Thanks to gRegor for the IndieWebCamp swag for Animal Crossing!

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for April 2020 (also virtual Homebrew Website Club US East, met on Zoom from 6pm - 8pm EDT on April 15th. It was mostly NYC folks, with one joining briefly from Portland!

Here are some notes from the meeting!

jmac.org — writing about webmentions on fogknife.com. Learned a lot about them through sending a "strange" RSVP to an event at events.indieweb.org. The RSVP was a longer post, which also included an RSVP inside it. events.indieweb.org treated the post as both an RSVP and a blog post about the event. Jason enjoyed learning about moderating webmentions through that experience! He also accidentally reposted a bunch of links to IndieNews because his site moved from http to https, and those are "new links". Eek!

aaronpk.com — had some time between giving a workshop and speaking at allthetalks.online. can now post photos from his Nintendo Switch to his website by making a new Twitter account that is just for posts from his Switch, then setting up a cron task to pull and post new tweets to special tags on his site, like the #ACNH tag for posts from Animal Crossing New Horizons.

david.shanske.com — now a member of NOAA's Citizen Weather Observing Program (CWOP)! Making him an official weather source. Working on a large project of archiving IndieWeb event videos from YouTube to archive.org. Hopes to find interested in re-watching some older IndieWebCamp videos to reconstruct notes that were lost when Mozilla recently shut down their Etherpad instance.

martymcgui.re — Still posting one cat GIF per day during the COVID-19 shutdown in NYC. Recently started work on a "consolidated watch later" list using IndieWeb building blocks - mostly with microsub channels in Aperture as a queuing mechanism.

Other topics of discussion.

• Home studios! aaronpk has a very nice setup with multiple cameras, switchers, and great lighting. Marty has some parts on order so he can use a DLSR as a webcam. GWG has a nice set up also!
• Personal "this is how I IndieWeb" pages might be useful for helping on-board developers, since each is a personal setup and won't immediately be considered "expert advice". For example, Marty's page on the IndieWeb wiki. Starts at a very high level and adds more detail the further you read.
• More open tests for Webmentions (beyond the strictly-plumbing webmention.rocks)
• Sourcing home supplies in this time of lockdown. GWG recommends bidets.

Thanks to all who joined us! We will see you all again at our next IndieWeb NYC (aka vHWC US East) meetup online on May 20th! Keep an eye on indieweb.nyc or events.indieweb.org/tag/nyc for the exact date, time, and online location!

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for March 2020, which was also Virtual Homebrew Website Club US East, met on Zoom from 6pm - 8pm EDT. Folks joined us from New York, Connecticut, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Toronto, London, and Berlin!

Here are some notes from the meeting!

gRegorLove.com — gRegor is calling in from San Diego! Was at the recent IWC Austin. Currently working on updating site the header across his site to make it more responsive and now to be more consistent across his pages. He's also been playing w/ typography and vertical rhythm. More notes on that below!

martymcgui.re — Marty has not worked much on IndieWeb projects recently. Currently doing an Eternal Caturday project, posting one animated cat GIF per day while staying home and "social distancing".

svenknebel.de — Sven joins from Germany (where he is up late). Slowly getting back into IndieWeb projects via text files he wrote sometime around 2018. Looking over items labelled "really need to be done at some point".

cheuk.dev — Cheuk joins from London (and is also up late). Co-organized the IndieWebCamp London online event last weekend and learned a lot. Working on adding more IndieWeb building blocks to her site.

tiaramiller.com — Tiara is working on un-breaking how she updates her website. Also working with a Long Island Women in Tech group, helping make a sign-up page to automate invites to their community Slack. Her jobs is still making her go to work in person rather than work from home!

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Dmitri is currently joining from Canada! Worked on his website last weekend. Wants his iteration speed to be faster than industry change, but that wasn't true for the issue tracker that he runs on his site. It has a public API that he doesn't want to break for other people. Now forking that feature to his own site so he can make changes.

david.shanske.com — David remote participated in IWC London and has a lot of new projects! Currently working on making the links on the top of his site match those at the bottom.

tantek.com — Tantek is staying in under a shelter-in-place order in SF! His work is very virtual already, but he is now seeing almost no humans. Most recent site update was adding a recent photos grid to the sidebar on his site's front page during IWC Austin. Still posting (positive) photos every day!

mfgriffin.com — Matt maybe broke his indieauth/relmeauth setup for the IndieWeb wiki? Looking to fix that so he can go through his TODO list there. Wants to pick something to finish during this meetup!

