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.
Screenshot of WIP GIF Reaction Micropub client
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.
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.
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 MonocleMicrosub 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.
This is a make-up event for last week’s meetup which was canceled due to weather!
I'm going!
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)!
