travel assistance is available. We'll work on it.
• Marty met Jared Ewy of name.com at the Summit and talked about all the cool work DHF does teaching youth to build websites, the upcoming Web Shop, hosting HWC and IWC Baltimore, etc. Jared gave him a bunch of codes for free domains and some hosting discounts to benefit that work, so we discussed lots of ideas!
  
• Some possibilities: give Web Shop youth employees incentive to work on their own projects, outside of paid jobs, to learn more about building their own sites. Host a special Homebrew Website Club that's a 2-hour jam for new folks who don't have a domain yet to get set up with a website. Host a longer "Build Your Website Day" (maybe in coordination with a multi-city Drag Queen Build-a-Website Day?)
• What would an IndieWeb "starter pack" look like for a quick "you have a domain but no money" way to get started? GitHub looks good for skill building for folks that want to get into web development someday because it's mostly managed by hand. Netlify looks pretty good for this because they offer hosting, flexible static site generation, SSL for HTTPS, and the NetlifyCMS. They also support some features like building your own webhooks on JavaScript, which could eventually be used to handle common IndieWeb building block endpoints (IndieAuth, Micropub, Webmention, ...) Because they run all the stuff for a given site from a git repository, it's possible to take a site from Netlify and set it up elsewhere if their offerings change.
• "Packages" for a getting started workshop. E.g. "what will you get at the end + what will you need to learn along the way." Static HTML/CSS on GitHub could get a portfolio site done. For $5/mo a Neocities site can be hosted on a custom domain and requires no Git/GitHub wrangling. Micro.blog hosting is also $5/mo and brings a ton of features, interactivity, and community.
• Talked about VueJS passing React in terms of number of stars on GitHub, and speculating why that is. For example, VueJS can be a lot easier to dip your toes in and get started without a complicated build toolchain.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday July 25th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

I'm going!

Homebrew Website Club returns! Come on out and work on your personal website, or learn more about how to escape the social media silos by building something of your own!

We’ll have updates about the recent IndieWeb Summit, a return of webrings, and much more!

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

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

derekfields.is — Thinking about ESP8266 + WebAR to make, e.g. a painting with AR overlays in mobile browsers. Working on CSS Grid stuff for his site, now. Trying to be consistent.

jonathanprozzi.net — Mainly been working on stuff for DHF, but it overlaps w/ personal projects. Working on a "headless WordPress" setup as a data source for a Gatsby or Next static site that can be taken to schools w/ super slow internet. Been learning how to use Gatsby – the GraphQL queries for WordPress have been tricky. Got it working on his own site first, then managed to get a handle on how to pull lessons for specific courses from the set of all courses. Now digging into more GraphQL (like debugging w/ GraphiQL) and issues like differences in how WordPress handles whitespace (processing newlines into paragraph and break tags) vs stuffing the content into a React component (no special whitespace processing by default). For personal stuff, feels like Gatsby + headless WP is too heavy. Interested in an IndieWeb-starter version of the Gatsby starter site, which doesn't even have semantic HTML at the moment. Also looking into WordPress + Next... next, because it seems simpler.

dariusmccoy.com — Went to NOMCON and helped build the We the Rosies sculpture. Will be working on a new project for DHF for managing 3D Print Shop.

martymcgui.re — Installed grant.codes' PostrChild plugin for Chrome. It shows Edit Post buttons on his posts and makes the content there editable via Micropub and it is very neat! Also showed off his indiebookclub.biz profile. Added support for read posts to his site to support it and is now converting old read posts (which were just notes of the form "📕 Finished Reading: ...") into this new form. Has ideas for additions to indiebookclub like URLs for books and authors, tags, text content, and backfeeding entries from his site to complete his profile. Will be dropping in his Goodreads data next.

bouhmad.com — Been implementing a speedtest-like app on a new site for Baltimore City to gather data by census block and compare. Part of his new(ish) project to establish a mesh network for the city!

Other discussion:

• IndieWeb Summit! I think next HWC Baltimore may be happening during IWS demo time. Maybe it'll be streaming here!
  