jmac.org — Also fogknife.com. Jason is in NYC now and helping organize IndieWeb events. Learned of IndieWeb ~2 years ago, specifically interested in webmention. So much so that he wrote a Perl module for it! Builds his own CMS Plerd and wants to add webmention to it this summer in a way that other folks might be able to use. So far he has something like a clone of webmention.io that works as a command line utility.

jgregorymcverry.com — Greg had a productive IWC London. Added CSS subgrid (now supported in Firefox) to the article cards on his site. Also added fluffy's webmention.js to his article pages so his site now displays webmentions! He thought it would be harder. Spending his time now making lots of videos and posting them as he tries to make tutorials for teachers who must now teach online. Recently added bittorrent links to his videos because they're eating up a lot of bandwidth on his shared host.

boffosocko.com — Chris joins us from LA! Been working on a TiddlyWiki for his own site. He is interested in using it as a Commonplace Book, taking notes on all sorts of things, and wants to add proper microformats2 and webmention support so his wiki can interact with those of others!

Drew — Joins us from Connecticut (and often attends HWCs organized by jgregorymcverry.com). Drew is a preschool teacher and is working on his district's website. Also working on mcweeneyaquaticconsulting.com and demoed some of the layout features he's been working on.

Other topics of discussion:

• Vertical rhythm and typography! gRegor has been learning about it for his site and found several interesting resources:
  • Type Scale - A Visual Calculator (lets you set paragraph height and derive heading sizes)
  • Vertical Rhythm (CSS generation tool)
    
  • Why is Vertical Rhythm an Important Typography Practice? | Zell Liew
  • Were We Wrong About Vertical Rhythm All Along? | Zell Liew
• A philosophical question: what are our websites? Replacements for ourselves?
  • Ben Werdmüller used to have a voice-controllable bot on his website that answered questions about him. It seems to be gone now?
  • Would a historian be able to understand "who you were" by your website alone?
• Storing webmentions! Jason is working on a new project that "would work for no one else but works for me". It was inspired by some brainstorming by Tantek and others on the IndieWeb wiki.
• How do all the IndieWeb bridges work for IRC, Slack, Matrix, etc? IRC is Freenode, the web and Slack bridges are community projects maintained by Aaron Parecki, Matrix.org runs a Freenode bridge for Matrix users, the Discord bridge is maintained by another community member.
• EXIF metadata - there are a lot of incompatible versions of it with a lot of special-case handling!
  
• Is Kicks Condor okay? We are pretty sure the answer is yes. We definitely want him to continue work on Fraidycat!
• Demos!
  • Jason showed the storage folders and format (UUID folder names with "webmentions.json" files). Previously these were serialized Perl objects!
  • Dmitri showed his latest issue tracker.
  • Marty showed his Eternal Caturday feed, and demoed a test page for David showing location info on a post extracted from a photograph's EXIF metadata.
    

Thanks to all who joined us out! We will see you all again at our next IndieWeb NYC (aka vHWC US East) meetup online on April 15th! Keep an eye on indieweb.nyc or events.indieweb.org/tag/nyc for the exact date, time, and online location!

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for February 2020 met at Think Coffee on Mercer St on January 25th around 2pm.

Here are some notes from the meeting!

jmac.org — Is now in NYC for the foreseeable! Looking forward to more IndieWeb events in NYC. Put up a "Now" page in December, and ended up chatting with the person who recently started the trend of making Now pages. Has been dusting off his Perl modules like Web::Mention and Web::Microformats. Also has some publisher interest and a draft outline for an introductory book on Webmention!

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Has wrapped up his work on building IndieAuth into his site so that other folks can log in using their own domain as their identity. He's now getting back to making improvements to his Go projects issue tracker. The first step there is to pull his projects off the public version of his issue tracker into a new private one so he can iterate on it quickly without affecting other users. He's also been playing with various databases available to Go and is leaning towards not worrying about selecting one now. Instead: keep content in memory and don't let your server process die. 😂

filippo.io — First time at an IndieWeb event! His day job is security for the Go language project. At the meetup tonight he added links to his site to enable RelMeAuth, which let him log into Dmitri's website using his own website as his identity!

aaronparecki.com — Spent lots of time getting his new open source events service Meetable in shape to be as easy as possible to install. He built configuration wizards to help walk through the setup process on shared hosting, and automated away even more of the work when you launch it on Heroku! Aaron also recently updated his /photos to include captions when you hover over them. This helps them show up correctly on micro.blog so he can be part of the February photo challenge. Aaron also showed off SIMTRACKER — a WiFi e-Ink badge he's been working on that pulls an automatically-generated image off his website to summarize his recent activity, including food, drink, sleep, time away from home, phone battery, and more. Oh, and he published a new book 😏.

