Me: [scrolling through posts in Monocle, the IndieWeb reader]

Monocle:

Me: I don't want to open up 8 tabs for Twitter. I'll just visit Tantek's homepage where I bet he shows these tweets in full context.

tantek.com:

😂

Looking forward to my third IndieWeb Summit! It’s amazing to reflect on the improvements coming out of the IndieWeb every year. I wonder what I will hack on this time around??

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of March met at The Bean at Cooper Union on March 6th, with me playing host.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup!

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Has many things to demo since last time! Left himself some to keep working on projects tonight. Most of his work is in Gerrit but it's main notification system is sending emails. Last time he was collecting those emails. But in processing the emails he realized they were missing info like user IDs and avatars. Changed to use the email as a notification of a notification - to trigger a fetch via the Gerrit API to grab the information he wants directly, looking for changes between the last time he updated and the time of the email. Been working on notification displays since. Has a reverse-chronological timeline where notifications flow by. Finds it less stressful than GitHub's notification system!

martymcgui.re — Completely forgot his work on timelines and re-styled listen posts! Launched BloodReads.com, a silly promo site for and upcoming Ides of March GHOST PARTY 👻🎉 show themed on BETRAYAL and also MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING. Used a template from HTML5up, which were recently discussed in #indieweb-meta as having a template that might be a good fit for the IndieWeb homepage redesign. Started work on a new section on his site dedicated to improv, so folks can find his upcoming shows, past events, etc.

Other discussions:

• It's cold but not rainy this week! Walk fast to stay warm.
• Density (and wasted space) in web designs.
• What goes into a good homepage? Are there parts of your site that exist but you don't necessarily guide people to easily?
• Rolling up and grouping noisy notifications, and choosing how to order notification details by priority.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, March 20th at 6:30pm!

New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of February met at The Bean at Cooper Union on February 20th, organized by Tiara Miller and myself.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup!

rootedfromnature.com — Finished a Python lab assignment! Felt like she was overthinking it. Also doesn't like that the particular problems are more math problem than coding problem. Plans to sign up for actual coding classes to get more practical coding experience.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Wants to visualize notifications from GitHub and Gerrit. He collects the data (sometimes by processing emails!) on his own site and wants to expose it. Spent some time thinking / brainstorming about how to design those things. Asked some fellow Go programmers about known ways to handle emails w/ Go. Wants it to work "forever" (the next decade) so is being careful about the design.

martymcgui.re — Played with layouts for his new /listens page. Looked at Pinterest and Dribbble and other design sites for "timeline" layouts and was pretty unhappy with what he found. Lots of "draw a line with labels and draw lines extending off to things." So, took some time to start extracting "listen" bits like podcast art, episode title, audio links, into simpler blocks to start playing with layouts.

Other discussions:

• Things that Go is really good at. Like being an http2 server!
• This new location! It... seems fine? It was crowded when we came in but we eventually got a table. No outlets handy as far as we could find. We'll keep looking for new venues!
• IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend!
• IndieWebCamp Online is also only a couple of weekends away!
  
• IndieWebCamp New Haven is at the end of March and planning is getting scrambly! There are wiki pages to create but there's a lot of missing information and content yet! Tiara has been co-organizing w/ wiki stuff. Marty volunteered to help, too. Being remote, we need Greg to fill in with his local knowledge about the area and venue though!
  
• What about IWC NYC! Yeah we'll do one too. Later in the year, though.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, March 6th at 6:30pm!

Inspired by Jonathan LaCour's January post about tracking his podcast listening habits, I recently decided to bring in my own listening history into my website.

Like Jonathan, I use Overcast to listen to podcasts on my phone, and I was surprised and delighted to learn that Overcast has an "All data" export option on the accounts page that includes per-episode details such as whether you listened to an ep, and when you last interacted with it!

I took a look at Jonathan's script to automatically log in and import his Overcast data and figured I could make something a little more minimal that would work with my Hugo site.

My process follows three steps: download the overcast.opml full export file, run a script to generate the Hugo posts, and run a script to grab extra podcast metadata like cover art.

You can find my scripts in this gist if you're interested in learning more, but they may not be that useful for anyone without my exact Hugo config.

