Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of October met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 16th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Worked today on a post recapping our last HWC meeting, focusing on ideas to get more people involved. For work at DHF, still learning lots of NextJS and ExpressJS. Getting back into writing content!

derekfields.is — Been a while! Last week in Minnesota for some networking. Met some cool people and talked to some companies, including Socrata, which was part of Open Baltimore. Also got back into bullet journaling after being away for a while. Working on legal and client-finding stuff for his freelance work.

pulianas.com — Also been awhile since he's been to an HWC! Moved all his sites to HTTPS. His podcast (overanalyzed.fm) is now on iTunes, so he added that link to the site. Also tried to track down an official Overcast button but hasn't found it yet. Recently in San Jose for API World. Very little talk about building APIs and more about pitching specific products/services. Did learn a bit about microservices and case-studies of moving to them. Did some general maintenance on his WP site, and has been working on his own plugin for podcasting on WP.

martymcgui.re — Been heavily porting his site from Jekyll to Hugo. Has had some fun porting things that he did as Ruby plugins for Jekyll into crazy Go template logic, like generating permashortlinks in NewBase60. Also had some fun setting up a new CSS Grid display for photos in posts with lots of them (example which apparently only works in Firefox). Also, after some struggling with his image proxy setup (because Hugo templating doesn't support HMAC signatures) is trying out Cloudinary's free tier for his image-resizing needs.

Other discussion:

• Podcasting on WordPress is... a pain. Apple Podcasts refused to accept their feed due to http vs https issues and that was hard to track down.
• Ferrite for audio editing on the iPad. Alec edits his podcasts there now. Some hiccups with the noise-cancelling and auto-levelling features being too-aggressive.
• Recording setups. Blue's new Yeti Nano looks cool.
• FF and Chrome starting to support the new dialog element. Maybe cool, maybe terrible?
  

Thanks to everyone who came out! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, November 13th at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of October met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 3rd.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — No updates since last time for his personal site. Was burned out after a lot of frustration with Gatsby + WordPress headless. Got to the point of feeling helpless and like he couldn't figure out how to progress. Started porting to Next.js and has some renewed energy because he is making progress and enjoying it.

martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC! Didn't do anything new for his site, but did manage to write a post full of project ideas that he came away with. Really interested in using free services like Glitch (for server-side processing), Neocities (static file hosting), and Cloudinary (make thumbnail images from those giant originals) to make IndieWeb building blocks that people without coding experience could combine to make their own sites. Currently thinking of building a Micropub Media Endpoint that handles dynamic image resizing to see how this approach works.

Other discussion:

• Ideas from the IndieWebCamp NYC Organizer's meeting about "messaging" for Homebrew Website Clubs. The name is often confusing or off-putting for newcomers, and oddly self-selecting for those that "get it". Thinking about rebranding to "Indie Web Meetup" – evokes "independent web" and a meetup is more inviting than a "club" which might have membership requirements.
• Talked a lot about how many folks who come to HWC are WordPress users and how we might do better by them if we made it more clear that we are here to help them power up their WordPress sites.
• Or even go a step further and simply offer to get people started with or improve their existing personal site. If we can get people to the meetups, no matter the skill level, we can get them started: sign-up for micro.blog to get going right away, put a simple static HTML page up on glitch or GitHub, dive into WordPress, etc.
• First steps may be to think of it more like an open hours help desk. The "price" of getting help can be to write up all the steps followed, as a way of documenting steps for future folks who might need it. The goal would be to have folks come and actually leave with something accomplished.
• Also talked about difficulties with estimating the limitations of tools before you invest a bunch of time in learning to use it and understand it deeply. Jonathan's experience with Gatsby was a prime example – ultimately he needed it to do something it didn't support well, but it took a lot of frustration to find out that the issue was with the tool being a bad fit for the problem.
  

