I attended IndieWebCamp NYC 2018 and it was a blast! Check the schedule for links to notes and videos from the awesome keynotes, discussion sessions, and build-day demos. I am so grateful to all the other organizers, to all the new and familiar faces that came out, to those that joined us remotely, to Pace University's Seidenberg School for hosting us, and of course to the sponsors that made it all possible.

I have a lot of thoughts about all the discussions and projects that were talked about, I'm sure. But for now, I'd like to capture some of the TODOs and project ideas that I came away with after the event, and the post-event discussions over food and drink.

• A Micropub Media Endpoint built on Neocities for storage and Glitch for handling uploads and metadata. It would allow folks to store 1GB of media files like photos, audio, and video for their websites, for free. It would be usable with all kinds of posting tools, no matter what backend you use for your site.
  • (Hilarious?) bonus: that content would be available peer-to-peer over IPFS.
• Improve the IndieWeb Web Ring (🕸💍.ws) to automatically check whether members' sites link back using Webmention. (I managed to make a small but often-asked-for update to the site during IWC)
• Improve how my website handles all these check-in posts which are made when someone else checks me in on Swarm. I would like to show who checked me in, at least, if not some of their photos, or maybe even an embedded version of the post from their site.
  
• Keep doing the This Week in the IndieWeb podcast! I had been feeling some burnout about this and falling behind. It was so great to talk with folks who listen to it and rely on it to keep up to date with the goings-on in the community!
• Offer a hand with aaronpk's new social monster catching game, built on IndieWeb building blocks.
• Offer a hand with jgmac1106's idea to issue educational course achievements (badges) via IndieWeb building blocks.
• Work on closing down Camura, a photo-sharing social network I helped build during the awkward age after the first "camera phones" and before Facebook introduced "Mobile Uploads". It has over 100k photos and 50k comments from around 400 folks. I'd like to let it down gently, make sure people have access to those photos, and maybe even preserve some of the best moments of human connection in a public place.

More generally: I think there's a really cool future where IndieWeb building blocks are available on free services like Glitch and Neocities. New folks should be able to register a domain and plug them together in an afternoon, with no coding, and get a website that supports posting all kinds of content and social interactions. All for the cost of a domain! And all with the ability to download their content and take it with them if these services change or they outgrow them. I already built some of this as a goof. The big challenges are simplifying the UX and documenting all of the steps to show folks what they will get and how to get it.

Other fun / ridiculous ideas discussed over the weekend:

• Support Facebook-style colored-background posts like aaronpk did at IWC. I love the simplicity of adding an RGB color as a hashtag.
  
• "This American Bachelor" (working title only) - a dating site as a podcast. Each episode (or season??) is an NPR-style deep dive into the life and longings of a single person looking for love. Alternate title: "Single". The cocktail-driven discussion that produced this idea was a joy.
  

I am sure there are fun ideas that were discussed that I am leaving out. If you can think of any, let me know!

Another late one but a great one. Mastodon adds rel-me, geocaching with WordPress, and Path ends their incredible journey. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for September 15th - 21st, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

Two weeks late but better than never! Pronoun buttons, a class on IndieWeb, and a Google takeover of the web. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for September 8th - 14th, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

My first IndieWebCamp outside the U.S.! Very excited to meet some new faces.

… and to be making my first trip to Germany!

Are you a member of the 🕸💍 IndieWeb Webring? Today I made an update!

All members of the webring get a unique emoji ID when they first sign in. Previously, those emoji might have included the flag of a country or state, and not everyone wants to be associated with a random country or state!

From now on, new emoji IDs will not include country flags.

If you’re a member of the webring already, and would like a new emoji ID, feel free to drop me a line in the #indieweb chat (I’m schmarty there). I’ll reset your account and you’ll get a new emoji ID. You’ll also have to update the webring links code on your page to make sure they point to your new ID!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of September met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 18th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Has been travelling and getting married and had lots of time to think about things! Not to work on them, though. Catching back up on things like Gatsby pages for Digital Harbor Foundation. Feeling some maintenance pains now with Gatsby's GraphQL queries pulling HUGE amounts of data from a WordPress backend – about a 5 minute process for each site build. Upgrading to Gatsby 2 would also require a bunch of changes that he isn't wanting to do. Also, something in the Gatsby build process just broke, without him making any code changes. Wishing now he had built the site in Next.js, which uses REST over GraphQL. For his personal site, he is thinking about how much effort he wants to put into things. He typically uses his personal site as a way to learn new technology, but is now wary of force-fitting things that aren't a good fit. Maybe tweaking his current WordPress site would be a better use of time than rewriting the site. Particularly since he hasn't posted since July.

rhearamakrishnan.com — Not much new on her personal site, since it's working well for her purposes. Posted some new stuff she made over the summer, including a micro chap-book called It Makes More Noise Than I Thought It Would. Been working on other summer projects, like writing poems on postcards for people. Photographing and typing those up to make a mini-collection. Wants to build something on Twine, if she can include a form so people can write letters back to her. She's gonna write out the adventure as she wants it and then think about what kind of interactivity she'd like from readers. Thinking about designing a mini-course for DHF around Twine for students to build stories around it.

martymcgui.re — Hasn't really made much progress on any personal or IndieWeb projects since the last HWC meeting. Had a couple of out of town trips and projects that were good and fulfilling experiences, like going to Camp Improv Utopia East. Those experiences highlighted that maybe he is feeling burned out about some IndieWeb things! For example, he has been letting the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition slip more and more each week and finding it hard to focus. He's trying to figure out what to do for the upcoming IndieWebCamp NYC, which he is excited about, but feeling a bit overwhelmed by project ideas, things he should be doing to help organize, etc.

Other discussion:

• https://twinery.org/ is great for creating interactive stuff - and it seems like the output is plain HTML? So it should be possible to add a form from some service like Formspree or Firebase to an exported project, if the tool doesn't offer exactly that kind of thing.
• Dealing with burnout and feeling stuck on things. Sometimes it helps to get energized by doing something else. Sometimes doing those other things really highlights that you have energy, just not for those things you're burned out on!
• Principle of Least Power is another big thing, here. Jonathan and Marty have both been struggling with projects where the tooling or the plumbing may be taking all the energy available.
• Semantic HTML and CSS can do so much, now. We looked at this CSS-only TODO MVC proof of concept. Talked about HTML definition lists, summary/details tags, figure/figcaption, and more.
• Talked about the pyramid of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and the inverted pyramid of overbuilt JS-dependent frameworks.
  

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you again at our next meetup on Wednesday, October 3rd at 7:30pm!

XOXO Fest happened, fighting in the Fediverse, and new microsub clients bloom. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for September 1st - 7th, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

Facebook’s tweet blips, a post-web era, and oops wow this episode is late! It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for August 25th - 31st, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!