Reminder! Homebrew Website Club Baltimore is on Tuesday this week.

Due to the holiday, this may be the final HWC Baltimore until 2018, so come on out, work on your website, and make a web for you (not them)!

Thanks to Jonathan for the great write-up for tonight’s Homebrew Website Club Baltimore! It is awesome that so many people came out and had such great discussions! I am sad to have missed it!

https://jonathanprozzi.net/indieweb/hwc-baltimore-2017-11-29-wrap-up/

Baltimore's second November 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 15th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Is back after lots of travel and writing a post about that, including a roadmap of getting back into things. Archived several posts from his old Hugo site into his new WordPress site. One of his 2018-01-01 goals is to practice posting status updates to his site instead of Facebook.

brksavage.com – Bought a new domain for a blog a couple of months ago, transferring it to BlueHost now. Been looking over old content. A 2018-01-01 commitment: small goal - write something small and publish it before end of year.

derekfields.is – Working on getting a JavaScript-based CMS called apostrophe.js working for his site. Probably going to host it on Heroku. Also learning the Windows subsystem for Linux, because developing on Windows "doesn't feel right" since he's not using .NET or similar.

bouhmad.com – Working on a first post to go up tonight! Realized the original scope for his "first post", which was going to compare multiple host-based intrusion detection systems, was going to take weeks! So, he's starting off with one, then planning to get back to it after he graduates (hopefully!) in December.

martymcgui.re – Been working on a new way to store and display webmentions on his site. Currently has one site that pulls them from webmention.io with JavaScript, and one site that polls webmention.io for new mentions every time it is compiled by Jekyll. Started building a webhook in Python but has now moved to PHP because it should be simpler. 

dariusmccoy.com – Just got started with his domain, just a landing page. Wants to add more content to it.

Other things:

• IndieWeb 2018-01-01 Commitments.
  
• echo-chamber.js - a fake commenting system that stores comments in the browser, so the commenter (and no one else) can see what they are saying.
• IndieWebCamp Baltimore 2018! We talked about what an IndieWebCamp is and how it is structured.
• IoT and the IndieWeb (mentioned the IndieWebSummit session on IndieWeb for Hardware).
• Twitter and Facebook business models and how they benefit from outrage.
• IndieWeb generations, specifically the way that participating in the IndieWeb right now almost requires you to be a developer.
• The creepiness of Amazon Key.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! We'll be meeting again on November 29th.

Come on out tonight for another meeting of Baltimore’s Homebrew Website Club!

Work on your personal website, learn about the IndieWeb, and build a web for you (not them)!

Baltimore's first November 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 1st. 

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

bouhmad.com – Been working on a big post about security issues. Also, collecting resources for an Equifax-breach-themed CryptoParty in November, which will also go on his site.

djfalcon23.github.io – Buying his dream domain (TBA once it is registered). Been reading lots about getting into tech industry, dealing w/ impostor syndrome. Planning to turn some of these into notes and/or posts on his site when it is up.

martymcgui.re – Posted up the last IWC NYC 2017 interview (with Tantek). Would like to have one per week to put up, so will bring his mic to next HWC Baltimore, and may start asking people in IRC to do interviews over Skype, Zencaster, or similar. Also just reached the 100th episode of his comedy podcast.

Other things.

• Worries about Net Neutrality and the upcoming FCC proposals to break it by allowing pay-for-access fees to publishers. We looked at resources like battleforthenet.com and a video from Congressional Democrats about the issue.
  
• Podcasts about tech. Derek has been trying to find podcasts about cutting-edge tech, but been frustrated. For example, Friends Talk Frontend has good content, but he finds the hosts annoying. Adam recommend Talk Python to Me because it is funny and timely, focusing on new tech. Marty recommends the Contrafubilists because it is kind of an anti-cutting-edge tech podcast with very thoughtful hosts that take apart the marketing speak behind technology trends.
• Also got off into the weeds about good story-driven podcasts. 😅
• Talked about a theoretical "disruptive student" detection system that uses computer vision, motion detection, face recognition, to log "overactive" students and generate reports. Generated a lot of interesting discussion about unintended consequences of technologically "simple" systems.
• Talked about the problems of trying to digitize the rules of complex human systems and the problems of measuring outcomes, determining what "just" algorithms looks like, etc.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! We'll be meeting again on November 15th and November 29th.

Looking forward to Homebrew Website Club Baltimore this Wednesday!

Join us at 7:30pm at Digital Harbor Foundation to talk about your personal website, owning your content outside the big social media silos, and making an IndieWeb for you (not them)!

Want some time to write a post, add a feature, or otherwise work on your website? Join us at 6:30pm for the (optional) quiet writing hour before the meetup.

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!