This ended up being a very organizer-y meta meeting. It was nice to be able to check in with ourselves about this meetup and its future. We are excited to continue to evolve! We look forward to seeing you at our next meetup on Tuesday, October 16th at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of September met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 18th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Has been travelling and getting married and had lots of time to think about things! Not to work on them, though. Catching back up on things like Gatsby pages for Digital Harbor Foundation. Feeling some maintenance pains now with Gatsby's GraphQL queries pulling HUGE amounts of data from a WordPress backend – about a 5 minute process for each site build. Upgrading to Gatsby 2 would also require a bunch of changes that he isn't wanting to do. Also, something in the Gatsby build process just broke, without him making any code changes. Wishing now he had built the site in Next.js, which uses REST over GraphQL. For his personal site, he is thinking about how much effort he wants to put into things. He typically uses his personal site as a way to learn new technology, but is now wary of force-fitting things that aren't a good fit. Maybe tweaking his current WordPress site would be a better use of time than rewriting the site. Particularly since he hasn't posted since July.

rhearamakrishnan.com — Not much new on her personal site, since it's working well for her purposes. Posted some new stuff she made over the summer, including a micro chap-book called It Makes More Noise Than I Thought It Would. Been working on other summer projects, like writing poems on postcards for people. Photographing and typing those up to make a mini-collection. Wants to build something on Twine, if she can include a form so people can write letters back to her. She's gonna write out the adventure as she wants it and then think about what kind of interactivity she'd like from readers. Thinking about designing a mini-course for DHF around Twine for students to build stories around it.

martymcgui.re — Hasn't really made much progress on any personal or IndieWeb projects since the last HWC meeting. Had a couple of out of town trips and projects that were good and fulfilling experiences, like going to Camp Improv Utopia East. Those experiences highlighted that maybe he is feeling burned out about some IndieWeb things! For example, he has been letting the This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition slip more and more each week and finding it hard to focus. He's trying to figure out what to do for the upcoming IndieWebCamp NYC, which he is excited about, but feeling a bit overwhelmed by project ideas, things he should be doing to help organize, etc.

Other discussion:

• https://twinery.org/ is great for creating interactive stuff - and it seems like the output is plain HTML? So it should be possible to add a form from some service like Formspree or Firebase to an exported project, if the tool doesn't offer exactly that kind of thing.
• Dealing with burnout and feeling stuck on things. Sometimes it helps to get energized by doing something else. Sometimes doing those other things really highlights that you have energy, just not for those things you're burned out on!
• Principle of Least Power is another big thing, here. Jonathan and Marty have both been struggling with projects where the tooling or the plumbing may be taking all the energy available.
• Semantic HTML and CSS can do so much, now. We looked at this CSS-only TODO MVC proof of concept. Talked about HTML definition lists, summary/details tags, figure/figcaption, and more.
• Talked about the pyramid of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and the inverted pyramid of overbuilt JS-dependent frameworks.
  

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you again at our next meetup on Wednesday, October 3rd at 7:30pm!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of August met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on August 22nd!

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

shawngrimes.me — Shawn has been working on teamruby.dog. Specifically, collecting content. It's a new WordPress site. Thought about Squarespace because of ease of maintenance but can't justify the pricing. Also trying to find a way to post some 360 panorama photos from a recent road trip through 19 states.

martymcgui.re — Finally started the grueling work of translating his site's data from Jekyll into Hugo. It involved writing lots of little scripts to do things like maintain redirects for old date-based URL slugs, RSS for podcast feeds, and other plumbing. Next up is to port his existing templates over, which should be a big process. Also started a tribute site to his cat Nitro at nitro.rocks. Hoping to make it an IndieWeb-project by getting folks to contribute fun cat memories by posting to their own site and syndicating to nitro.rocks.

Other discussion:

• Ways to showcase 360 photos. Ricoh apps can (could?) post interactive panoramas to Facebook/Twitter. Marty posted some interactive panoramas on his site back in 2016 (example), but isn't super happy with the experience.
  
• RSS (and Indie) readers
• Webmentions and notifications
• Badging (and politics)
  

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday September 5th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of July met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on July 25th!

