It's been a while!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of May met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 1st!

In celebration of 5/01 aka HTTP 501 Not Implemented, we'll talk about things we wish that our websites did, but that they don't yet do.

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Been working on lots of other projects. Did two work projects with GatsbyJS. One is deployed but not public. Learned a lot about GraphQL. Working on a handbook for youth training and trying to get a netlify CMS hooked up to it. Also did a small VueJS project to learn a bit more about it. Wants to use the WordPress API with some of these technologies on his site. 501 desire: going headless for his WordPress site because he is obsessed with PageSpeed.

maryreisenwitz.com – Been working on sites and content for work. Trying to capture FAQs about working at DHF in preparation for a couple of dozen new youth to start working here. Finds that good explanations uncover the need for more good explanations and lots of branching docs, as different youth employees will have different responsibilities. Excited about having this resource be a website. Wants to include a youth "face book" of names and faces so the new folks can recognize one another and existing staff. 501 desire: wants a web store on her main site, because Etsy is becoming frustrating.

bouhmad.com – Set up SSL via LetsEncrypt and loves it, the easiest SSL setup he has ever done. Started a blog post about intrusion detection, kept adding to it, and pushed it out last week. Working on a piece about a bug bounty he recently collected, working with the company in question. 501 desire: a mailing list signup and a Hugo-driven RSS feed to a Mailchimp mailing list.

grant.codes – Visiting as he drives across the US! Restructuring his site's data on the backend. Was using something like mf2 data, but now moving to pure mf2. Broke a bunch of features doing that, so going through to fix those now. 501 desire: homepage mentions! He accepts but doesn't store or display them.

eddiehinkle.com – Working on leaving Facebook! Has made a sign-up form for friends/family to sign up for monthly (for now) newsletter. Has a complex (too complex?) tagging for tech, personal, family to generate three RSS feeds. These can be subscribed to in any combination (so 9 possible feeds), and the emails will combine all posts in the desired feeds. The feeds themselves reuse markup that he wrote to make posts look good on micro.blog. Just posted monthly review for March and hopes to keep doing summaries. Uses the "last month" view on his site for the raw data. 501 desire: automated webmentions! His site is Jekyll-based, so that's a can of worms. Loves using Indigenous for the quick responses from the indie reader, but then has to go back to his site and manually send webmentions.

martymcgui.re – Traveled recently and checked in everywhere using Swarm, which feeds back to his site (sorry anyone following feeds)! Really enjoyed it, but slightly regrets giving Swarm all that data. Thinks an app could use the Swarm venue API to do Micropub and skip creating the checkins on the server. 501 desire: unlisted posts! Really wants to make photo gallery posts where each photo has a permalink but only the gallery shows up in feeds. Eventually private posts, too.

Other discussion:

• Grant's automated year-in-review feature. Cities visited, hours of TV, distance traveled (tracks GPS constantly).
• Ways to do hidden posts. Categories. Unlisted or private as a property.
• Email lists vs "followers" on social media and the feeling of reach.
• Facebook's reaction when you start mass deleting friends. Mary once deleted close to 700 people and found that the interface started rearranging itself, putting people back in the list where it's easy to mis-click and re-add them as a friend.
• Deleting your posts from Facebook. Does it affect the algorithm? What threats does it eliminate?
• Family signing up for email blasts: would they reply? What if those replies went to an address that turned them into a comment on your site? If their email address is in your nickname cache, you can show their name and photo and url.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on May 15th!

Homebrew Website Club Baltimore returns!

Roving IndieWeb developer grant.codes, lead developer of the Together indie reader, will also be joining us!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on April 10th

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

martymcgui.re – Demoed an as-yet-unnamed (maybe: kapowski) "GIF Reaction" Micropub client. It's currently available on Glitch. It supports IndieAuth, searching for GIFs via the GIPHY API, then posting those as the "photo" property in a Micropub form-encoded request. It also supports in-reply-to functionality, putting the "reaction" into "GIF Reaction", though there's no UI for that, yet. He made an example reply post, but Jonathan's post doesn't seem to support photo replies. 🤔 Also fixed up some metacrap for his podcast site so sharing looks better on Facebook and Twitter.

rhearamakrishnan.com – Working on a redesign of her site. Making good use of view-source on sites that she likes for inspiration. Working on a mixed media art project with post cards that direct you to a website that contains coordinates to a geo cache containing an actual letter.

jonathanprozzi.net – Been doing lots of work stuff that overlaps with personal web interests. Working on his wedding page. It's now up on Netlify and uses their form collection for RSVPs.

