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!
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!
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!
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.
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!
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!
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!
Below are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.
jonathanprozzi.net - not been making his weekly posts in challenges with Marty. Inspired by a nearby bookstore closing, realized he had done lots of learning in bookstores over the last ~15 years. New idea for a series of posts cataloging all the things learned in a specific place over the years. Wants to journal the things he is learning on a weekly(ish) basis to build an archive.
brianey.com - been writing up lots of ideas for his blog but not finishing them. Based on that unfinished work, started writing about some new topics on creativity. For example, writing about starting things vs. achieving them. Looking forward to writing those including cute graphics of badgers, (em)barkers, etc. and being inspired by those posts to take on other unfinished posts.
amyhurst.com - working on an FAQ page for all the questions she gets from students seeking to get into the grad programs that she manages. It should be a useful resource for students, but also for her to copy and paste into emails from students who don't or won't read it.
martymcgui.re - brought a bunch of posts from an old blog into his site, including old comments from disqus. Did updates to site plumbing so he can add syndication to his posts after the fact with micropub updates, allowing him to get webmentions and notifications of interactions on Twitter, FB, etc via brid.gy without pulling out a laptop.
We talked about the upcoming 2017 IndieWeb Summit June 24th-25th in Portland, Oregon and discussed the indie RSVPs on the site. From there we ended up on Aaron Parecki's site and chatted about the amount of information that is collected and shared, what things we'd like to be collecting for review about ourselves, what things we're comfortable publishing.
Left-to-right: martymcgui.re, brianey.com, amyhurst.com, jonathanprozzi.net. Also: many air plants.
We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore on May 31st at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!