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

derekfields.is — Derek wanted a couple new rules for sharing time, today. First, find and share a site with some cool tech that you like. Second, talk about why you're into web development. He showed off a demo of using the browser Gamepad API w/ a Playstation dual-shock 3 controller. It showed button state changes, including analog states for buttons and joysticks. Been thinking about lots of ideas lately but missing some focus. Looking at productivity hacks to focus more. Notices when he's not focusing, now trying prompts to figure out why he's distracted and get back on task. Derek is into web development because it changes rapidly and requires focus to keep learning. Been working on his VueJS class and it's been going well until today. His accountability buddy is on a trip.

jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on work stuff. Built a single-page app w/ Gatsby for deploys of some Digital Harbor Foundation content for use in remote schools with intermittent internet connections. Pulls course data from the central DHF WordPress and deploys it as a package on Netlify. Ran into his first deploy issues with Netlify due to case-sensitive filesystems (which he doesn't experience on his Mac dev machine). Been really inspired by the Susty WordPress theme which can deliver WordPress pages in ~6KB, compared with most themes, which are very bloated. Jonathan is into the web because of the problem-solving aspects of it, but also because it allows creative expression and productivity.

zach.oglesby.co — New! Welcome, Zach! Recently switched his Known-powered site to Jonathan LaCour's overview page (w/ location info and other nice things), but it doesn't have a representative h-card, yet, so working on that. Also working on making his read posts more compatible with IndieBookClub. In terms of "Cool Tech", just had occasion to use Bootstrap for the first time, which was interesting. Zach is into web development because there are so many ways to do things on the web, you can play and tinker with different things you might not have otherwise.

pulianas.com — New! Welcome, Alec! Has had this website for a while, originally as a portfolio, now as a WordPress site that powers his Micro.blog. Been working on a new site for a podcast, Overanalyzed, also WordPress. In terms of "Cool Tech" - likes Eddie Hinkle's website. Also, webrings "seem pretty cool". Isn't a web developer professionally, but likes how it makes publishing easy. Really also likes the concept of owning your own content, bringing his stuff in from Twitter. Sees his online identities as layers: website is most personal, Twitter next, and Facebook is sanitized.

martymcgui.re — Been working on the Baltimore Improv Festival website, a static site generator called Ruhoh that doesn't really "exist" as a project anymore, though the code and gems are still out there. Needs to spend time on the webrings site. In terms of "Cool Tech", likes this recent "Even More CSS Secrets" talk from Lea Verou. Marty is into web development because it is an amazing way to share content that anyone can access from anywhere in the world! "Can it be done on the web?" is an interesting, if sometimes difficult, lens to see the world through.

Other discussion:

• Code-of-Conduct issues with the recent Hackers On Planet Earth conference that Marty attended last weekend.
• Deploying things on Netlify! Marty tried his first Netlify site during quiet writing hour, as a potential host for the Baltimore Improv Festival website, which is currently on an old shared host.
• Tools for writing VueJS (and using Visual Studio Code for it). Like Vue Snippets for VS Code, linting tools, and Sarah Drasner's CSS tricks articles about VueJS.
• brutalist-web.design and the principle of least power when building things.
• Talked about how mobile designs can be better than "full" desktop site designs. E.g. Twitter vs. mobile Twitter. But also Facebook vs. mobile Facebook vs. "basic" mobile Facebook, the last of which has no Javascript!
• Getting around town. E.g. the new Bird scooters that are here in Baltimore.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday August 8th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of July met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on July 11th!

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

jonathanprozzi.net — Been building static HTML/CSS layouts for fun! Some examples. Also started practicing turning those designs into layouts in Figma. Had a usability testing call w/ the folks from Gatsby that turned into a great discussion about how to better build community starters.

dariusmccoy.com — Was having some issues w/ his site, which is hosted on AWS. He is thinking about wiping his instance and starting a new one, since he has lost track of some of his passwords. In a tricky spot because AWS doesn't offer any tech support for free tier users. Talked about switching to Digital Ocean or something simpler but will have to balance his budgets to justify the costs.

derekfields.is — Been taking a Udemy course on VueJS. Before that has been working on a schedule for developing his website. Has a friend doing the same and they mutually keep each other on track to spend a certain amount of time on developing their skills and sites. It's kind of working!

martymcgui.re — Brought a bunch of stickers and other fun things home from IndieWeb Summit! Had a great time seeing folks he met last year and meeting new folks. Lots of great discussion sessions, hacking projects, wild ideas, and more. He really needs to write it up on his site! His hack day project also desperately needs to be written up – it's an IndieWeb-style web ring, available at 🕸💍.ws ! This week he added support for indielogin.com, which lets people sign in using their own websites by setting up only a couple of links.