Other discussion:

• The new Killer Queen 5 vs 5 arcade game recently installed in Baltimore at Holy Frijoles.
  
• Baltimore zine culture (apparently Atomic Books considers carrying local zines).
• Twine for creating interactive poetry and fiction. It outputs a bunch of HTML and CSS (and maybe JS) that can be hosted anywhere.
• The Netlify static site model of separating content management, storage, layout and rendering, and file hosting.
• The difficulty in evaluating "frameworks" like React and Vue based on their low-level merits. Looking at community and availability of higher-level components might help more.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting!

Homebrew Website Club returns tonight with a special “410 Gone” edition!

Let’s remember those sites we loved which have since shuffled off this mortal web.

Oh, and we’ll work on and discuss our personal websites. Of course!

After a postponement due to snows on the first day of spring, Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of March met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on March 27th. 

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Talked about his recent experiments with Netlify and JAMstack. Had been researching static site hosting services for a while and found a lot of hype. After playing w/ Netlify he feels like it lives up to the hype! Was specifically interested in a static site generator called Gatsby, which uses the React front-end framework to render content.

derekfields.is – Been building a blog section for his site on a static site generator called Hexo. Found the theming stuff to be confusing and time-consuming, but has something working. Will eventually replace the theme with his own as he understands it more. Really likes the Hexo admin composer and compared with the editor for Ghost. Feels like the features help him write. Also setting up a Now.sh tiny server for a subdomain to host VueJS apps.

brksavage.com – Set a goal to do something creative and post about it every month. Did a big project for February (created a desk-sized piece filled w/ the word "bored"). Now writing it up and thinking about ways to make it easier to publish in the future.

www.dariusmccoy.com – Still building up momentum on his Wordpress site. Had a scare that he was locked out of his admin but got back in. Now that he has a working site, he is setting goals for himself about what he wants that site to have and how he wants to present himself there.

Robert (gnostech.net) – Working on owning his data. Has a Nextcloud service set up on his domain, where he can access all his data from his phone and more. Has been taking lots of notes about his home set up (Nextcloud, Let's Encrypt, ad filtering firewall at home, and more). Wants to build a blog to share both how-tos on what he has set up and how, but also the way he decided on his particular needs. Has been using NAS4Free to have more control over his home network storage.

martymcgui.re – Is finally back after missing several HWCs. He has definitely missed them! Talked about the need for indie readers that allow reading and posting reactions to personal sites all in one. Demo'd Together, and Monocle Microsub clients as well as Aperture for Microsub server to handle all the nitty-gritty of fetching and parsing feeds.

Other discussion:

• Derek started us off with a really nice warm-up. We took turns with each person sharing compliments/thanks/encouragement about things people are working on and/or doing for and/or learning from one another. (This was seriously really nice).
  
