Baltimore's second October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

martymcgui.re — Recently posted about his IWC NYC hack day project - showing subtitle and caption tracks for audio files in the browser by marking them up as a video element. Showed off his new personal site, a note-taking and planning site with an audience of one. It lives on his laptop and on a protected Tor hidden service so it can be read from his phone. Also been working on porting his podcast website to Hugo, learning how fragile his micropub server is about mapping URLs to flat files on the server.

bouhmad.com — Started a new job recently, so been working to find time to work on his new site. Wrote an outline and a list of resources about what the site will be about and what content will be on it. Hoping to publish in the next two weeks!

maryreisenwitz.com — Our venue host for the evening! Been writing a lot of stuff and working to organize it. Outlining story points for a narrative piece, consists of lots of dream pieces, which she has been logging for a few years. Been organizing those in Google Keep, cataloging and tagging them by time. Found it really interesting to look over her dream notes for this time past year. Also finding searching incredibly useful. "When did I dream about a horse? There are two dreams!"

rhearamakrishnan.com — Has a set of projects she wants to finish before updating her website. One of them is a podcast that will require lots of collaborative elements, so been planning that.

angelosresu.me — Has been on the job search and realized he needed a website. It's currently a programming demo of a CAD app that uses Paper.js and supports boolean operations over primitives.

Other things:

• We talked about aligning audio/video content and content in a web page, like this course on O'Reilly. Would be useful for DHF's learning system courses. Could also be fun to have This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition show previews of the pages being discussed as they are being discussed.
• We discussed capturing notes with the lowest friction tools then moving them into more useful/durable systems later.
• We talked about podcasting tools. Dedicated recorders for in-the-field recording, Audacity for editing.
• We talked about the recent announcement from Adafruit's founder/owner/engineer ladyada finding herself locked out of her Facebook account with no apparently recourse. This led to general discussion of silos and monopolies, systems that are secretly bad for you because they stalk you or share you or your contacts' data, systems that are directly bad for you like Candy Crush and other addictive apps.
• Talked about some decentralized systems, like MaidSafe (decentralized p2p filestore, incentivized w/ a cryptocurrency), and Beaker's new decentralized Twitter-alike Rotonde (decentralized p2p websites, host it yourself or pay someone to mirror).

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! Look for the announcement soon!

Looking forward to another night of #IndieWeb at Homebrew Website Club Baltimore!

Come on out, work on your website, and talk shop with us!

Baltimore's first October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC last weekend! Had a really great time (that he really needs to write up). Figured out how to show closed captions / subtitles on audio content (and needs to write that up). Recently decided that Jekyll was slowing him down too much and decided to jump to Hugo. First steps there - use a sacrificial website to learn on that is much simpler, in this case the We Have to Ask Podcast. Also showed off Rob Weychert's website as one that impressed him from IWC NYC due to the really nice typography, spacing, layout.

djfalcon23.github.io — Added a new slideshow feature. Can now show a model slideshow of past projects. In true HWC fashion, he pushed this feature live during the demo. Will be adding similar modal displays for PDF documents and videos.

lizboren.art — Been changing her art portfolio site. It's hosted on ArtStation which has a pretty affordable "pro" level with good editing tools. She's been happy with it for now. Slightly more problematic is that her .art domain was registered on her behalf by her school and now she doesn't know how to get access to manage it. We tried to use the WHOIS info to track down who to contact at the controlling registrar.

jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on a site for work at Digital Harbor Foundation. They are relaunching blueprint.digitalharbor.org educator resource portal. They've been working on a clear structured landing page for people that are not registered for it, as well as cleaning up navigation for users who are registered. It's a WordPress site and they've been moving their content into "Sensei", a WordPress add-on for education content from WooCommerce.

Other things:

• We talked about doing design research and taking inspiration from sites that are similar to what you're working on.
  
• Talked about the different approaches needed when working on content and structure versus working on making something attractive.
• Went around talking about pet peeves about the web: bad graphic design, not having an obvious login button, sites that use social logins (e.g. GitHub or Twitter) when they don't work, crucial interactions in modals that aren't clickable on mobile, surveillance and adware crap.
• Talked about the recent "alternative to ads" where the page runs a JavaScript bitcoin miner, and how wasteful this is in terms of energy vs. coins earned. Maybe all machines need mining ASICs? Talked about other alternatives like Brave and Flattr, compulsory licensing models and Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, paywalls, paying for things with Bitcoin in general, money as an abstract concept.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you on October 18th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!

Very excited for this week’s Homebrew Website Club Baltimore!

Come work on your personal website, or learn more about doing so.

Come chat about what you’re working on, or what questions you have.

I also have stories to share from IndieWeb Camp NYC this past weekend!

Baltimore's second September 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 20th. It was our one-year anniversary, given that our first meeting occurred on September 21st, 2016.

We celebrated with cookies!