Other discussion:

• IndieWeb Summit! Marty went and loved it. Next year would love to bring more folks from HWC Baltimore, and travel assistance is available. We'll work on it.
• Marty met Jared Ewy of name.com at the Summit and talked about all the cool work DHF does teaching youth to build websites, the upcoming Web Shop, hosting HWC and IWC Baltimore, etc. Jared gave him a bunch of codes for free domains and some hosting discounts to benefit that work, so we discussed lots of ideas!
  
• Some possibilities: give Web Shop youth employees incentive to work on their own projects, outside of paid jobs, to learn more about building their own sites. Host a special Homebrew Website Club that's a 2-hour jam for new folks who don't have a domain yet to get set up with a website. Host a longer "Build Your Website Day" (maybe in coordination with a multi-city Drag Queen Build-a-Website Day?)
• What would an IndieWeb "starter pack" look like for a quick "you have a domain but no money" way to get started? GitHub looks good for skill building for folks that want to get into web development someday because it's mostly managed by hand. Netlify looks pretty good for this because they offer hosting, flexible static site generation, SSL for HTTPS, and the NetlifyCMS. They also support some features like building your own webhooks on JavaScript, which could eventually be used to handle common IndieWeb building block endpoints (IndieAuth, Micropub, Webmention, ...) Because they run all the stuff for a given site from a git repository, it's possible to take a site from Netlify and set it up elsewhere if their offerings change.
• "Packages" for a getting started workshop. E.g. "what will you get at the end + what will you need to learn along the way." Static HTML/CSS on GitHub could get a portfolio site done. For $5/mo a Neocities site can be hosted on a custom domain and requires no Git/GitHub wrangling. Micro.blog hosting is also $5/mo and brings a ton of features, interactivity, and community.
• Talked about VueJS passing React in terms of number of stars on GitHub, and speculating why that is. For example, VueJS can be a lot easier to dip your toes in and get started without a complicated build toolchain.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday July 25th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of June met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on June 13th!

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

derekfields.is — Thinking about ESP8266 + WebAR to make, e.g. a painting with AR overlays in mobile browsers. Working on CSS Grid stuff for his site, now. Trying to be consistent.

jonathanprozzi.net — Mainly been working on stuff for DHF, but it overlaps w/ personal projects. Working on a "headless WordPress" setup as a data source for a Gatsby or Next static site that can be taken to schools w/ super slow internet. Been learning how to use Gatsby – the GraphQL queries for WordPress have been tricky. Got it working on his own site first, then managed to get a handle on how to pull lessons for specific courses from the set of all courses. Now digging into more GraphQL (like debugging w/ GraphiQL) and issues like differences in how WordPress handles whitespace (processing newlines into paragraph and break tags) vs stuffing the content into a React component (no special whitespace processing by default). For personal stuff, feels like Gatsby + headless WP is too heavy. Interested in an IndieWeb-starter version of the Gatsby starter site, which doesn't even have semantic HTML at the moment. Also looking into WordPress + Next... next, because it seems simpler.

dariusmccoy.com — Went to NOMCON and helped build the We the Rosies sculpture. Will be working on a new project for DHF for managing 3D Print Shop.

martymcgui.re — Installed grant.codes' PostrChild plugin for Chrome. It shows Edit Post buttons on his posts and makes the content there editable via Micropub and it is very neat! Also showed off his indiebookclub.biz profile. Added support for read posts to his site to support it and is now converting old read posts (which were just notes of the form "📕 Finished Reading: ...") into this new form. Has ideas for additions to indiebookclub like URLs for books and authors, tags, text content, and backfeeding entries from his site to complete his profile. Will be dropping in his Goodreads data next.

bouhmad.com — Been implementing a speedtest-like app on a new site for Baltimore City to gather data by census block and compare. Part of his new(ish) project to establish a mesh network for the city!

Other discussion:

• IndieWeb Summit! I think next HWC Baltimore may be happening during IWS demo time. Maybe it'll be streaming here!
  