• JAMstack (Javascript, APIs, Markup). Name was coined because some "static" sites have lots of dynamic functionality.
  • Jonathan gave a demo of Netlify serving pages from a GitHub repo. Talked about how lots of different workflows can be used to manage content (e.g. Ghost, Netlify CMS, etc) without worrying about the final step of compiling the source into HTML and serving those static pages. Netlify has tons of features in the free tier (SSL with Let's Encrypt, support for forms, and more).
  • Q: How do they make money? A: Great question! They're advertised all over the place in the web design world. Maybe consulting? For example, they did a huge redesign for Smashing Magazine.
  • Q: Do we have to use GitHub? A: That's all Jonathan has played with so far, but they probably support other source control services.
  • Q: What content goes in the Git repo? A: The source content, templates, etc. E.g. the output of "hexo init".
  • Q: How does the DNS setup work? A: Netlify gives you IP addresses and you point A records at them. Same way you would for a Digital Ocean droplet or other virtual server.
  • With custom domains, pulling content from GitHub, and tools like the (also free) Netlify CMS that ease editing, this could be a strong competitor for e.g. Wordpress.com sites, barring some initial setup pain.
  • Was able to replace FormSpree service with Netlify's free form handling service. He can see the submitted form data by logging into his Netlify account.
• Talked about recent creepy Facebook news and efforts like cleverdevil's to escape it with our content intact. Marty was inspired by that to grab his Facebook content with fb-export and the DownAlbum extension for Chrome.
• If Facebook goes away or runs into issues, what happens to projects like React or their other open source projects?
• Would a giant like Amazon step up? What would an Amazon social network look like?
• If Facebook actually "falls" (however unlikely), would another centralized social network "win"? Probably!

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Tuesday, April 3rd!

So excited for my return to Homebrew Website Club Baltimore! See y’all there! Let’s work on our websites together (and get our data out of Facebook, sheesh)!

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!

Homebrew Website Club Baltimore meets tomorrow at 7:30pm!

Got a domain name, but mystified by hosting options? Join us an hour earlier, at 6:30pm, for an activity that will (hopefully) demystify things a bit!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of January met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on January 23rd.

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

martymcgui.re — Been catching up on things since IndieWebCamp! Spent tonight writing the first of several wrap-up posts. Also finally got the weekend's episode of This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition up this morning, ~3 days late. Planning to write more specific wrap-ups, open up some old Micropub and IndieAuth python projects he needs to update.

jonathanprozzi.net — Recently finished a draft of a 45-60 minute activity for new folks to HWC to register their first domain. None of tonight's attendee's need a domain, so we'll punt on that for next time. Spent the time tonight setting up a notebook.jonathanprozzi.net subdomain to be a publicly accessible version of the Hugo site that he set up recently to take notes. He used it over the weekend at IWC Baltimore and now wants it available on his phone. He also subscribed to all the IWC Baltimore attendees on Woodwind.

derekfields.is — Working on VR world project where the server is a microcontroller with sensors that can directly manipulate the VR world. Dealing w/ issues serving an A-Frame VR web app from his nodemcu microcontroller. The nodemcu serves a big opaque string for content and he wants to have it load A-Frame and other third-party resources from a CDN. The trouble is that when your computer is connected to the nodemcu's access point, there is no access to the internet. He is looking at another possibility of serving those minified scripts directly from the nodemcu.

angelosresu.me — Just noticed his website is down, oops. Not been working on his site much. Has been working on setting up his first OAuth implementation at work.

Other things:

• Baltimore had our own IndieWebCamp! It was great! Videos are available now for all Saturday sessions as well as Sunday morning intros and afternoon demos.
• 1 Million Webmentions!
• WebSub is a W3C REC!
• IndieAuth is a W3C Note!
  • Lots of discussion about what IndieAuth is, vs RelMeAuth, PGP
• W3C governance is interesting! And confusing!
• Showed off Woodwind as an example of IndieAuth dance. Also got Jonathan set up with Micropub via Woodwind so he can send replies.
• Open Graph Protocol, microformats
• Moving the idea of computing out of the default idea of a screen and keyboard/mouse/touch and a bunch of storage and computing right in front of you into more interesting paradigms like little internet-connected microcontrollers, virtual worlds.
• The idea of needing indie readers to start consolidating how people can read and respond to IndieWeb content as easily as on silos. We may all be asking Aaron for accounts on Monocle.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meetings:

• February 6th (Note: this is a Tuesday). We'll have a new activity for new folks during this meeting starting at 6:30pm – getting started with web hosting!
• February 20th (also Tuesday!)

Come on out and talk about what happened at IndieWebCamp Baltimore this past weekend.

BONUS: We’ll be trying a new activity! Join at 6:30pm to learn how to set up your domain! You’ll leave with a registered domain and the ability to navigate the domain registrar dashboard system to find information you’ll need for next steps!