martymcgui.re — Not a lot of work on his own site, but recently built a single-use "random job placement" website for a friend who is launching a book about an absurd journey through temporary work. Marty complained that the work he did on indieweb.nyc was largely made obsolete by Aaron's excellent Meetable project — folks can follow IndieWeb Events in NYC on events.indieweb.org/tag/nyc/. He has hopes to continue working on the project site, eventually getting live updates from Meetable. At the meeting Marty set up a copy of Meetable with Aaron's help, largely to test out the setup workflow, but maybe to post improv shows... Marty also wants to improve, document, and encourage folks to build on the Microsub-powered photo frame he built on an Adafruit PyPortal so long ago, particularly how he got the low-powered touchscreen device to work with IndieAuth through an IndieAuth Device Flow Proxy.

Other topics of discussion:

• !!con (Bang Bang Con) is happening May 9th-10th in NYC. The call for proposals for 10 minute lightning talks is open! Proposing a talk means you're guaranteed a ticket to the event!
• We may try new venues for IndieWeb NYC meetups, including Columbia University (near Broadway and 125th St) and the Ability Project at NYU (Brooklyn near MetroTech).
• Filippo doesn't like JSON Web Tokens, publicly, because they are too easy to configure insecurely. Aaron warns that they are getting baked deep into a new draft of some OAuth spec. 😬
• Some discussion was had about verifying two-way links between your homepage and your silo account for RelMeAuth. When making indielogin.com, Aaron decided to verify that the silo account links back after the user has logged in to their account — primarily because using the silo's API is so much more reliable than trying to scrape their silo profile information.
• Is This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition coming back? Not right now, but Marty reminds everyone that he documented in detail how he summarized the newsletter content into a podcast script each week. Reading all the updates and making the summaries is the most time-consuming part of making the podcast. Perhaps some tooling and collaborators could make this process more incremental as new articles, events, and wiki content appear?
• Aaron walked Marty through the process of setting up a new instance of Meetable on Heroku and it went pretty dang smoothly, though there was one server error speedbump. There's already a GitHub issue for it.
• Maybe Aaron will work on making IndieLogin easy to self-host, soon??
• Aaron recently experienced a weird bug with yellow streaking in low-light photos on his iPhone. Searching around indicated that other people had experienced the same thing ... and that it went away with the latest software update. Strange errors in HDR processing? It's weird that cameras are computers.
• Everybody loves WireGuard as a magic-feeling VPN tunnel thing. Aaron recently got it working on his home network without running the WireGuard software on his router(s). He plans to write this up soon!

Thanks to all who came out! We will see you all again in March! Keep an eye on indieweb.nyc for the exact date, time, and location! You can subscribe to the calendar there to receive automatic updates!

Thanks to Ruxton for making available the source to the IndieWeb Best Nine, here are my “Best 9 Photos of 2019”.

The app walks your personal website, looking for photo posts, then makes a collage of the best nine. “Best” is determined by most IndieWeb likes or replies.

I initially tried to use the online version, but ran into some issues, so I grabbed the source and started tweaking it to handle some quirks of my site.

• My monthly archives contain next/prev links that can be used to crawl my whole archive, but I don’t consider e.g. /2019/01/ to be a “feed”, so it’s just a collection of h-entry items. I updated the microformats2 crawler to support pages that are a collection of h-entry without a containing h-feed.
• Counted replies marked up as ‘comment’ rather than ‘reply’.
• Changed the resulting image size to fit more with my site’s layout.
• Filtered out comments from myself, as well as automated comments on my checkins from Swarm via OwnYourSwarm.
• Added cropping to make non-square images square.
• Added some debugging to spit out my posts and their interaction counts.

Here are the links to the individual top 9 photo posts!

• https://martymcgui.re/2019/03/29/153239/ (11 likes, 2 replies)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/06/29/133546/ (1 like, 1 reply)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/04/18/133411/ (1 like, 1 reply)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/10/19/155613/ (1 like)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/06/09/142254/ (1 like)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/06/11/185857/ (1 reply)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/06/27/220354/ (1 reply)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/10/06/122724/ (1 like)
• https://martymcgui.re/2019/06/29/135959/ (1 like)

You can find my modified version of indieweb-bestnine on GitHub!

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for January 2020 met at Think Coffee on Mercer St on January 25th around 2pm.

