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!

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

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

martymcgui.re – Went to IndieWebCamp Austin, and it was great! Some notes on that below. IndieWebCamp Baltimore is scheduled and people are RSVPing and booking plane tickets, so he is very excited! The schedule now appears to be locked in and it's time to market it hard. Also demo'd the way he shows multiphoto posts on his site with CSS Grid (example). 2018-01-01 commitments progress: super happy with IWC Baltimore progress, expects to cut is close with his commitment to move his site to Hugo by 2018.

brksavage.com – Been working on a crash course in WordPress, HTML, kind of overloaded on it. Tonight worked on another project because of writer's block.

derekfields.is – Been geeking out on codrops – really nice visualizations and animations on the web with SVG, WebGL, and more. So pretty! Adding a blog page to his site (by hand). Researching how to incorporate Ghost into his site. Started a 100 Days of Code project! Similar to 100 Days of IndieWeb, the goal is to get an hour of coding done every day and tweet your progress. Missed a couple of days over the weekend, but enjoys sharing out his progress and the community support. Would like to have a buddy to support each other. 2018-01-01 commitment progress: working on apostrophe and a cloud service to host it, downloaded Ubuntu tools for Windows.

bouhmad.com – Site is down at the moment. Needs to get it back up and on HTTPS. Wants to do a blog post on experiences as being a dual full-time student and full-time employee out of high school, and the "full college experience". 2018-01-01 commitments: wants to get that blog post up, would like to commit to blogging at least once every two weeks in the new year capturing projects as a resource to others but also daily life as an archive for his future self.

jonathanprozzi.net – 2018-01-01 commitments: little progress on his pre-2018 commitment but still thinks he has time. Really wants to get his local WordPress + git setup going soon. A new near term goal: RSVP to IWC Baltimore!

Other Things:

• Bitcoin! Coinbase! GDAX! How unreal the value is right now and how unusable it all is.
  
• IndieWebCamp Austin! Marty went and loved it. We went looked at the Sessions Grid and talked about each one at a high level.
• Talked about the WordPress Post Kinds plugin and how it might be useful to have a series of blog posts that explains how to get the most out of this plugin, tying that into details about the different types on the wiki and so on.
• Talked a lot about IndieWebCamp Baltimore. It's shaping up to be very exciting! Aaron Parecki got the event and wiki pages looking good, so now we want to start getting the word out everywhere.
• Brianna Privett talk about using WordPress as a life log.
• Ways to put WordPress development into git, like Bedrock/Trellis, putting the whole site in version control, organizing child themes, etc.
• CSS Grid! It seems like magic!
• 2017 was an amazing year for HWC Baltimore. Thanks to everyone who made it a success. We can't wait to see everyone again and made an awesome 2018!

Thanks to everybody who came out! Due to the upcoming holiday around the next usual meeting, this will be our last meeting of 2017. We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the first meeting of 2018! We'll be meeting again on Tuesday, January 9th !