Yesterday I joined in the West Coast Homebrew Website Club via Zoom. I was worried I'd be too tired to join - it was held 9-10:30pm my time - but after a nice dinner and wind-down from the day I was in a pretty good place.
A recurring theme as new folks join the IndieWeb community is that the wiki is an amazing resource but also a source of crippling information overload. In recent years we have discussed ways to (re-)organize content for folks geting their own site started. On his own, Jason has begun writing guided intros for developers on topics like Webmention. But as Sarah pointed out, IndieWeb is much more than just developer documentation or guides for folks setting up their own websites. IndieWeb is also an active community with frequent live events, 24/7 discussions, and a long-term memory of observations and ideas and projects and participants. So, perhaps it's worth thinking about onboarding from a perspective of introducing new folks to this community, what they can expect, and how to successfully engage.
For my part, I continued research into the cursed project that I've been noodling on for years and finally started during IndieWebCamp 2020 West. My goal is to give folks a free way to dip their toes into the IndieWeb without needing to understand the building blocks first, but with on-ramps to understanding, customizing, and improving any part of it. While I am learning a lot from projects like Postr, I think I will end up actually making my own version of building blocks like authorization, token, and micropub endpoints. By way of being careful, I would like to be able to test that each one works properly. So that's how I ended up volunteering to help build out the IndieAuth.rocks test suite. 😅
I really enjoy and appreciate these meetups and I look forward to joining the next one!
jmac.org — Moved to NYC and started attending local HWCs just before The Lockdown. Very interested in Webmention as a technology to connect websites to one another - but wants to improve the focus on how it can be used for real human interaction!
martymcgui.re — Long-time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Been working on lots of random projects. Currently thinking about turning his pile of "read" posts, largely dumped from GoodReads, into more usable pages about what he's reading now, reading next, and read recently.
david.shanske.com — Long-time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Been working on location features, aspirationally. Looking forward to a time when he can thrill audiences by reporting being in a location other than "Home".
Sandro — Has been building CMSes and more for years. Been working on some new stuff that works even offline!
Kevin — Worked w/ sandro at Limewire some years ago! Attended past HWC SF meetings in the Before Times. Has been calling into the West Coast virtual meetings, first time calling into East Coast. Wants his site (zootella.com) to publish to 3 places - webserver, local files, and Beaker Browser (just went 1.0!)
Mike — Did web development for years, then stopped, now back again! Learned about IndieWeb through Micro.blog community. Interested in making sure the software he develops is a "good IndieWeb citizen". Working on a kind of Meetup competitor.
jgregorymcverry.com — Long time IndieWeb and NYC organizer. Currently working on a website for a poetry radio show. Folks from all over the world can submit clips. It's wiki-based, but can also receive webmentions.
gRegorLove.com — In San Diego, but joining East Coast to see some new faces. Been out of IndieWeb-land for a bit but dipping toes back in.
kevinmarks.com — Long-time IndieWeb. Microformats co-founder with Tantek and has been blogging forever!
Talked a bit about how Beaker works. You make edits locally and then they are published from your own machine. Others on the Beaker network can share your site. Everything is signed with keys and content-addressable so you're the only one that can make changes to your published stuff.
Beaker left behind DAT in the 1.0 release, breaking old URLs. They promise to never do this again, though?
Kicks Condor did some good writing on Dat:// and how Beaker used it, as well as Duxtape, a tool that he built to share mixtapes over Dat.
Kevin Marks has done a presentation on Dat, as well! Went through it in the Zoom. Compares to Web Packaging, including issues with content-addressability like trying to apply copyright takedowns and censor content.
With so many tools, projects, protocols, and more available that solve different parts of the problems of self-publishing, how can we encourage more folks to pick them up and use them instead of silos?
Owning your own content and publishing compared to organic foods. It's more involved and expensive, and some folks see it as niche or unnecessary, but you get benefits for the effort!
Twitter rolled out a feature to control who can reply to specific tweets. Predictably, they were terriblysmug about it.
Context collapse is a problem everywhere on the web, but it's such a deep problem on Twitter that maybe they can't claw it back. So, this feature is a maybe almost-good idea that won't actually help the folks who receive the most abuse.
There's a new microformats parser for JavaScript!Lots of interest in publishing it under an IndieWeb or Microformats umbrella to supersede the previous one (microformats-shiv?) which is some years out of date. Difficulty: need to track down who "owns" the Microformats account on NPM.
It passes a lot of the newly updated tests, includes support for mf2 and mf1, and more! Thanks to Jason Garber for kicking off some recent work there.
gRegor reviewed recent updates to php-mf2 that are very close to a new release!
jmac.org working on a command line tool called Whim (link?) to allow folks to receive and process webmentions. Hopes to have something for folks to play with in the next month. This was kicked off by a friend trolling him by sending webmentions and nudging him to support posting short notes to his own site.
kevinmarks.com is revisiting mention.tech to fix some issues with timing out on unresponsive pages.
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.
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:
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!