Here are some notes from the meeting!

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Made even more progress on integrating IndieAuth into his site! In addition to letting people log in to his site with GitHub profile URLs (github.com/username), he has finished changes to allow folks to log into his site with their own URLs via IndieAuth. Along the way he learned a lot about and contributed to the IndieAuth spec! He wrapped up and deployed it at this meetup!

martymcgui.re — Since last time, create a very minimal indieweb.nyc site for folks that want to track IndieWeb events in NYC. This was just a few week's ahead of Aaron Parecki's launch of events.indieweb.org. 😂 Marty plans to continue updating indieweb.nyc but now has the events there link to events.indieweb.org.

Other topics of discussion

• Tiara, Matt, and Jason were missed! Jason has been involved in the IndieWeb for a while, and we're excited to have him join the NYC community!
  
• The new IndieWeb events site is great! Marty is looking forward to using it for future IndieWeb NYC meetups.
• Thanks to Tantek for pointing out a Twitter thread about webrings and Tor onion sites. Marty spent a good portion of the meetup looking through folks sites (and checking that the .onion mirror of his own site (onion link) was working.
  

Thanks to all who came out! We will see you all again in February! Keep an eye on indieweb.nyc for the exact date, time, and location! You can subscribe to the calendar to receive automatic updates (webcal link)!

Are you a member of the 🕸💍 IndieWeb Webring? Today I added a page for Terms of Use and Frequently Asked Questions!

The webring has mostly been churning along on its own, with a few folks adding themselves here and there. A couple of times folks have shown up in IndieWeb chat to let me know about sites that break the webring, or when they ran into other issues.

Hopefully this page answers some of the more common things that come up. The TL;DR version? The webring is more proof-of-concept than robust-community-service. I’ll do my best, but can’t make any promises! 😅

If you have any questions that aren’t addressed there, please let me know!

Update 2020-05-18

As with most in-person events, IndieWeb Summit 2020 has been cancelled.

I’ll be sad to miss out on a fun weekend-and-a-day-or-two time to catch up in person with some great IndieWeb community folks, collaborate on projects, and draw inspiration for my own site.

Thankfully, as a group of folks with a web-focus, there is plenty to keep up with online!

In fact, you can join us at one this week on Wednesday May 20th from 6-8pm US Eastern!

https://events.indieweb.org/2020/05/online-indieweb-meetup-nyc-vkY32vBfCTEJ

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for November 2019 met at Think Coffee on Mercer St on November 16th around 2pm.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Made lots of progress on understanding IndieAuth and how he might integrate it into his site. Starting with GitHub profile URLs (github.com/username), he will expand to allowing folks to log into his site with their own URLs. Been working on the user experience aspects of this, as it needs to be attractive and easy to do. Currently working to clear his development plate for his site by wrapping up some features related to notifications before getting back to auth-related work.

martymcgui.re — Hasn't had much time to work on website projects, so spent today making event posts for a couple of upcoming improv shows. Also worked on barebones event feeds for indieweb.nyc, which is so very much a work in progress. Very excited to have started planning an IndieWebCamp NYC for early 2020 at NYU. Details below and many more to come!

Other topics of discussion:

• David and Tiara were missed! Calendar reminders would have helped, so this is now a top-priority feature for indieweb.nyc. 😅
• Paths to getting people started on their own webpages. Dmitri recently helped his mother set up a starter static site on GitHub pages, which only took a couple of hours, but provided the benefits she wanted. If she wants more features in the future, this was easy enough that she won't feel bad "throwing it away".
  
• NYU Tandon can host an IWC NYC in Spring 2020! Can reserve 3 main rooms and additional classrooms for breakouts. Located in Brooklyn at Jay St./Metrotech. Tentative weekends include late March/early April and mid-to-late May. Will add suggestions to /Planning soon!
  
• Complexity of managing "simple" "composable" cloud services (AWS Lambda, "infrastructure as code" projects like Terraform)
• MacBook Pro 16" has been updated! It's so much like the 2015 MBP! Everything old is new again.

Thanks to everyone who came out and braved the crowded weekend tables. Apparently it is always crowded at Think Coffee Mercer, so perhaps we'll try a new venue next time! We hope that you'll join us for the next IndieWeb NYC meetup on December 7th. Watch indieweb.nyc for info about the exact time and location!

Whew, these slides from Laura Kalbag at the recent FF Conf are quite good. Looking forward to seeing a recording of the talk!

https://noti.st/laurakalbag/Y4Q95l/slides