Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for August 19th - 25th, 2017.

This week features a brief interview with Tom Brown recorded at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

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!

Baltimore's second August 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 23rd.

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

jonathanprozzi.net (Jonathan) – Had been working on a wedding site with Hugo and making progress. Got really frustrated with adding image galleries, which required a lot of extra tools. Realized that he could accomplish the same thing in WordPress really quickly. So, spent quiet writing hour starting over in WordPress. At this point, just wants to have it done, rather than spending time learning something new along the way.

martymcgui.re (Marty) – Since last time has been thinking a lot more about delivering transcriptions with audio content. Did more experimenting with Audiogram, and found the BBC's fork, which supports subtitles and transcription editing, but also depends on a lot of private BBC infrastructure out of the box. Is now able to get timestamped transcripts by combining an audio file and long-form text transcription using a tool called gentle. Then by feeding that into a hacked-up copy of the BBC's Audiogram can generate video with hardcoded subtitles. Here's an example from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb. Pretty neat! Also experimenting with providing a text transcript of the audio newsletter along w/ the audio via a simple HTML details/summary elements with an iframe. Example here.

Other things:

• We talked about use cases where static sites are great (simple project sites) and not-so-great (lots of media files).
• We also chatted a lot about the future of the This Week in the IndieWeb audio edition, making the content more accessible, making it more engaging.
• We also talked about being aware of when it makes sense to use manual tools vs. trying to creating automation, such as the tradeoffs with using "manual" video editing tools vs. tools like Audiogram.
  

We hope that you'll join us for another HWC Baltimore, which will next meet on September 6th and again on September 20th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center! 

Here’s an interview with Jean MacDonald from the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb.

🎧 Full Episode:

https://martymcgui.re/2017/08/19/140447/

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for August 12th - 18th, 2017.

This week features a brief interview with Jean MacDonald recorded at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

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!

I (finally) watched the video of this session from IndieWeb Summit 2017:

https://youtu.be/C0Cv10b83RE

One of the most powerful ideas discussed is the “algorithm that works for you”, to avoid information overwhelm.

Time to nudge the folks that started working on Together after the session!

https://cleverdevil.io/2017/richard-its-early-but-at-last-weekends-indieweb-summit-in

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for August 5th - 11th, 2017.

This week features a brief interview with Anton Podviaznikov recorded at IndieWeb Summit 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

You can subscribe with your favorite podcast app on huffduffer.

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!

I publish a few different podcasts and often find myself advertising new episodes by syndicating new posts to various social media silos.

Sadly, few social media services consider audio to be "a thing", despite often having robust support for video.

I'm certainly not the first person to notice this, and the fine folks at WNYC have taken this audio sharing problem head-on.

Enter the Audiogram Generator, an open source project that runs on NodeJS and uses FFMPEG to take samples from your audio files and munge them into short videos for sharing on social networks.

Here's a quick rundown of how I got the Audiogram Generator running on my macOS laptop using Docker.

I use Homebrew, so first I installed docker and docker-machine and created a new default machine:

  brew install docker docker-machine
  docker-machine create -d virtualbox default

Once that finished, I set my environment variables so the docker command line utility can talk to this machine:

eval $(docker-machine env)

Next, it was time to download the source for the audiogram generator from GitHub and build the Docker container for it:

  git clone https://github.com/nypublicradio/audiogram.git
  cd audiogram
  docker build -t audiogram .

Finally, I could run it:

  docker run -p 8888:8888 -t -i audiogram
  npm start

Once up, I pointed my browser at http://192.168.99.100:8888/ and I saw pretty much the interface that you see in the screenshot above.

The basic usage steps are:

• Choose an audio file
• Choose a template
  • Templates w/ images are hardcoded into the app, so if you want to use them with your own images you'll have to make changes to the source.
• Choose a selection of the audio that is less than 300 seconds long
• Add any text if the template requires it
• Generate!
• Download
• Upload to silos!

I made a sample post to my own site using a selection of an interview and then syndicated that post by uploading the same video to Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon.

I don't yet know exactly how I'll choose what portions to share on each silo, what text and links to accompany them to encourage folks to listen to the full episodes, and so on. There are also some quirks to learn. For example, Twitter has a maximum length of 2:20 for videos, and its cropping tool would glitch out and reset to defaults unless I stopped it "near" the end.

Thankfully, there is a very detailed Audiogram Generator usage doc with lots of examples and guidelines for making attention-getting posts.

For the near term I want to play with the tool to see what kinds of results I can make. Long-term I think this would be a really neat addition to my Screech tool, which is designed for posting audio to your own website.

How do you feel about audiograms? I'd love to hear other folks' thoughts!

Baltimore's first August 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 9th.

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

djfalcon23 (Derek) – been on break of web dev to learn Android dev. Set up a schedule to work on his portfolio site on Wednesdays. Has a WIP site up at djfalcon23.github.io with a landing page. Next steps are modals to display the content for the main sections, a carousel for other photos. After that, it's time to make a project page for his LED backpack with brake and turn signals for cyclists.

jonathanprozzi.net (Jonathan) – started a new Hugo project for his wedding which will be his "Hugo project" so he can feel free to move his main site over to WordPress. Bought and set up a new domain and a new Hugo project for that.

polarfire.net (Isaac) – In town visiting Marty. Spent quiet writing hour tracking down the source for his Pelican-based site which was last updated 2014 and getting the dependencies installed. Likes starting side projects, so might port it to Hugo. Many of his projects are related to owning his data on a home server. Next major step there is setting up backups w/ duplicity.

martymcgui.re (Marty) – Did some reading from the folks at @meetgretta (formerly signl.fm) and learned about a tool called Audiogram from WNYC. It generates videos from audio files for sharing on silos that have good video sharing support but not audio, which is most of them. Made an example post with an interview with Ben Werdmüller from the This Week in the IndieWeb Podcast that is syndicated to Twitter, Facebook, and Mastodon.

Other things:

• djfalcon23 showed a cool use of parallax on firewatchgame.com.
  
• Talked about automated captions for audio, showed off some of the Gretta demos.
• djfalcon23 pointed us to @noopkat, who streams live development and was recently working on similar tools.
• martymcgui.re did a quick demo of the micro.blog iOS app for posting tonight's photo

We hope that you'll join us for another HWC Baltimore, which will next meet on August 23rd and again September 6th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!