Marty McGuire

Posts Tagged indieweb

2017
Fri Jun 9

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • June 3rd - 9th, 2017

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for June 3rd - 9th, 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 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!

Fri Jun 2

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • May 27th - June 2nd, 2017

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for May 27th - June 2nd, 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 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!

Wed May 31

HWC Baltimore 2017-05-31 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second May 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 31st.

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

jonathanprozzi.net - Since last time, did some cosmetic updates to site. Also did a lot of traveling. Catching up now on finishing a series of posts he started at last HWC (May 10th). Now one-and-a-half posts behind his schedule. Wants to stick with consistency of writing something once per week.

amyhurst.com - Working on a website for work (something that is usually on her "some day" list). Gathering student questions from emails into an FAQ on a Wordpress site.

martymcgui.re - Added JSON Feed to blog.adafruit.com because it was easy and why not? Also talked about webmention notifications in his home Matrix chat server via Hubot. Is interested in more textual/conversational interfaces for things in his life and fewer apps and pages to remember to look at.

metamage.com (jjuran.org) - All sites now HTTPS. A couple are HTTP/HTTPS for classic MacOS clients, others are HTTPS-only. Used PNG/GIF and CSS to make a screenshot of an emulator animate when moused-over (bottom of https://www.v68k.org/advanced-mac-substitute/). Some fun browser issues w/ image handling (dithering?) in Safari. His site uses a homebrew Perl static site generator, shared CSS across all his sites. Planning to rework it in the V language.

Chatted about Micropub becoming a W3C Recommendation, including going through Aaron Parecki's announcement post, which is a very clear walk through of the development process. Talked about micro.blog as an up-and-coming social platform that supports Micropub out of the box. Talked about the power of social nudges (like "how's that project going?") for making progress on projects. Two of us (jjuran and martymcgui.re) will be at IndieWeb Summit in Portland later this June and are looking forward to it!

Top-to-bottom, left-to-right: jjuran.org, amyhurst.com, martymcgui.re, jonathanprozzi.net

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore on June 28th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!  

↩ Replied to https://martymcgui.re/2017/05/12/172008/
post from
Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center 1045 Light St. Baltimore MD 21230
Homebrew Website Club Baltimore May 31, 2017
Join us for an evening of quiet writing, wiki editing, IndieWeb demos and discussions!

Photo for HWC Baltimore 2017-05-31

🗓️ Homebrew Website Club Baltimore May 31, 2017

Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center 1045 Light St. Baltimore MD 21230
📆 Add to Calendar: iCal | Google Calendar

Join us for an evening of quiet writing, wiki editing, IndieWeb demos and discussions!

  • Create or update your personal web site!
  • Finish that blog post you’ve been writing, edit the wiki!
  • Demos of recent IndieWeb breakthroughs, share what you’ve gotten working!
  • Join a community with like-minded interests. Bring friends that want a personal site!

Any questions? Join the #indieweb chat!

Optional quiet writing hour starts at 6:30pm. Meetup begins at 7:30pm.

More information: https://indieweb.org/events/2017-05-31-homebrew-website-club

Facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/777899845722051/

Sun May 28
🔖 Bookmarked Microformats : Meaningful HTML https://microformats.io/

“By adding Microformats to your HTML, your website becomes more understandable to various kinds of computers.

  • Search engines can make sense of your HTML which allows them to display a better version in their search results.
  • Browser extensions can enable your readers to download information to their contacts, calendar, and maps apps.
  • Feed readers can be used to subscribe to your website’s feeds (blog posts, bookmarks, checkins, etc).
  • You can even use your website (with Microformats) to sign into other websites.”
Sat May 27

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • May 20th - 26th, 2017

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for May 20th - 26th, 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 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!

Fri May 26

Site Updates: Webmention Notifications in Matrix with Hubot

Jonathan Prozzi and I have challenged one another to make a post about improving our websites once a week. This is me getting back on the train!

In a previous site update I wrote about setting up a system to notify me whenever my site received webmentions. Essentially, this meant that I could now get notifications on my phone and desktop whenever somebody interacted with my site, such as: replying to one of my posts on their own site, retweeting or favoriting one of my posts, or even RSVPs to my Facebook events.

One thing I didn't super like about this system is that it used the Pushbullet service which, while great, is not under my control.

I've been running a Matrix chat server at home for a while now. I primarily use it to chat with people in my household in IRC channels. I use a really nice client for Matrix called Riot, which runs in the browser, but is also available on Android and iOS, and is capable of sending notifications about chat events, which I have found really handy.

Recently, I've added a chatbot to my Matrix server named Hubot, thanks to the Hubot-Matrix adapter. Hubot is super neat because it is fairly easy to script up new behaviors, and it has nice built-in support for the web - both for making web requests, but Hubot also runs a server for accepting web requests. Once I realized this, it occurred to me that I could replace my previous notification system that uses Pushbullet with one that goes through Hubot.

First, a note on security. Exposing a chatbot's HTTP listener interface to the great wide internet comes at some risk! I made sure to the following:

  • I run Hubot behind a firewall, so no plain HTTP traffic can come directly across the internet.
  • Using another home server, I set up nginx to act as a secure HTTPS proxy, using a certificate from Let's Encrypt to encrypt all traffic that goes over the internet.
  • I decided that any behaviors I write for Hubot that use the HTTP listener will use some kind of secret token to ensure that the request is valid. I don't want spammers blowing up my chatrooms!

I decided that the bot should:

  • Allow a user to request webmention.io notifications for a given site into any room.
  • Generate and store a "callback secret" to work with webmention.io's Web Hook system and tell the user the URL and callback secret to configure over on the Webmention.io Dashboard.
  • Accept HTTP requests from webmention.io at something like <HUBOT_HOST>/hubot/wmio/notify
  • Verify that the request contains the callback secret
  • Generate a nice text summary of the notification based on its contents
  • Send the notification to the room that the user was in when they made the follow request.

With that in mind, I began learning lots about testing Hubot scripts, refreshing myself on Coffeescript, and so on.

I am now happy to introduce this first (janky) release of my Hubot Script, hubot-webmentionio-notify!

Once installed, you can start a conversation with your hubot and ask it to follow a site:

  you> hubot wmio follow mycoolsite.biz
  
hubot> @you OK! Use this as your Web Hook: <HUBOT_URL>/hubot/wmio/notify And use this as your callback secret: 1a2b3c4d5e6f7890000

The string "mycoolsite.biz" can actually be anything and should be something easy to remember in case you want to unfollow notifications later. Hubot doesn't check incoming mentions against it at the moment.

You can enter the URL and callback secret in the Webmention.io dashboard, and future webmentions will be sent to your Hubot and output into the room of your choice.

Notification example - a user on Twitter mentioned my Twitter handle in a post there.

I don't know how useful hubot-webmentionio-notify will be for other folks at the moment, but I am excited be getting these notifications via services that I control. I look forward to building more fun things with Hubot!

Sat May 20

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • May 13th - 19th, 2017

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for May 13th - 19th, 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 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!

Sat May 13

This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition • May 6th - 12th, 2017

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for May 6th - 12th, 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 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!