Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 11th - 17th, 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!

Earlier this week I announced Screech, a simple client for posting audio content (such as podcasts) to your own site using Micropub.

I’m pleased to announce that Screech is now available publicly. You can check it out at https://screech.schmarty.net/.

Screech also now has an adorable logo, thanks to a couple of pieces of public domain art.

• Owl from LumoSpark
• Microphone from OpenClipArt-Vectors

I've been working on my idea of what IndieWeb podcast publishing looks like for some months now, both with the improvised We Have to Ask comedy podcast that I make with Jonathan Monroe and more recently with the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition that I started producing last month.

In addition to following standard IndieWeb-friendly practices like using microformats2 feeds, backfeeding social interactions from Twitter and Facebook with bridgy, and exploring other interesting audio markup tricks, I wanted a tool that made it easy for me to publish new content to my sites via the Micropub protocol, which supports sending audio media files.

I didn't see another micropub client in the wild that supported audio files in the way that I wanted, so I made my own.

Screech is an audio-publishing-focused micropub web client with a Python server component built on Flask. Screech supports logging in with your own site using indieauth and posts to your site's micropub endpoint.

It's still a work-in-progress, but the basic flows work well enough for my needs.

One fun feature of Screech is that once you select an MP3 file for upload, it uses the jsmediatags library to pull out information about the track, such as its duration, track title, album and artist info, etc. This info is outside the scope of the Micropub standard, but if you want to add support to your server, you'll see those properties arrive with names like "id3-title", "id3-artist", etc.

Edit, March 17, 2017 — Screech is available at screech.schmarty.net. If you'd like to run it yourself, add features, or fix bugs, you can find the source code and instructions on GitHub.

Edit, November 30, 2022 — Screech has been rewritten in PHP. The new version is available at screech.bayside.pub. If you'd like to run it yourself, add features, or fix bugs, you can find the source code and instructions on my Git server.

There are many TODOs yet on my plate for Screech before I'd consider it "done", such as micropub media endpoint support, syndication support, adding a photo to the post as a "poster" image, and more.

I'd love to hear feedback from the IndieWeb community! What do you think it means to be an "IndieWeb podcaster"? What features would make Screech useful for you?

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for March 3th - 10th, 2017.

Thanks to everyone for the feedback so far! In responding to a couple of listener requests, I slowed my speaking rate down for this week’s updates. However, because I am re-using some common clips, it sounds like I am speeding up and slowing down quite a bit. My apologies for any confusion this causes! I plan to re-record the common samples soon.

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 February 25th - March 3rd, 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!

A common IndieWeb principle, after "Own Your Data" is Publish on your Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere .

In general, this means that you should make posts on your own site, then copy the post to silos like Twitter, Facebook, etc., to reach the folks in those communities. To complete the process, include links on your site from the original post out to the syndicated copies.

One fun reason to do this is that tools like brid.gy use syndication links in order to backfeed comments and reactions from silos like Facebook and Twitter to your own site.

I'd been collecting these links for a while and displaying them in a "hidden" way - so tools like bridgy could see them, but a human reading the page would not.

Yesterday I added a "See also:" section that includes links out to any syndicated copies of my posts on other sites.

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for February 18th - 24th, 2017.

You can find all of my audio editions here.

And maybe you can subscribe with whatever you consume podcasts with on huffduffer.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 48 - Glitch, Day 9, 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!

Jeremy raises some great points here that mirror some of my own worries about trying to summarize the discussions happening on the IndieWeb wiki and the many #indieweb chat channels.

When I had the initial idea to do an “audio edition” of This Week in the IndieWeb, the question of “who is the audience” seemed to have an obvious answer: folks who would read the newsletter but preferred an audio edition.

However, it quickly became clear that doing a “direct read” of the newsletter — where much of the content is names and links to changes on wiki pages — wouldn’t make a lot of sense when spoken aloud. So, my first crack at the format evolved into answering a slightly broader question: “how can I explain these updates to someone who might not already be familiar with the wiki?”

My short (and unhelpful) answer is: this is hard. The discussions on the wiki tend to be very technical, jargon-heavy, and touch on an extremely wide set of topics. In the first episode, I attempted to give some structure with groupings like “IndieWeb Events”, “Software and Services”, “Silo Updates”, “Silo Issues”, etc., but I agree with Jeremy that it is still very fast and dense. While I want to keep the podcast short (less than 10 minutes), I think a next positive step would be to give topics more time to breathe with some explanatory commas that give context.

It is my hope that projects like this podcast will help find new ways to phrase and frame the things that the IndieWeb community are doing and talking about, helping to reach new folks. I have a feeling it is going to be a lot of work. :}

Over the weekend I created an English audio version of the most recent This Week in the IndieWeb newsletter. This led to some great discussion in the #indieweb chat about improvements and next-steps in creating a podcast from audio posts on one's own website. Today I added a couple of features to my site towards that end.

First up, I added support for "tag aggregations" - essentially, pages that list all posts with a certain tag. So, any future editions of this audio newsletter that I post can be tagged with "this-week-indieweb-podcast" and will then show up on the "This Week in the IndieWeb Podcast" page. It should soon be possible to feed that page to a tool like Granary to convert the feed on that page, with its audio entries, into an RSS feed suitable for subscribing with a podcast app.

Next up, I added support for "Media Fragments", a W3C recommendation that allows linking to a specific timestamp to start (and even stop!) playback of video and audio. Aaron Parecki's recently implemented this on his own site and was kind enough to share the implementation! Now, you can create links that jump to a specific time of any audio or video post on my site.

For example, if you want to quickly jump to the part of the This Week in the IndieWeb audio edition that contains info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetings, it looks like this: https://martymcgui.re/2017/02/18/151503/#t=54

Media fragments could enable some fun things, such as a list of links that index directly to particular sections of a long recording.

Aaron also documented a fun way to use media fragments for attribution of other people's audio or video posts. For example, my audio newsletter made use of several of Aaron Parecki's pieces from his 100DaysOfMusic project. I gave attribution by linking to Aaron's posts from my post, and because Aaron's site supports Webmentions, you can see that my post shows up in the "mentions" list for one of the clips I used. With media fragment support, it should be possible to have the mentions on Aaron's post link directly to the exact portion of my audio post where it appears!

Features like this give me hope that it could be possible to make an IndieWeb podcasting experience that is richer and more interactive than the current directory model.

Audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for February 10th - 17th, 2017

Thinking about doing this as a regular thing, if I can get the production time down. Feedback welcome!

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project:

• Day 48 - Glitch
• Day 49 - Floating
• Day 9
• Day 11