You may notice in the scripts that I have a "block list" of podcast URLs I can add. That's because I wanted my listen posts to helpfully link to and embed audio whenever possible. However, some of the feeds I subscribe to contain private or for-pay content - particularly a couple of podcasts I support on Patreon. I do want to track my listening habits for these podcasts, so I will likely start handling them differently by leaving out the embedded audio and linking directly to Patreon pages where possible.

Running the script, I was able to happily show everything I listened to as just another type of post on my site. However, it turns out I had (and keep making) a lot of listen posts. Visually they were drowning out all my other activity on my site.

So I have sequestered them on a new Listens page where you can only follow my podcast consumption history, keeping it out of my main feeds.

Similarly, I have been interested in having a nice Instagram-like page that shows off my photos in a grid. So I made a Photos page to show off those posts.

Both of these pages have microformats2 feed information embedded, so if you have an Indie reader, you might be interested in following just those pages!

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of 2019 met at Aroma Espresso Bar on February 6th.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

rootedfromnature.com — Was working on a Grav skeleton... thinking of throwing it out. Had a client site that received some praise, though! Spent some time this evening looking at flights to Germany

aaronparecki.com — Was working on fixing Quill's URL resolution for IndieAuth login (e.g. so you can login with a shortdomain like aaronpk.com and have it resolve to https://aaronparecki.com/). Got distracted by Marty showing an iOS Shortcut that works like Teacup to post ate/drank posts via Micropub. Made an iOS shortcut to allow him to upload videos to his site.

martymcgui.re — Spent quiet hour porting some old notes out of Evernote-like browser-based app Laverna into his personal notes site. Just housekeepin'. Current personal site project is probably getting event hosting up for his upcoming improv and livestreaming shows.

david.shanske.com — Wrote a post saying something is ready to test. Current project for his site: everything. Took a break for a few days and doesn't know what is next.

Other discussions:

• Aaron's cool tiny gimbal / timelapse camera
  
• Looking at flights to Germany for IWCs
• Bus vs subway/rail/driving between Manhattan and Queens
• What do you mean this coffee shop's hours have changed to close at 7pm?
• There's a Starbucks like two blocks away, I guess.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, February 20th at 6:30pm!

Missed the last one due to a gnarly cold. Excited for my first HWC NYC!

Reportedly we will have special guest aaronpk!

Members of the 🕸💍 IndieWeb Webring now have a new way to find one another, and show off!

That's right, this 🕸💍 IndieWeb Webring now has a directory showcasing profiles of active sites in the ring! Where possible, it shows name, photo, and short bio in addition to the site's URL (and of course their potentially problematic cute emoji ID).

These profiles are possible when people publish personal particulars on their page as a microformats2 representative h-card.

That is a bunch of jargon, to be sure, but what it means is that you with a few tweaks to your homepage, you can make info like your name, photo, and a bio – which is probably already displayed for people to see – readable by machines that understand microformats2, like this one!

Fated-to-be Asked Questions

How do I get my site to show up in the directory?

Visit the your 🕸💍 webring dashboard (you'll need to log in) and click the "Check for updated profile" button.

I updated my profile, but it's not working!

Try out your page in the indiewebify.me validator. If it shows you that it found a "representative h-card", then your page should work for the webring directory!

Wait a sec, my site is already in the directory!

I went ahead and pre-loaded the profile info for all registered and active sites! I don't plan to do that again.

My site is in the directory but I don't want to be listed!

Sorry about that! You can remove yourself by visiting your 🕸💍 webring dashboard (you'll need to log in) and click the "Remove my profile" button.

Why did you do this?

I was inspired by Grant's IndieWeb Directory, Aaron's Microcast.club, this 🕸💍 review by Brad Enslen, and more. Basically: surfing around a webring with next and previous links is good fun, and it's even more fun to see so many folks excited about the IndieWeb in one place!

Is there anything else?

Yes! There are also now individual profile pages, if that's something you want to link to. My webring emoji ID is 🚯, so my profile can be found at: 🕸💍.ws/🚯

I don't know yet how these pages might evolve so I welcome your feedback!

Can I ask you a different question or give you feedback?

Of course! Please do! You can reply to this post on your own site or via Twitter, or feel free to drop me a line in the #indieweb chat (I’m schmarty there).

Looking forward to my first Homebrew Website Club since moving to NYC!

This inline website editor by Grant is looking very exciting! Powered entirely by IndieWeb building blocks: microformats (to understand the content on your page) and micropub (to make new posts and edits).

https://grant.codes/2019/01/11/my-new-posting-workflow