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

IndieWeb NYC's meetup for October 2019 ( see also) met at Think Coffee on Mercer St on October 19th around 2pm.

tiaramiller.com — Relaunched her site as a Hugo site hosted on Netlify during the recent IndieWebCamp NYC. Since then, has been working on adding features. Set up voxpelli's webpage-micropub-to-github on Heroku and was able to log into Indigenous and create a new like post! webpage-micropub-to-github is designed for Jekyll, so it created the post file in an unexpected place, but she should be able to tweak that and get things working. Also added herself (back) to the IndieWeb Webring.

mfgriffin.com — Upon some (possibly bad) advice from Marty and Tiara, Matt worked towards hosting his Hugo-powered site via GitHub and Netlify, rather than compiling it on his laptop and uploading the finished HTML to a server. Ran into issues with git submodules, and then a version mismatch between the theme he was using and the version of Hugo on Netlify. He was able to update the published HTML pages to let himself login to indieweb.org to review his todo list, meaning he made it to "step zero" on his list of goals for the day.

martymcgui.re — Working on indieweb.nyc, a site for IndieWeb events in and around New York City. Mostly spent time on plumbing, setting up a barebones Hugo site and hosting it on Netlify. Keeps finding himself pulled between desires: to get barebones content up, to allow interested folks to add events to their calendar, to work on plumbing that will make it easier to manage events via micropub, and to work on styling, theming, and logo.

Thanks to everyone who came out and braved the crowded weekend tables. Apparently it was midterms time at NYU? We hope that you'll join us for the next meetup, on November 16th. Watch indieweb.nyc for info about the exact time and location!

I’m pretty terrible about doing post-event write-ups. Thankfully as a co-organizer for the recent IndieWebCamp NYC, I helped assembled a “thanks for coming” email which became a wrap-up post for the event.

In honor of the IndieWeb in Practice session, I’m curating some of my photos and videos from the weekend.

And, since I’m thinking about the event as I look through them, I’ll capture some lessons learned for next time, as well!

Friday

First up, some photos I took while I wanted for others to join for the pre-event meetup on Friday. I forgot that the Stone Street tables, while they appear to be open seating, actually belong to restaurants who may chase you away.

A couple of lessons learned for this event: ask for RSVPs to the Friday social when people register for tickets. Also, pick a place that takes reservations!

Saturday

First up, Tiara and I picked up food for the camp from Leo’s Bagels.

Then it was time to help set up the camp at the Pace Seidenberg school. Thanks to Aaron we had a table full of IndieWeb pins and stickers, as well as pronoun pins for ask/he/she/they. I also brought in some simple stick-on name badges and markers, but before next camp I want to pick up some multi-colored lanyards instead, as a way of letting attendees state their preferences for our photo policy.

While we waited for folks to show up, David set up our tech setup and Greg worked with our keynotes Amira (on site) and Amanda (remote). After a brief kick-off, it was keynote time!

A couple of lessons-learned, here.

Out of something like 50 registrants, we had about 12 folks actually show up. A pretty dismal attrition rate! In the future, I think we will charge at least a small registration fee for IndieWebCamp NYC, so that registrants have something at stake if they don’t come.

For an introduction to the weekend, we really should have followed past examples like the Day 1 introduction for IndieWeb Summit. I think the Saturday discussions would also have benefitted from a 10-minute “What is the IndieWeb?” intro from one of the organizers.

Saturday Intros and Demos

Following keynotes, we had an introduction and demo session where anyone could introduce themselves and show off some features of their website. There were a couple of lessons learned here, as well!

David did a great job with our tech, setting up self-contained stations consisting of low-cost Android TV boxes that connect to a display over HDMI, can be controlled via an infrared remote, and are pre-configured to sign into a pre-set Zoom meeting, which can be recorded. One thing we didn’t prep for very well was that in order to present with such a setup, all presenters and folks giving demos need to dial into the Zoom meeting and share their screen or browser window. This allows remote participants to not only see and hear but also join in on presenting, which is great. This extra bit of setup wasn’t much work, but it was time-consuming and frantic when not expected.

One final note, we should set clear expectations at the start of intros and demos for how and what to present, how much time each person has, and should have an emcee to keep them moving with minimal commentary (and only positive commentary, if any at all).

Saturday Sessions

After keynotes and demos, it was time to do some session planning and build out the grid of discussions for the day.

Building out the Saturday discussion session grid is always an interesting challenge, and I often step up to try and help emcee it if I am co-organizing. We had many attendees who were new to the IndieWeb community, and it was sometimes tricky to find concise wording for a given topic. That said, I think we came away with some particularly interesting things to discuss!

But before discussion sessions, some lunch. Matt and I went to 150 Market, which had a perfectly mediocre lunch hot bar.

I didn’t take any photos during the sessions, though I did help with note-taking in many of them. I’ll have to jot down my experiences with those in another post.

