Tweaks Ali Spittel’s face tracking filter demo to include a “snapshot” button that creates an image you can right-click and save.

Next up: can I make this into a Micropub client to post directly to my site?

NYC's first IndieWeb Meetup of July 2019 took place at Devoçion Coffee in Brooklyn, NY. Here are some notes from the meeting!

rasulkireev.com (new!) — New to the IndieWeb and attending his first meetup! Has been building his own websites for a while, learning a lot about web development. Currently working on a version of his site based on Django, and interested in adding IndieWeb building blocks, starting with rel=me.

martymcgui.re — Working on his write-up(s) post-IndieWeb Summit. Made some small progress today. 😅 Also wanting to streamline his iOS Shortcuts-based workflows for posting to his site, taking personal notes, etc.

Other discussion:

• We should bring signs or other IndieWeb indicators to these meetups! I'm so used to a few regulars that I didn't expect new folks. Thankfully Rasul found me! 😬
• We talked about soooo many building blocks! Webmention (and how to use them to RSVP), Micropub (and how iOS Shortcuts can post using it), backfeed (responses from Twitter), storing data, hosting sites and content, learning new languages, learning new libraries, how and why to learn new web dev skills, and much more.
• How did you get started building websites? Despite starting many years apart, we both had stories of building websites for groups we were part of or businesses we knew people from.
• Staying in touch with the IndieWeb community, from chat (very high attention if you're in there all the time to low attention with the help of Loqi the chat bot and !tell commands) to the weekly newsletters.
  

Thanks to Rasul for coming out for his first IndieWeb Meetup! We missed Tiara, who was stuck on Long Island due to extreme train schedule changes. We also missed Matt G, who was at a wedding, but working on his website in spirit.

We look forward to seeing folks at the next meeting! Watch the Events page for details about the next meetup!

It looks like I will be speaking at IndieWeb Summit! Specifically, I’ll be giving a keynote about how to “Own Your Mobile Experience”.

As a long-time enthusiast for these tiny computers we carry, I try to make most of the things I can do online into things I can do on my phone or tablet. That turns out to be… a lot of things.

I’ll probably keep the technical details light, other than naming specific IndieWeb building blocks that each piece relies on. I plan to make a (set of?) posts on my site explaining the plumbing, afterwards.

With just about a week and a half left to plan my ~10-15 minute set of demos, here are some things I am thinking of discussing / demoing.

• Reading! With an [indie reader](https://indie web.org/reader) setup based on Microsub and the Indigenous iOS app.
  • Including following folks on Instagram and Twitter with the help of Granary
• Replying and responding to things I read directly on my site via Indigenous and Micropub.
• Posting my own notes and photos with Indigenous and Micropub
• Seeing notifications on my devices when someone posts a response to my own posts.
• Doing so many things with Shortcuts
  • Save articles to read later (similar to IndiePaper)
  • Save podcasts to listen later (via huffduffer.com)
  • Edit posts on my site and my private notes site via the Drafts app
  • Upload images and other files to my site
  • Track what I read (a Shortcut that extracts info from goodreads.com to post to my site)
  • Track what I eat / drink
  • Post iOS Live Photos as looping videos
• Cheat a bit using external services
  • Checkins with Swarm go to my site via ownyourswarm.p3k.io
  • Podcast listening history with the Overcast app goes to my site via a script and the Overcast “All data” export
• And other more exotic stuff that technically uses web apps but work well on mobile:
  • Syndicating to Twitter and updating my post with the syndication URL thanks to micropublish.net
  • Post silly animated GIF responses with Kapowski

Obviously this is too many things to demo in ~15 minutes. So, I’m looking for feedback!

What things on this list do you care to see most?

What things do you already do with mobile apps or social silos that you’d like to do on your website?

What things do you do with your website that you wished worked on mobile?

(Posted from an iPad mini, composed using Drafts, Micropub’d via Indigenous)

New York City's first IndieWeb Meetup of June 2019 met at Think Coffee in the Meatpacking District on June 9th, with me playing host.

Here are notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup.

amyhurst.com — Did not work on her site today. Been updating her NYU-generated faculty page, instead, and thinking about how it fits in with her site. Trying to fix links to things like research papers, which are normally behind paywalls.

mfgriffin.com — Managing TODO lists today! Trapped in a "oh all these wonderful tools to choose from" situation. Made a lateral move to put his notes about IndieWeb into a local notebook in OneNote, re-reading them and splitting things up. Finding lots of old TODOs from IndieWebCamp and other meetings. Got FTP to his website functioning again. Amy reminds him to set up griff.fun to redirect to his main site, as it's parked right now.

tiaramiller.com — Been learning Amazon Web Services stuff, finding lots of IndieWeb examples of folks hosting on S3 and other services there. Doing research and making lists for things to try and learn next.

martymcgui.re — Updated his homepage feed of upcoming events. Previously, it would show future events that he had posted on his site, but it now also shows RSVPs

Other topics of discussion

• We got a pretty decent table and an outlet, even! Sundays are pretty quiet here so that's good. The A/C was quite aggressive, though!
• AWS does so many things and also has a very steep learning curve!
• IndieWebCamp shirts are available now in two styles!
  • "Mens" style
    
  • "Womens" style
• We're officially over the name "Homebrew Website Club" and we're currently feeling "IndieWeb Meetup". Maybe we'll make some arts for signs?
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you again at our next meetup on Saturday, June 22nd. Location to be announced soon, but will likely be in Brooklyn near Atlantic Station.