• Greg McVerry's work on IndieWeb and WordPress and education. His most recent post on building a course management system in IndieWeb-style feels very much in line with what Jonathan has been working on.
• "Headless" Micropub CMS - what would these look like? Jonathan is interested in Microformats2 as the storage format for posts, courses, and other data, and Micropub seems like the way that MF2 data gets shipped around for creating/editing posts. But most Micropub clients are built for creating (and rarely editing) very specific kinds of posts.
• Comparison to Netlify CMS - which is built around Git and flat files. Netlify can get a list of all your posts by listing files in Git. A Micropub-based CMS would need to query a list of all posts, with filters like post type, tags, ...
• GraphQL queries over MF2 properties??
• Facebook's API changes have caused Bridgy to stop working for backfeeding reactions and comments, and Publish will stop working in August. Jonathan thought his site configuration was broken as he wasn't getting backfed comments and likes anymore. Basically: Facebook has shut out the IndieWeb. This feels like a huge problem (for the IndieWeb)! How are people working around it? Are they? This may help usher IndieWeb folks out the door for Facebook, but it almost completely stops people who want to be in that in-between space.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday June 27th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

It's been a while! Again! We cancelled our previous meetup due to weather.

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of May met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 29th!

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

dariusmccoy.com – Playing with Squarespace because he expects to have youth using it for the upcoming Web Shop launch at DHF. In ~3 weeks! He's trying to clone the existing DHF 3D Print Shop website in it, but finding it a bit restricting. Playing w/ some CodePens for nice animations/transitions but having trouble getting those into the Squarespace editing tools. Wants to use them for within-page links.

derekfields.is – Been struggling w/ goals on personal website stuff. Has been applying for webdev jobs, though! Waiting to hear back. Has been working on his startup idea - an LED backpack for biking. It's controlled by a microcontroller and he wants it to serve a webpage over WiFi so you can control it from your phone without installing anything.

jonathanprozzi.net – Spent time tonight writing a post because he hasn't in a long time. The post includes shaming himself for not writing posts. Writing up his experiences from a recent conference where DHF was receiving an award. Building apps with GatsbyJS which are PWAs that work offline, so the content he writes for DHF can work for people who have viewed them even if the internet goes down.

martymcgui.re – "Launched" his GIPHY-backed GIF posting app Kapowski. After feedback from last time, made it work without requiring logins (making it usable by people who aren't all wired up with IndieAuth on their sites). Thinking about ways to progressively enhance Kapowski, such as saving favorites that can be viewed offline, offline sending with posts going out when the internet comes back, etc. Been going all in on micropub for his personal notes that exist on a private site. Used selfauth, mintoken, skippy's micropub server, spano for media, and built a new nginx auth_request service that uses IndieAuth and an access control list to allow only him to view the private posts. Hoping to clean that up and release it someday soon. Also started first steps for another long-term micropub-related project to assist sites that support micropub for creating and editing posts but don't want to build their own infrastructure for syndication. It's called "POSSE Party", and currently it's a manual-til-it-hurts Micropub editor that lets you manage mp-syndicate-to and syndication properties for posts. Someday he hopes to make something that can use bridgy or silo.pub to automate syndication for people whose sites don't do that.

Other discussion:

• LED mounting strategies for backpacks. Big diffusers make for good looking LEDs but surface mount parts make things easier to mount.
  
• Jonathan's experiences at the conference. His takeaways from talks about making human-centered technology. E.g. "context is everything, a perfectly engineered span is useless, but the Brooklyn bridge connects people". He's thinking a lot about common themes around technology that works *for* humans. For example, so many people don't have internet all the time!

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday June 13th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

I'm not attending.

Update! Due to thunderstorms and internet storms, tonight’s HWC has been cancelled. See you next on May 29th!

Excited for the return of Homebrew Website Club Baltimore, tonight! See you at Digital Harbor Foundation at 6:30pm for quiet writing hour, 7:30pm for the meetup!

Let’s make the web stupid and fun again, together!