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

jonathanprozzi.net – Set up bridgy on his new WordPress site since last time. Working on a post detailing his move from Hugo to WordPress. Hoping it serves as documentation to help with outreach to other folks who already use WordPress, or folks looking to start a new personal website. Also hoping the bridgy publish works, since this is his first time posting with it.

maryreisenwitz.com – Working on web content for a DHF digital fabrication course that starts next week, starting with Autodesk Fusion 360. It's organized as "lessons" on a WordPress site at learn.digitalharbor.org.

bouhmad.com – Prepping to launch his personal site at that URL. Has a local development version, written in Hugo. Will be posting about security research.

rhearamakrishnan.com – Working on her portfolio website, which mostly links to writing she has had published elsewhere. Wants to make sure all the outgoing links still work, update the look. Also has a lot of visual content like zines that she wants to display in an appealing way. Currently publishes via GitHub Pages, facing a learning curve making styling changes, but is sticking with it and wants to keep things simple.

martymcgui.re – Super excited that we have had a year of HWC Baltimore meetups! Looking forward to more outreach in the year ahead, finding ways to reach people who don't yet know that they want to be part of the IndieWeb. On his personal site, been working on a per-month archive view. Playing both with Jekyll plugins to generate the pages and with learning CSS Grid to do the layout, because it's new and shiny. The slowness of Jekyll is really tempting him to jump to Hugo, despite knowing it will be a huge pain.

Shawn Grimes – Working on web content for a different DHF learning system called Blueprint. Currently focused on things like that rather than his personal website.

Other things:

• We talked about some of the pros/cons of static site generators vs WordPress. E.g. security needs, ease of posting, etc. etc. etc...
  
• We talked about Hugo being good for archiving content like old Evernote notes. You can make an archive that is more browsable/searchable than the Evernote exports and doesn't require Evernote.
• Talked about ways of taking and organizing notes, differing needs (e.g. need to write down something quickly, so a mobile interface is key). Some different options came up, like laverna.cc, ulyssesapp.com.
• Talked about reasons not to store things on clouds like Evernote and Dropbox, targeted advertising. Tools to prevent surveillance such as Better and Firefox Focus.
• Talked about some general intro-to-IndieWeb stuff, how it got started, building blocks like POSSE and webmentions, and making progress through small incremental steps.

We're very happy to have reached the milestone of a year of (nearly-) regular meetings! Thanks to everyone who has come out to be a part of these meetups so far.

We hope you'll join us again on for another HWC Baltimore meetup at Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center! Our next meetups will be October 4th followed by another on October 18th.

Edit: Wow, I just remembered that this will be our 1-year anniversary of when we started this meetup, back in September 2016! To celebrate, there will be stickers and maybe cookies! So if you have no idea what Homebrew Website Club or the IndieWeb are about or don’t know if you want a personal website, come on out to celebrate with us anyway!

Baltimore! Come on out to Digital Harbor Foundation starting at 6:30pm to work on your personal site and learn more about escaping silos like this one.

We’ll also be talking about the upcoming IndieWebCamp NYC!

Can’t make it? That’s okay! Tell your friends by sharing this event. We’ll meet again in October!

Baltimore's first September 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 6th.

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

jonathanprozzi.net (Jonathan) – Stepped through Digital Ocean tutorials with nginx and has a fresh new WordPress site running for his personal site. Has a SemPress theme and the IndieWeb plugin and will be working through all those next. Happy to already have working rel-me stuff and being able to log into the IndieWeb wiki. Looking forward to helping others get set up as well.

djfalcon23 (Derek) – Thinking about getting a ".is" domain. Likes the idea of using it with paths like ".is/cool", ".is/making". Started a new site for his light-up bicycling backpack, using his personal portfolio site as a template.

martymcgui.re (Marty) – Started a dedicated podcast-oriented page for This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition. Did some refactoring of his site to make it work reasonably. Next up is adding subscribe buttons for Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, and more. Did some research into other podcasts' website subscribe button designs.

Other things:

• We also talked about Digital Ocean has a hosting provider. We like that they provide a lot of guides, in addition to being very affordable.
• Talked about geo-based TLDs as being more stable than ".ninja" and others. Reviewed some podcast subscribe button designs on a few sites.
  
• Talked about recent video games and 8-bit aesthetics.

We hope that you'll join us for another HWC Baltimore, which will next meet on September 20th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!  

Looking forward to another great Homebrew Website Club Baltimore meetup. Come on out to work on your personal website, and learn more about how you can stay social online without silos like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.

Baltimore's second August 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 23rd.

Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

jonathanprozzi.net (Jonathan) – Had been working on a wedding site with Hugo and making progress. Got really frustrated with adding image galleries, which required a lot of extra tools. Realized that he could accomplish the same thing in WordPress really quickly. So, spent quiet writing hour starting over in WordPress. At this point, just wants to have it done, rather than spending time learning something new along the way.

martymcgui.re (Marty) – Since last time has been thinking a lot more about delivering transcriptions with audio content. Did more experimenting with Audiogram, and found the BBC's fork, which supports subtitles and transcription editing, but also depends on a lot of private BBC infrastructure out of the box. Is now able to get timestamped transcripts by combining an audio file and long-form text transcription using a tool called gentle. Then by feeding that into a hacked-up copy of the BBC's Audiogram can generate video with hardcoded subtitles. Here's an example from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb. Pretty neat! Also experimenting with providing a text transcript of the audio newsletter along w/ the audio via a simple HTML details/summary elements with an iframe. Example here.

Other things:

• We talked about use cases where static sites are great (simple project sites) and not-so-great (lots of media files).
• We also chatted a lot about the future of the This Week in the IndieWeb audio edition, making the content more accessible, making it more engaging.
• We also talked about being aware of when it makes sense to use manual tools vs. trying to creating automation, such as the tradeoffs with using "manual" video editing tools vs. tools like Audiogram.
  

We hope that you'll join us for another HWC Baltimore, which will next meet on September 6th and again on September 20th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center! 

Interested in having a personal website? Got questions about the web? Join us Wed Aug 23rd at Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!