During the last session, Greg and I cleaned up all the uneaten food (we definitely bought too much!) and picked up the space. Then we closed for the day, with the organizers taking a brief trip to One Pace Plaza, which would be our location for day two.

Getting to the room was a little confusing, so I made a quick video to send out to registrants that night.

After that, it was time for dinner, cocktails, and winding down.

Sunday

Feeling burned by our bagel-and-fruit over-buy on Saturday, Tiara and I decided to provide coffee and let folks get breakfast on their own. The Dunkin Donuts where we picked up coffee also had the Beyond Meat faux-sausage patties, so I took the opportunity to try it.

Lesson learned here: out of two Starbucks in the Pace area where I tried to buy boxed coffee, none of them had this available!

After morning of hacking on my demo (post TBD!) and lending an assist with Tiara’s Hugo setup, it was lunchtime! Greg was kind enough to sponsor a delivery from Dos Toros Taqueria which, despite their nearly impossible to use website, worked out well and was delicious.

With food and more coffee in our stomachs, we hacked until demo time!

After demos was a quick cleanup, break for dinner, a stop outside 177 Bleecker St., and a short round of cocktails before I headed home, exhausted. 😅

Note: much of this was taken from the "thank-you" email that Greg, Tantek, Tiara, and I put together to send attendees after camp

Thanks to all organizers and attendees for making this year's IndiewebCamp NYC a success! From the enlightening keynotes and in-depth discussions on Saturday, to the successful launch of several new personal websites and other projects on Sunday, we are extremely pleased with how it went.

Here's a quick recap of the weekend.

Friday

Six of us met up at Adrienne's pizzabar on Stone Street for pizza, pasta, and discussion of the weekend to come! Thanks to Mozilla for sponsoring this pre-event social!

Saturday

We kicked things off at the Pace Seidenberg school in NYC's Financial District with bagels, fruit, and coffee thanks to our Open Collective donors!

Amira Dhalla opened the day with a keynote on data privacy in this age of online surveillance. You can find her slides here.

Amanda Rush walked us through some concrete steps that we can take to make our websites more accessible. Look for a link to her talk transcript on indieweb.org/2019/NYC as soon as we can make it available.

We then made a schedule of attendee-facilitated discussions, covering topics like Automation, Getting Started, Why We Publish, and many more!

You can find the full list of discussions, including session notes and video streams, at https://indieweb.org/2019/NYC/Schedule

Sunday

Sunday was a day of making, with 10 of us convening at One Pace Plaza to create and hack on our personal sites and projects. We kicked off by having each participant stick notes for their planned projects on the wall for accountability, then dove in!

After a sponsored lunch from Dos Toros Taqueria (thanks to ReVIEW Talent Feedback System), we wrapped up our work and demoed what progress we had made.

Three participants were able to demonstrate brand new personal sites, and many more folks had made incremental improvements or fixes! You can find the full details on what was demoed at https://indieweb.org/2019/NYC/Demos

Reflections

I'll post some of my own, shortly, but we also want to see yours!

Did you take photos? Write a blog post about the experience? Want to share? We encourage everyone to help us get the word out about IndieWebCamp NYC. Please hashtag your posts with #IndieWebCamp!

We'll be collecting blog posts, short notes, photos, and more on the event page at: https://indieweb.org/2019/NYC#Blog_posts

As a bonus, if you publish by Friday Oct 11 at 2pm Eastern time you can even make the weekly IndieWeb newsletter! There are 4 ways to make it into the newsletter:

• Syndicate your blog post to IndieNews
• Post your link in IRC, Slack, or chat
• Share a link on Twitter with the hashtag #IndieWebCamp. Our friendly bot Loqi will pick up the link, drop it into our chat channels, and a community member can add your post to the newsletter.
• Ask a community member in chat and we will help you out!

Upcoming IndieWeb Events

Live near NYC and hungry for more IndieWeb? We encourage you to attend our semi-regular IndieWeb Meetups in NYC!

Our next meetup is scheduled for October 19. Exact time and location time are still TBD. To learn more check out the brand new (and under construction) indieweb.nyc.

And of course, New York City isn't the only place for the IndieWeb! You can find a list of upcoming IndieWebCamps and local meetups worldwide at https://indieweb.org/Events

We have a few more IndieWebCamps in particular this year, so if you’re nearby one of these cities, check it out:

• October 19-20th: IndieWebCamp Brighton — complimentary sign-ups open!
• November 23-24th: IndieWebCamp Berlin— save the date!
• December 7-8th: IndieWebCamp San Francisco— save the date!

Thanks Again!

IndieWebCamp NYC would not have been a success without attendees like you! Of course, we'd also like to thank our sponsors (Pace, ReView, Mozilla, and all our Open Collective donors) for making this event possible!

And, of course, thanks to all my fellow co-organizers: Tiara, Greg, David.

If you'd like weekly updates and event invitations, sign-up for our This Week In The IndieWeb newsletter!

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