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!

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!