Baltimore's first July 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on July 12th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net - finished up a post from the last HWC meetup about his thoughts on switching from Hugo to Wordpress. Had it all written, but forgot to publish it - largely because of the multistep Hugo publishing process! Says this illustrates that the process overhead of using the tool is clearly getting in the way. Started a local Wordpress install to get things going. Before switching - wants to figure out how to preserve the Hugo version of his site as a snapshot (maybe on a subdomain?). Cares about both the content and the presentation of it. Also wants to figure out another project to encourage him to learn Hugo.

Darius - started in on a portfolio-style site on Wordpress. Has a theme he likes but is struggling with customizing it due to its documentation. Thinking about what he wants to put on the site. Also found out that a Wordpress site that he manages for work was hacked by spammers, so worked on fixing that.

martymcgui.re - since last time, cleaned up microformats around his likes, reposts, bookmarks to add explicit p-name and e-content, so readers like Woodwind will show something more reasonable than the "implied" names. Hasn't been working much on his site, so spent some time on his IndieWeb wiki user page to read through and re-organize his itches to choose something to work on. Inspired by the 2017 IndieWebSummit session on events, started work on a Jekyll generator plugin that will create iCal .ics files for his event posts, so he can put "add to calendar" buttons on his indie events.

We chatted about the Battle for the Net, Wordpress security, Wordpress Outreach Club, intricacies of how the various IndieWeb Wordpress plugins and theming operates, and more!

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore, which will meet on July 26th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!

Photo for tonight’s HWC Baltimore!

Baltimore's June 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on June 28th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net - Been very busy with work. Wrote a couple of posts since the last meeting. Tonight started a reflective post about his decision to use Hugo for his site vs Wordpress, which he already uses a lot for work. Feels like he has learned a little bit of Go (which Hugo is written in), but mostly has just learned Hugo and felt that's held him back. Interested in the Wordpress API and maybe move his site over because he wants to post more and still learn.

eddiehinkle.com - Been working on his site rewrite in Angular Universal. Today worked on micropub media endpoint. Is saving files successfully, now needs to add file extensions and return the Location URL. Also been working on Indigenous, his iOS micropub client. Been switching back and forth between the two as he makes progress or gets stuck on one or the other. Other stuff since last time: adding OwnYourSwarm, OwnYourGram. Having a micropub client on his phone has enabled him to send lots and lots of likes - enough that he decided to move likes out of his main social stream page and treat them as a reply.

djfalcon23 (domains currently expired) - been learning web development on and off for the last year. Now building a portfolio site using Bootstrap and trying out React, but it is a lot. Also trying to (re-)learn Android development.

martymcgui.re - Went to IndieWeb Summit and it was amazing! Added checkins to his site w/ OwnYourSwarm while there because of jealousy of seeing other folks checking in with Swarm. Really attracted to the gamification, but wants to make a checkin client so he doesn't have to give them his data. Also been cleaning up microformats on his site so that reply contexts on other site and in readers like Woodwind look better.

Chatted a bit about:

• "Double-dipping" - choosing side projects that involve technology you already need to use (or learn) for work
• Angular Universal, basically a server-side render of Angular which includes a static rendering of markup as well as all the scripts and data to "hydrate" the page
• Saving posts on Facebook and trying to PESOS to a bookmark post, but the Facebook API seems to have those locked down.
  
• Learning React is pretty overwhelming, lots of tooling and stuff up front that doesn't feel connected to a project.
• Guided learning w/ online systems with guided courses like Pluralsight have been really helpful for Jonathan.
• Gamification of Foursquare - coins for photos and random things, comparison with friends, weekly generated summaries with titles like "Weekend Getaways"
• Talked about how some aspects of the "design language" of web sites have converged and solidified several years ago. djfalcon23 likes looking at the designs on the welovewebdesign Instagram page. Wants to see more like that in the world.
• Talked about IndieWeb Summit and the videos available, particularly the Wordpress sessions.
• Spent a lot of time on the Personal Web Sites examples.
  • Awesome suggestion by djfalcon23 to bring an inspirational website to the next meetings.

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore, which will meet on July 12th and then again July 26th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!

Photo for tonight’s Homebrew Website Club Baltimore

Baltimore's second May 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 31st.

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

jonathanprozzi.net - Since last time, did some cosmetic updates to site. Also did a lot of traveling. Catching up now on finishing a series of posts he started at last HWC (May 10th). Now one-and-a-half posts behind his schedule. Wants to stick with consistency of writing something once per week.

amyhurst.com - Working on a website for work (something that is usually on her "some day" list). Gathering student questions from emails into an FAQ on a Wordpress site.

martymcgui.re - Added JSON Feed to blog.adafruit.com because it was easy and why not? Also talked about webmention notifications in his home Matrix chat server via Hubot. Is interested in more textual/conversational interfaces for things in his life and fewer apps and pages to remember to look at.

metamage.com (jjuran.org) - All sites now HTTPS. A couple are HTTP/HTTPS for classic MacOS clients, others are HTTPS-only. Used PNG/GIF and CSS to make a screenshot of an emulator animate when moused-over (bottom of https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/). Some fun browser issues w/ image handling (dithering?) in Safari. His site uses a homebrew Perl static site generator, shared CSS across all his sites. Planning to rework it in the V language.

Chatted about Micropub becoming a W3C Recommendation, including going through Aaron Parecki's announcement post, which is a very clear walk through of the development process. Talked about micro.blog as an up-and-coming social platform that supports Micropub out of the box. Talked about the power of social nudges (like "how's that project going?") for making progress on projects. Two of us (jjuran and martymcgui.re) will be at IndieWeb Summit in Portland later this June and are looking forward to it!

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore on June 28th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!  

Photo for HWC Baltimore 2017-05-31

Homebrew Website Club Baltimore is back! Join us May 31 @ 7:30pm @DHFBaltimore and learn how to take charge of what you post on the web!