After many years away, I have returned to in-person IndieWeb events, for IndieWebCamp Berlin 2025!

In past years, I have tried to capture my experience for each day and session in a long-form blog post, with thoughts on sessions, project ideas, progress made, ideas for the future, etc.

I’m pretty tired, though, so instead here is a collection of photos from my phone. It is both too-few and yet too-many!

Saturday

We had a good turnout, and I was impressed with how many folks demo’d their personal sites, in whatever state they were in, and shared their plans and hopes to improve them! ❤️

You can find a recap of the Intros session on the IndieWeb wiki.

After intros we took a short break for coffee and the restroom, then inscribed the runes and constructed the grid for summoning our schedule for Saturday.

With our futures committed to ink and paper, we had our first short sessions. Then it was time to break for lunch.

Fed and caffeinated, we returned to our sessions.

You can find a list of sessions, each with links to notes (and, eventually, videos) for each, on the IWC Berlin 2025 schedule page.

Before 5pm (1700) we cleaned up and moved out. I was beat, so I headed back to where I’m staying for food, before meeting up with Amy and our friend Jessica, who showed us KPop Demon Hunters. I loved it. 🥹

Sunday

Once caffeinated, we returned to the scene of Saturday’s summoning. We each inscribed small prayers for the day on small paper squares and arranged them next to the scheduling grid as a blessing.

Then everyone hacked on their websites! Until lunch time!

A short couple of hours of hacking later, it was time for Demos. Everyone shared the projects they had tackled, showed their progress, and talked about future work.

After demos it was time to wind it down, clean up, photograph and take down the schedule board, pack up our pins and stickers, and say our goodbyes and see-you-laters.

It’s Over!

It was weird to be back, and it was good to be back. To catch up after a long time away, to continue conversations as if no time had passed at all, and to meet new friends in meatspace.

Thanks to everyone who made this possible! An incomplete list would include:

• Our hosts at Mozilla Berlin
• Organizers Tantek and Joschi.
• Fellow volunteers Jo and Daniel
• Expert remote Zoom wrangler David
• Everyone who attended, whether you were in-person or remote. Thank you for contributing your time and your thoughts!

About those Projects

I had an idea of a couple of “easy” projects, but ended up spending most of my time fixing up some posts with images I broke when I deleted a bucked from Amazon S3, thinking I had already updated those posts. I hadn’t! So, I dug into my backups, re-uploaded, and updated 50-something images across 30 or so posts, mostly from my February 2011 thing-a-day posts.

My first easy project was to fix up some bad markup and styles where YouTube embeds were breaking out of my layout at small screen sizes. This was largely due to my awful old templates and styles, and I ended up manually fixing about a half-dozen posts by hand.

The second “““easy””” project was to try and figure out why I couldn’t sign in to the IndieWeb wiki, using my own IndieAuth server.

It seems like the indielogin.com service that the IndieWeb wiki uses has drifted from the IndieAuth spec, in anticipation of an update to the spec that has not yet materialized.

It’s too much to recap here, but you can find the chat log where I bother Aaron Parecki about it.

A little while later, he told me to “try again”, and…

It’s been a while! Excited to return to IndieWebCamp, in Berlin, no less!

Looking forward to spending some quality time with some quality IndieWeb folks! 💖

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

My first IndieWebCamp Online. The first one in ~5 years, in fact! Let’s build fun personal things for the web, together!

Listen to a summary of all the sessions at IndieWebCamp Berlin 2018!

Session notes: https://indieweb.org/2018/Berlin/Sessions

Narration by Marty McGuire

Edited by Aaron Parecki

This is a repost of https://aaronparecki.com/2018/11/18/7/indiewebcamp-berlin.

Excited to be attending my first Berlin IWC!

I attended IndieWebCamp NYC 2018 and it was a blast! Check the schedule for links to notes and videos from the awesome keynotes, discussion sessions, and build-day demos. I am so grateful to all the other organizers, to all the new and familiar faces that came out, to those that joined us remotely, to Pace University's Seidenberg School for hosting us, and of course to the sponsors that made it all possible.

I have a lot of thoughts about all the discussions and projects that were talked about, I'm sure. But for now, I'd like to capture some of the TODOs and project ideas that I came away with after the event, and the post-event discussions over food and drink.

• A Micropub Media Endpoint built on Neocities for storage and Glitch for handling uploads and metadata. It would allow folks to store 1GB of media files like photos, audio, and video for their websites, for free. It would be usable with all kinds of posting tools, no matter what backend you use for your site.
  • (Hilarious?) bonus: that content would be available peer-to-peer over IPFS.
• Improve the IndieWeb Web Ring (🕸💍.ws) to automatically check whether members' sites link back using Webmention. (I managed to make a small but often-asked-for update to the site during IWC)
• Improve how my website handles all these check-in posts which are made when someone else checks me in on Swarm. I would like to show who checked me in, at least, if not some of their photos, or maybe even an embedded version of the post from their site.
  
• Keep doing the This Week in the IndieWeb podcast! I had been feeling some burnout about this and falling behind. It was so great to talk with folks who listen to it and rely on it to keep up to date with the goings-on in the community!
• Offer a hand with aaronpk's new social monster catching game, built on IndieWeb building blocks.
• Offer a hand with jgmac1106's idea to issue educational course achievements (badges) via IndieWeb building blocks.
• Work on closing down Camura, a photo-sharing social network I helped build during the awkward age after the first "camera phones" and before Facebook introduced "Mobile Uploads". It has over 100k photos and 50k comments from around 400 folks. I'd like to let it down gently, make sure people have access to those photos, and maybe even preserve some of the best moments of human connection in a public place.

More generally: I think there's a really cool future where IndieWeb building blocks are available on free services like Glitch and Neocities. New folks should be able to register a domain and plug them together in an afternoon, with no coding, and get a website that supports posting all kinds of content and social interactions. All for the cost of a domain! And all with the ability to download their content and take it with them if these services change or they outgrow them. I already built some of this as a goof. The big challenges are simplifying the UX and documenting all of the steps to show folks what they will get and how to get it.

Other fun / ridiculous ideas discussed over the weekend:

• Support Facebook-style colored-background posts like aaronpk did at IWC. I love the simplicity of adding an RGB color as a hashtag.
  
• "This American Bachelor" (working title only) - a dating site as a podcast. Each episode (or season??) is an NPR-style deep dive into the life and longings of a single person looking for love. Alternate title: "Single". The cocktail-driven discussion that produced this idea was a joy.
  

I am sure there are fun ideas that were discussed that I am leaving out. If you can think of any, let me know!