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!

Me: [scrolling through posts in Monocle, the IndieWeb reader]

Monocle:

Me: I don't want to open up 8 tabs for Twitter. I'll just visit Tantek's homepage where I bet he shows these tweets in full context.

tantek.com:

😂

Looking forward to my third IndieWeb Summit! It’s amazing to reflect on the improvements coming out of the IndieWeb every year. I wonder what I will hack on this time around??

New York City's first Homebrew Website Club of March met at The Bean at Cooper Union on March 6th, with me playing host.

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

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Has many things to demo since last time! Left himself some to keep working on projects tonight. Most of his work is in Gerrit but it's main notification system is sending emails. Last time he was collecting those emails. But in processing the emails he realized they were missing info like user IDs and avatars. Changed to use the email as a notification of a notification - to trigger a fetch via the Gerrit API to grab the information he wants directly, looking for changes between the last time he updated and the time of the email. Been working on notification displays since. Has a reverse-chronological timeline where notifications flow by. Finds it less stressful than GitHub's notification system!

martymcgui.re — Completely forgot his work on timelines and re-styled listen posts! Launched BloodReads.com, a silly promo site for and upcoming Ides of March GHOST PARTY 👻🎉 show themed on BETRAYAL and also MULTI-LEVEL MARKETING. Used a template from HTML5up, which were recently discussed in #indieweb-meta as having a template that might be a good fit for the IndieWeb homepage redesign. Started work on a new section on his site dedicated to improv, so folks can find his upcoming shows, past events, etc.

Other discussions:

• It's cold but not rainy this week! Walk fast to stay warm.
• Density (and wasted space) in web designs.
• What goes into a good homepage? Are there parts of your site that exist but you don't necessarily guide people to easily?
• Rolling up and grouping noisy notifications, and choosing how to order notification details by priority.
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Wednesday, March 20th at 6:30pm!

New York City's second Homebrew Website Club of February met at The Bean at Cooper Union on February 20th, organized by Tiara Miller and myself.

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

rootedfromnature.com — Finished a Python lab assignment! Felt like she was overthinking it. Also doesn't like that the particular problems are more math problem than coding problem. Plans to sign up for actual coding classes to get more practical coding experience.

dmitri.shuralyov.com — Wants to visualize notifications from GitHub and Gerrit. He collects the data (sometimes by processing emails!) on his own site and wants to expose it. Spent some time thinking / brainstorming about how to design those things. Asked some fellow Go programmers about known ways to handle emails w/ Go. Wants it to work "forever" (the next decade) so is being careful about the design.

martymcgui.re — Played with layouts for his new /listens page. Looked at Pinterest and Dribbble and other design sites for "timeline" layouts and was pretty unhappy with what he found. Lots of "draw a line with labels and draw lines extending off to things." So, took some time to start extracting "listen" bits like podcast art, episode title, audio links, into simpler blocks to start playing with layouts.

Other discussions:

• Things that Go is really good at. Like being an http2 server!
• This new location! It... seems fine? It was crowded when we came in but we eventually got a table. No outlets handy as far as we could find. We'll keep looking for new venues!
• IndieWebCamp Austin is this weekend!
• IndieWebCamp Online is also only a couple of weekends away!
  
• IndieWebCamp New Haven is at the end of March and planning is getting scrambly! There are wiki pages to create but there's a lot of missing information and content yet! Tiara has been co-organizing w/ wiki stuff. Marty volunteered to help, too. Being remote, we need Greg to fill in with his local knowledge about the area and venue though!
  
• What about IWC NYC! Yeah we'll do one too. Later in the year, though.
  

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

Inspired by Jonathan LaCour's January post about tracking his podcast listening habits, I recently decided to bring in my own listening history into my website.

Like Jonathan, I use Overcast to listen to podcasts on my phone, and I was surprised and delighted to learn that Overcast has an "All data" export option on the accounts page that includes per-episode details such as whether you listened to an ep, and when you last interacted with it!

I took a look at Jonathan's script to automatically log in and import his Overcast data and figured I could make something a little more minimal that would work with my Hugo site.

My process follows three steps: download the overcast.opml full export file, run a script to generate the Hugo posts, and run a script to grab extra podcast metadata like cover art.

You can find my scripts in this gist if you're interested in learning more, but they may not be that useful for anyone without my exact Hugo config.

You may notice in the scripts that I have a "block list" of podcast URLs I can add. That's because I wanted my listen posts to helpfully link to and embed audio whenever possible. However, some of the feeds I subscribe to contain private or for-pay content - particularly a couple of podcasts I support on Patreon. I do want to track my listening habits for these podcasts, so I will likely start handling them differently by leaving out the embedded audio and linking directly to Patreon pages where possible.

Running the script, I was able to happily show everything I listened to as just another type of post on my site. However, it turns out I had (and keep making) a lot of listen posts. Visually they were drowning out all my other activity on my site.

So I have sequestered them on a new Listens page where you can only follow my podcast consumption history, keeping it out of my main feeds.

Similarly, I have been interested in having a nice Instagram-like page that shows off my photos in a grid. So I made a Photos page to show off those posts.

Both of these pages have microformats2 feed information embedded, so if you have an Indie reader, you might be interested in following just those pages!