Photo for HWC Baltimore 2017-05-31

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!

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.

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!

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!

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!

Baltimore's April 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on April 19th.

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.

We hope that you'll join us for the next HWC Baltimore on May 31st at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center! 

Photo for tonight’s HWC Baltimore