• Greg McVerry's work on IndieWeb and WordPress and education. His most recent post on building a course management system in IndieWeb-style feels very much in line with what Jonathan has been working on.
• "Headless" Micropub CMS - what would these look like? Jonathan is interested in Microformats2 as the storage format for posts, courses, and other data, and Micropub seems like the way that MF2 data gets shipped around for creating/editing posts. But most Micropub clients are built for creating (and rarely editing) very specific kinds of posts.
• Comparison to Netlify CMS - which is built around Git and flat files. Netlify can get a list of all your posts by listing files in Git. A Micropub-based CMS would need to query a list of all posts, with filters like post type, tags, ...
• GraphQL queries over MF2 properties??
• Facebook's API changes have caused Bridgy to stop working for backfeeding reactions and comments, and Publish will stop working in August. Jonathan thought his site configuration was broken as he wasn't getting backfed comments and likes anymore. Basically: Facebook has shut out the IndieWeb. This feels like a huge problem (for the IndieWeb)! How are people working around it? Are they? This may help usher IndieWeb folks out the door for Facebook, but it almost completely stops people who want to be in that in-between space.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday June 27th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

It's been a while! Again! We cancelled our previous meetup due to weather.

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of May met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 29th!

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

dariusmccoy.com – Playing with Squarespace because he expects to have youth using it for the upcoming Web Shop launch at DHF. In ~3 weeks! He's trying to clone the existing DHF 3D Print Shop website in it, but finding it a bit restricting. Playing w/ some CodePens for nice animations/transitions but having trouble getting those into the Squarespace editing tools. Wants to use them for within-page links.

derekfields.is – Been struggling w/ goals on personal website stuff. Has been applying for webdev jobs, though! Waiting to hear back. Has been working on his startup idea - an LED backpack for biking. It's controlled by a microcontroller and he wants it to serve a webpage over WiFi so you can control it from your phone without installing anything.

jonathanprozzi.net – Spent time tonight writing a post because he hasn't in a long time. The post includes shaming himself for not writing posts. Writing up his experiences from a recent conference where DHF was receiving an award. Building apps with GatsbyJS which are PWAs that work offline, so the content he writes for DHF can work for people who have viewed them even if the internet goes down.

martymcgui.re – "Launched" his GIPHY-backed GIF posting app Kapowski. After feedback from last time, made it work without requiring logins (making it usable by people who aren't all wired up with IndieAuth on their sites). Thinking about ways to progressively enhance Kapowski, such as saving favorites that can be viewed offline, offline sending with posts going out when the internet comes back, etc. Been going all in on micropub for his personal notes that exist on a private site. Used selfauth, mintoken, skippy's micropub server, spano for media, and built a new nginx auth_request service that uses IndieAuth and an access control list to allow only him to view the private posts. Hoping to clean that up and release it someday soon. Also started first steps for another long-term micropub-related project to assist sites that support micropub for creating and editing posts but don't want to build their own infrastructure for syndication. It's called "POSSE Party", and currently it's a manual-til-it-hurts Micropub editor that lets you manage mp-syndicate-to and syndication properties for posts. Someday he hopes to make something that can use bridgy or silo.pub to automate syndication for people whose sites don't do that.

Other discussion:

• LED mounting strategies for backpacks. Big diffusers make for good looking LEDs but surface mount parts make things easier to mount.
  
• Jonathan's experiences at the conference. His takeaways from talks about making human-centered technology. E.g. "context is everything, a perfectly engineered span is useless, but the Brooklyn bridge connects people". He's thinking a lot about common themes around technology that works *for* humans. For example, so many people don't have internet all the time!

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Wednesday June 13th at 6:30pm (quiet writing hour at 5:30pm)!

It's been a while!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of May met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on May 1st!

In celebration of 5/01 aka HTTP 501 Not Implemented, we'll talk about things we wish that our websites did, but that they don't yet do.