New York City's first (and, oops, only) Homebrew Website Club of May met at Think Coffee in the Meatpacking District on May 11th, with me playing host.

We didn't really have a "broadcast" portion of the meetup, but we discussed some things and worked on personal projects! I'm writing this up nearly a month late, so I have forgotten many of the things we talked about. 😬

Matt (mfgriffin.com) and myself (martymcgui.re) researched ways for Matt to capture and process the many text, audio, image, and video artifacts that he creates across many projects, both personal and professional.

I showed off a bit about how I do this on my own non-public notes site, and spent some time working on an iOS Shortcut to post notes more quickly to that personal site.

We look forward to seeing folks at the next HWC NYC, at another weekend meetup on June 9th. We'll be meeting at the same location, and may even be able to grab some outlets this time!

New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of April met at The Bean at Cooper Union on April 17th, with me playing host.

We didn't really have a "broadcast" portion of the meetup, but we discussed some things and worked on personal projects!

mfgriffin.com (new!) — Has been to IndieWeb events in the past, but is looking to get re-started. Went over his past notes about some of his hopes and plans for his site, and how he wants to use it for personal notes, writing, drawing, and blogging projects, and more. Got started on a stripped-down system of using Hugo to track plaintext notes, with tags, so he can worry about how to organize it more later.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Interested in being "done" with his notification system updates. In general, wants to be able to iterate faster on his site updates, and finds that a lot of his time is absorbed in HTML/CSS design processes. Started working on some text-only designs, which get a minimal amount of styling by being converted from Markdown to HTML. By using text and emojis, he was able to prototype a couple of quick things during the meetup.

martymcgui.re — Recently decided that he disagrees with how Granary processes his site's feed (which is HTML+Microformats2) into JSON Feed and Atom. The result is that his feeds often have missing info and show up as weirdly empty posts on micro.blog or in Atom feed readers. At the meetup, finished writing and adapter that will take his main feed and spit out a JSON Feed. Managed to break his site's build process trying to integrate it, but will get it working soon enough.

Other discussion:

• A couple Dmitri's cool game projects
• The recent release of the original source for Zork and other Infocom games, as they would have been worked on originally, for a compiler that no longer exists. Really neat to see how that info is organized.
• We want to start later! Folks often need until 6 or 6:30pm to arrive.
• We're also open to venue options!
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, May 1st from 6:30pm - 8:30pm!

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at The Bean at Cooper Union on April 3rd, with me playing host.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup!

zazzyzeph.biz (new!) — Learning about Progressive Web Apps and their features, like web app manifests. Started out wanting to learn ES6 and decided to roll back to some basics. Doesn't have a specific project in mind, yet, so doing lots of reading.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Continuing work on "v2" of his website, specifically notifications API. "v2" is more package-based than repository-based, as a single repo can hold multiple packages, and it's very helpful to reason about the projects individually. Demonstrated showing unread notifications from Gerrit and GitHub, new presentation to show

martymcgui.re — Re-organized his homepage to be much simpler, moving incrementally towards having easier ways for people to discover the newer parts of his site, like where he displays photos, listens, and more interesting ways than his main "river of posts" timeline view. Also added book cover photos to his reading posts (example) using the Open Library Covers API with lookup by ISBN.

Other discussion:

• Building your own organizational and self-management tools. Balancing time spent on that tooling versus actually getting things done.
• Updating, migrating, and archiving old behaviors and versions in APIs. "Gradual code repair". Making "v2" versions of pieces of an API while allowing "v1" apps to work, hybrid apps to work. Semantic versioning when "v2" could change wildly - is it "really v2-pre-0.0.1", for example? A name like that should warn away folks starting new projects that expect a stable API.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, April 17th at 6:30pm!

Loving the Adafruit PyPortal as an IndieWeb-powered photo device.

Code to come!

New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of March met at The Bean at Cooper Union on March 20th, with me playing host.

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup!

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Working on his notification system, specifically tracking (un)read status of notifications from Gerrit. Today was exploring pieces of the system he'll have to modify to get this to work and now has a list of which pieces need updates. In his previous notification system, any fetch of a notification marked it as read, but that will change because it gives him more control over the system. Also made an update to the Homebrew Website Club main page to make the event description clearer, using text that we include on individual HWC event pages now.

martymcgui.re — Did a lot of digging into what's possible with MediaWiki templates, with the goal of simplifying the creation of Homebrew Website Club event pages on the IndieWeb wiki. He was able to get an "hwcdate" template together that outputs the date portion (2019-03-20) of event pages like events/2019-03-20-homebrew-website-club-nyc. Maybe created some tech debt, given how that locks in our URLs, but hopefully it will save some copy-paste-tweak labor.

rootedfromnature.com — Got stuck on a train and super delayed! 😭

Other discussion:

• MediaWiki and its relation to Wikipedia and as an open source project. Many mediawiki installs become stale quickly, for some good reasons! Finding documentation on parts of mediawiki can also be confusing, as the common terms may point to similar but unrelated topics, may be outdated, may refer to plugins or extensions you don't have, or may refer to functionality available in newer versions of mediawiki.
• How we learn and modify the tools we use to write and edit code. The trade-offs between using something we're comfortable with versus trying to pick up and become proficient with new tools. Sublime and vim and emacs and VisualStudio Code and all their plugins and ways of integrating with services and supporting different languages.
• The Language Server Protocol for standardizing how editors can provide "smart" features like autocomplete for different languages and projects.
• Synchronizing work-in-progress code. Is Git too much overhead? Maybe! Dmitri likes using Dropbox.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, April 4th at 6:30pm!