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Been working on lots of other projects. Did two work projects with GatsbyJS. One is deployed but not public. Learned a lot about GraphQL. Working on a handbook for youth training and trying to get a netlify CMS hooked up to it. Also did a small VueJS project to learn a bit more about it. Wants to use the WordPress API with some of these technologies on his site. 501 desire: going headless for his WordPress site because he is obsessed with PageSpeed.

maryreisenwitz.com – Been working on sites and content for work. Trying to capture FAQs about working at DHF in preparation for a couple of dozen new youth to start working here. Finds that good explanations uncover the need for more good explanations and lots of branching docs, as different youth employees will have different responsibilities. Excited about having this resource be a website. Wants to include a youth "face book" of names and faces so the new folks can recognize one another and existing staff. 501 desire: wants a web store on her main site, because Etsy is becoming frustrating.

bouhmad.com – Set up SSL via LetsEncrypt and loves it, the easiest SSL setup he has ever done. Started a blog post about intrusion detection, kept adding to it, and pushed it out last week. Working on a piece about a bug bounty he recently collected, working with the company in question. 501 desire: a mailing list signup and a Hugo-driven RSS feed to a Mailchimp mailing list.

grant.codes – Visiting as he drives across the US! Restructuring his site's data on the backend. Was using something like mf2 data, but now moving to pure mf2. Broke a bunch of features doing that, so going through to fix those now. 501 desire: homepage mentions! He accepts but doesn't store or display them.

eddiehinkle.com – Working on leaving Facebook! Has made a sign-up form for friends/family to sign up for monthly (for now) newsletter. Has a complex (too complex?) tagging for tech, personal, family to generate three RSS feeds. These can be subscribed to in any combination (so 9 possible feeds), and the emails will combine all posts in the desired feeds. The feeds themselves reuse markup that he wrote to make posts look good on micro.blog. Just posted monthly review for March and hopes to keep doing summaries. Uses the "last month" view on his site for the raw data. 501 desire: automated webmentions! His site is Jekyll-based, so that's a can of worms. Loves using Indigenous for the quick responses from the indie reader, but then has to go back to his site and manually send webmentions.

martymcgui.re – Traveled recently and checked in everywhere using Swarm, which feeds back to his site (sorry anyone following feeds)! Really enjoyed it, but slightly regrets giving Swarm all that data. Thinks an app could use the Swarm venue API to do Micropub and skip creating the checkins on the server. 501 desire: unlisted posts! Really wants to make photo gallery posts where each photo has a permalink but only the gallery shows up in feeds. Eventually private posts, too.

Other discussion:

• Grant's automated year-in-review feature. Cities visited, hours of TV, distance traveled (tracks GPS constantly).
• Ways to do hidden posts. Categories. Unlisted or private as a property.
• Email lists vs "followers" on social media and the feeling of reach.
• Facebook's reaction when you start mass deleting friends. Mary once deleted close to 700 people and found that the interface started rearranging itself, putting people back in the list where it's easy to mis-click and re-add them as a friend.
• Deleting your posts from Facebook. Does it affect the algorithm? What threats does it eliminate?
• Family signing up for email blasts: would they reply? What if those replies went to an address that turned them into a comment on your site? If their email address is in your nickname cache, you can show their name and photo and url.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on May 15th!

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on April 10th

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

martymcgui.re – Demoed an as-yet-unnamed (maybe: kapowski) "GIF Reaction" Micropub client. It's currently available on Glitch. It supports IndieAuth, searching for GIFs via the GIPHY API, then posting those as the "photo" property in a Micropub form-encoded request. It also supports in-reply-to functionality, putting the "reaction" into "GIF Reaction", though there's no UI for that, yet. He made an example reply post, but Jonathan's post doesn't seem to support photo replies. 🤔 Also fixed up some metacrap for his podcast site so sharing looks better on Facebook and Twitter.

rhearamakrishnan.com – Working on a redesign of her site. Making good use of view-source on sites that she likes for inspiration. Working on a mixed media art project with post cards that direct you to a website that contains coordinates to a geo cache containing an actual letter.

jonathanprozzi.net – Been doing lots of work stuff that overlaps with personal web interests. Working on his wedding page. It's now up on Netlify and uses their form collection for RSVPs.

Other discussion:

• The new Killer Queen 5 vs 5 arcade game recently installed in Baltimore at Holy Frijoles.
  
• Baltimore zine culture (apparently Atomic Books considers carrying local zines).
• Twine for creating interactive poetry and fiction. It outputs a bunch of HTML and CSS (and maybe JS) that can be hosted anywhere.
• The Netlify static site model of separating content management, storage, layout and rendering, and file hosting.
• The difficulty in evaluating "frameworks" like React and Vue based on their low-level merits. Looking at community and availability of higher-level components might help more.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting!