Marty McGuire

Posts Tagged wrap-up

2018
Tue Mar 27

HWC Baltimore 2018-03-27 Wrap-Up

After a postponement due to snows on the first day of spring, Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of March met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on March 27th. 

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Talked about his recent experiments with Netlify and JAMstack. Had been researching static site hosting services for a while and found a lot of hype. After playing w/ Netlify he feels like it lives up to the hype! Was specifically interested in a static site generator called Gatsby, which uses the React front-end framework to render content.

derekfields.is – Been building a blog section for his site on a static site generator called Hexo. Found the theming stuff to be confusing and time-consuming, but has something working. Will eventually replace the theme with his own as he understands it more. Really likes the Hexo admin composer and compared with the editor for Ghost. Feels like the features help him write. Also setting up a Now.sh tiny server for a subdomain to host VueJS apps.

brksavage.com – Set a goal to do something creative and post about it every month. Did a big project for February (created a desk-sized piece filled w/ the word "bored"). Now writing it up and thinking about ways to make it easier to publish in the future.

www.dariusmccoy.com – Still building up momentum on his Wordpress site. Had a scare that he was locked out of his admin but got back in. Now that he has a working site, he is setting goals for himself about what he wants that site to have and how he wants to present himself there.

Robert (gnostech.net) – Working on owning his data. Has a Nextcloud service set up on his domain, where he can access all his data from his phone and more. Has been taking lots of notes about his home set up (Nextcloud, Let's Encrypt, ad filtering firewall at home, and more). Wants to build a blog to share both how-tos on what he has set up and how, but also the way he decided on his particular needs. Has been using NAS4Free to have more control over his home network storage.

martymcgui.re – Is finally back after missing several HWCs. He has definitely missed them! Talked about the need for indie readers that allow reading and posting reactions to personal sites all in one. Demo'd Together, and Monocle Microsub clients as well as Aperture for Microsub server to handle all the nitty-gritty of fetching and parsing feeds.

Other discussion:

  • Derek started us off with a really nice warm-up. We took turns with each person sharing compliments/thanks/encouragement about things people are working on and/or doing for and/or learning from one another. (This was seriously really nice).
  • JAMstack (Javascript, APIs, Markup). Name was coined because some "static" sites have lots of dynamic functionality.
    • Jonathan gave a demo of Netlify serving pages from a GitHub repo. Talked about how lots of different workflows can be used to manage content (e.g. Ghost, Netlify CMS, etc) without worrying about the final step of compiling the source into HTML and serving those static pages. Netlify has tons of features in the free tier (SSL with Let's Encrypt, support for forms, and more).
    • Q: How do they make money? A: Great question! They're advertised all over the place in the web design world. Maybe consulting? For example, they did a huge redesign for Smashing Magazine.
    • Q: Do we have to use GitHub? A: That's all Jonathan has played with so far, but they probably support other source control services.
    • Q: What content goes in the Git repo? A: The source content, templates, etc. E.g. the output of "hexo init".
    • Q: How does the DNS setup work? A: Netlify gives you IP addresses and you point A records at them. Same way you would for a Digital Ocean droplet or other virtual server.
    • With custom domains, pulling content from GitHub, and tools like the (also free) Netlify CMS that ease editing, this could be a strong competitor for e.g. Wordpress.com sites, barring some initial setup pain.
    • Was able to replace FormSpree service with Netlify's free form handling service. He can see the submitted form data by logging into his Netlify account.
  • Talked about recent creepy Facebook news and efforts like cleverdevil's to escape it with our content intact. Marty was inspired by that to grab his Facebook content with fb-export and the DownAlbum extension for Chrome.
  • If Facebook goes away or runs into issues, what happens to projects like React or their other open source projects?
  • Would a giant like Amazon step up? What would an Amazon social network look like?
  • If Facebook actually "falls" (however unlikely), would another centralized social network "win"? Probably!
Left-to-right: dariusmccoy.com, jonathanprozzi.net, gnostech.net, martymcgui.re, derekfields.is, brksavage.com

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on Tuesday, April 3rd!

Tue Feb 6

HWC Baltimore 2018-02-06 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of February met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on February 6th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Productive 2 weeks! Has a personal notes site running on Hugo on a subdomain after some adventures with git publishing hooks and a bug with themes that was causing it to render only as XML. Set up a separate site with Hugo and Reveal.JS and might be interested in that for IndieWeb-related learning activities going forward. Has been tracking everything he is writing, taking notes in his personal notes site as he goes so he can either clean them up for real posts, or just publish the notes. Worked tonight on more activity content on his personal notes site. Troubleshooting microformats on his main site WP theme. Also interested in GatsbyJS plus a WordPress backend... maybe? Also working with Gulp to make a build tool for P5.js sketches.

dariusmccoy.com – Tonight moved his domain from WordPress.com to Hover. Waiting on that to finish so he can set up new hosting and move his site in general off of WordPress.com onto a WordPress.org site which has more flexibility. Thinking about the direction of his site - resume / portfolio, or blogging, or posting his photography. Could blog personal projects, maybe sports blogging but worried about trolls.

derekfields.is – Set up his GitHub pages site to serve from his custom domain. Also put up a post about serving A-Frame virtual worlds from an ESP8266 microcontroller on Medium. Working on a PESOS copy of his post back to his site. Wants to work on a couple more posts for next time.

bouhmad.com – Working on bringing his site back up. Something went wrong on the virtual server running it and he is reinstalling and reconfiguring things. Has a blog post ready to go once the site is back up. (He got it back up before the end of HWC!)

martymcgui.re – Been working on IndieWeb-ifying some project websites, most recently ghostparty.today. It's a single HTML page hosted on Neocities that his improv partner created at IndieWebCamp Baltimore. It's an experiment in nesting microformats and permalinks, making use of links with anchors (example event, example RSVP). Also added mf2 markup to the site for his D&D livestreaming show (example, example reply) so he could reshare things on his site. Is excited about making a micropub server for the Neocities site as a goof, probably running on Glitch. Something like "IndieWeb like it's 1999".

Other things: 

  • The Falcon Heavy test launch happened today and wow! We could not find a reference for the projected final orbit of the payload (a Tesla with a mannequin wearing a SpaceX space suit)
    • The livestream video was interesting. It offered multiple camera views, switchable with a "Switch Camera" button in the YouTube UI. The main view was the public facing talking-head discussion, telemetry displays, etc. The other was a static camera with audio direct from mission control.
  • Transferring domains from WordPress.com is interesting. Apparently the registrar is listed as wildwestdomains.com?
  • Managing DigitalOcean droplets is hard when you lose your SSH private keys.
  • Glitch as a fun way to sketch in code. Neocities has an API.
  • Really clever onboarding process on Glitch. Log in with your GitHub and it shows a welcome page with "Start New Project" and "Resume Coding" buttons. Even if you have never used Glitch before, clicking "Resume Coding" will take you to a new Hello World project. Nice!
  • DigitalOcean recently(?) updated their pricing so that lower tiers are much better! You have to walk through a process to stop each droplet, resize it, and start it back up.
  • The Brackets editor has a Confetti plugin and it is very eye-catching.
  • .meme is a pending TLD??? Also talked .bot premiums on shorter domain names.
  • GitHub Security Alerts now send out weekly emails. Maybe only for some accounts or types of vulnerability, but Marty has been receiving them about some old projects.
  • JAMstack, the attractive bits about "reusable APIs" the dangers of those same APIs belonging to third-parties out of your control.
Left-to-right: jonathanprozzi.net, dariusmccoy.com, bouhmad.com, derekfields.is, martymcgui.re

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting on February 20th, which is a Tuesday!

Tue Jan 23

HWC Baltimore 2018-01-23 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second Homebrew Website Club of January met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on January 23rd.

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

martymcgui.re — Been catching up on things since IndieWebCamp! Spent tonight writing the first of several wrap-up posts. Also finally got the weekend's episode of This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition up this morning, ~3 days late. Planning to write more specific wrap-ups, open up some old Micropub and IndieAuth python projects he needs to update.

jonathanprozzi.net — Recently finished a draft of a 45-60 minute activity for new folks to HWC to register their first domain. None of tonight's attendee's need a domain, so we'll punt on that for next time. Spent the time tonight setting up a notebook.jonathanprozzi.net subdomain to be a publicly accessible version of the Hugo site that he set up recently to take notes. He used it over the weekend at IWC Baltimore and now wants it available on his phone. He also subscribed to all the IWC Baltimore attendees on Woodwind.

derekfields.is — Working on VR world project where the server is a microcontroller with sensors that can directly manipulate the VR world. Dealing w/ issues serving an A-Frame VR web app from his nodemcu microcontroller. The nodemcu serves a big opaque string for content and he wants to have it load A-Frame and other third-party resources from a CDN. The trouble is that when your computer is connected to the nodemcu's access point, there is no access to the internet. He is looking at another possibility of serving those minified scripts directly from the nodemcu.

angelosresu.me — Just noticed his website is down, oops. Not been working on his site much. Has been working on setting up his first OAuth implementation at work.

Other things:

  • Baltimore had our own IndieWebCamp! It was great! Videos are available now for all Saturday sessions as well as Sunday morning intros and afternoon demos.
  • 1 Million Webmentions!
  • WebSub is a W3C REC!
  • IndieAuth is a W3C Note!
    • Lots of discussion about what IndieAuth is, vs RelMeAuth, PGP
  • W3C governance is interesting! And confusing!
  • Showed off Woodwind as an example of IndieAuth dance. Also got Jonathan set up with Micropub via Woodwind so he can send replies.
  • Open Graph Protocol, microformats
  • Moving the idea of computing out of the default idea of a screen and keyboard/mouse/touch and a bunch of storage and computing right in front of you into more interesting paradigms like little internet-connected microcontrollers, virtual worlds.
  • The idea of needing indie readers to start consolidating how people can read and respond to IndieWeb content as easily as on silos. We may all be asking Aaron for accounts on Monocle.
Attendees for tonight's HWC Baltimore: angelosresu.me, derekfields.is, martymcgui.re, jonathanprozzi.net

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

  • February 6th (Note: this is a Tuesday). We'll have a new activity for new folks during this meeting starting at 6:30pm – getting started with web hosting!
  • February 20th (also Tuesday!)
2017
Tue Dec 12

HWC Baltimore 2017-12-12 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's December meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on December 12th.

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

martymcgui.re – Went to IndieWebCamp Austin, and it was great! Some notes on that below. IndieWebCamp Baltimore is scheduled and people are RSVPing and booking plane tickets, so he is very excited! The schedule now appears to be locked in and it's time to market it hard. Also demo'd the way he shows multiphoto posts on his site with CSS Grid (example). 2018-01-01 commitments progress: super happy with IWC Baltimore progress, expects to cut is close with his commitment to move his site to Hugo by 2018.

brksavage.com – Been working on a crash course in WordPress, HTML, kind of overloaded on it. Tonight worked on another project because of writer's block.

derekfields.is – Been geeking out on codrops – really nice visualizations and animations on the web with SVG, WebGL, and more. So pretty! Adding a blog page to his site (by hand). Researching how to incorporate Ghost into his site. Started a 100 Days of Code project! Similar to 100 Days of IndieWeb, the goal is to get an hour of coding done every day and tweet your progress. Missed a couple of days over the weekend, but enjoys sharing out his progress and the community support. Would like to have a buddy to support each other. 2018-01-01 commitment progress: working on apostrophe and a cloud service to host it, downloaded Ubuntu tools for Windows.

bouhmad.com – Site is down at the moment. Needs to get it back up and on HTTPS. Wants to do a blog post on experiences as being a dual full-time student and full-time employee out of high school, and the "full college experience". 2018-01-01 commitments: wants to get that blog post up, would like to commit to blogging at least once every two weeks in the new year capturing projects as a resource to others but also daily life as an archive for his future self.

jonathanprozzi.net – 2018-01-01 commitments: little progress on his pre-2018 commitment but still thinks he has time. Really wants to get his local WordPress + git setup going soon. A new near term goal: RSVP to IWC Baltimore!

Other Things:

  • Bitcoin! Coinbase! GDAX! How unreal the value is right now and how unusable it all is.
  • IndieWebCamp Austin! Marty went and loved it. We went looked at the Sessions Grid and talked about each one at a high level.
  • Talked about the WordPress Post Kinds plugin and how it might be useful to have a series of blog posts that explains how to get the most out of this plugin, tying that into details about the different types on the wiki and so on.
  • Talked a lot about IndieWebCamp Baltimore. It's shaping up to be very exciting! Aaron Parecki got the event and wiki pages looking good, so now we want to start getting the word out everywhere.
  • Brianna Privett talk about using WordPress as a life log.
  • Ways to put WordPress development into git, like Bedrock/Trellis, putting the whole site in version control, organizing child themes, etc.
  • CSS Grid! It seems like magic!
  • 2017 was an amazing year for HWC Baltimore. Thanks to everyone who made it a success. We can't wait to see everyone again and made an awesome 2018!
HWC Baltimore Participants
Left-to-right: derekfields.is, brksavage.com, jonathanprozzi.net, bouhmad.com, martymcgui.re

Thanks to everybody who came out! Due to the upcoming holiday around the next usual meeting, this will be our last meeting of 2017. We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the first meeting of 2018! We'll be meeting again on Tuesday, January 9th !

Wed Nov 29

Thanks to Jonathan for the great write-up for tonight’s Homebrew Website Club Baltimore! It is awesome that so many people came out and had such great discussions! I am sad to have missed it!

https://jonathanprozzi.net/indieweb/hwc-baltimore-2017-11-29-wrap-up/

post from HWC Baltimore 2017-11-29 Wrap-Up
Baltimore’s third November 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 29th.Here are the notes from the broadcast portion of tonight’s gathering!
Wed Nov 15

HWC Baltimore 2017-11-15 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second November 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 15th.

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Is back after lots of travel and writing a post about that, including a roadmap of getting back into things. Archived several posts from his old Hugo site into his new WordPress site. One of his 2018-01-01 goals is to practice posting status updates to his site instead of Facebook.

brksavage.com – Bought a new domain for a blog a couple of months ago, transferring it to BlueHost now. Been looking over old content. A 2018-01-01 commitment: small goal - write something small and publish it before end of year.

derekfields.is – Working on getting a JavaScript-based CMS called apostrophe.js working for his site. Probably going to host it on Heroku. Also learning the Windows subsystem for Linux, because developing on Windows "doesn't feel right" since he's not using .NET or similar.

bouhmad.com – Working on a first post to go up tonight! Realized the original scope for his "first post", which was going to compare multiple host-based intrusion detection systems, was going to take weeks! So, he's starting off with one, then planning to get back to it after he graduates (hopefully!) in December.

martymcgui.re – Been working on a new way to store and display webmentions on his site. Currently has one site that pulls them from webmention.io with JavaScript, and one site that polls webmention.io for new mentions every time it is compiled by Jekyll. Started building a webhook in Python but has now moved to PHP because it should be simpler. 

dariusmccoy.com – Just got started with his domain, just a landing page. Wants to add more content to it.

Other things:

  • IndieWeb 2018-01-01 Commitments.
  • echo-chamber.js - a fake commenting system that stores comments in the browser, so the commenter (and no one else) can see what they are saying.
  • IndieWebCamp Baltimore 2018! We talked about what an IndieWebCamp is and how it is structured.
  • IoT and the IndieWeb (mentioned the IndieWebSummit session on IndieWeb for Hardware).
  • Twitter and Facebook business models and how they benefit from outrage.
  • IndieWeb generations, specifically the way that participating in the IndieWeb right now almost requires you to be a developer.
  • The creepiness of Amazon Key.
Left-to-right: martymcgui.re, bouhmad.com, dariusmccoy.com, jonathanprozzi.net, brksavage.com, derekfields.is

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! We'll be meeting again on November 29th.

Wed Nov 1

HWC Baltimore 2017-11-01 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's first November 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on November 1st. 

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

bouhmad.com – Been working on a big post about security issues. Also, collecting resources for an Equifax-breach-themed CryptoParty in November, which will also go on his site.

djfalcon23.github.io – Buying his dream domain (TBA once it is registered). Been reading lots about getting into tech industry, dealing w/ impostor syndrome. Planning to turn some of these into notes and/or posts on his site when it is up.

martymcgui.re – Posted up the last IWC NYC 2017 interview (with Tantek). Would like to have one per week to put up, so will bring his mic to next HWC Baltimore, and may start asking people in IRC to do interviews over Skype, Zencaster, or similar. Also just reached the 100th episode of his comedy podcast.

Other things.

  • Worries about Net Neutrality and the upcoming FCC proposals to break it by allowing pay-for-access fees to publishers. We looked at resources like battleforthenet.com and a video from Congressional Democrats about the issue.
  • Podcasts about tech. Derek has been trying to find podcasts about cutting-edge tech, but been frustrated. For example, Friends Talk Frontend has good content, but he finds the hosts annoying. Adam recommend Talk Python to Me because it is funny and timely, focusing on new tech. Marty recommends the Contrafubilists because it is kind of an anti-cutting-edge tech podcast with very thoughtful hosts that take apart the marketing speak behind technology trends.
  • Also got off into the weeds about good story-driven podcasts. 😅
  • Talked about a theoretical "disruptive student" detection system that uses computer vision, motion detection, face recognition, to log "overactive" students and generate reports. Generated a lot of interesting discussion about unintended consequences of technologically "simple" systems.
  • Talked about the problems of trying to digitize the rules of complex human systems and the problems of measuring outcomes, determining what "just" algorithms looks like, etc.
Left-to-right: djfalcon23, bouhmad.com, martymcgui.re

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! We'll be meeting again on November 15th and November 29th.

Wed Oct 18

HWC Baltimore 2017-10-18 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.

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

martymcgui.re — Recently posted about his IWC NYC hack day project - showing subtitle and caption tracks for audio files in the browser by marking them up as a video element. Showed off his new personal site, a note-taking and planning site with an audience of one. It lives on his laptop and on a protected Tor hidden service so it can be read from his phone. Also been working on porting his podcast website to Hugo, learning how fragile his micropub server is about mapping URLs to flat files on the server.

bouhmad.com — Started a new job recently, so been working to find time to work on his new site. Wrote an outline and a list of resources about what the site will be about and what content will be on it. Hoping to publish in the next two weeks!

maryreisenwitz.com — Our venue host for the evening! Been writing a lot of stuff and working to organize it. Outlining story points for a narrative piece, consists of lots of dream pieces, which she has been logging for a few years. Been organizing those in Google Keep, cataloging and tagging them by time. Found it really interesting to look over her dream notes for this time past year. Also finding searching incredibly useful. "When did I dream about a horse? There are two dreams!"

rhearamakrishnan.com — Has a set of projects she wants to finish before updating her website. One of them is a podcast that will require lots of collaborative elements, so been planning that.

angelosresu.me — Has been on the job search and realized he needed a website. It's currently a programming demo of a CAD app that uses Paper.js and supports boolean operations over primitives.

Other things:

  • We talked about aligning audio/video content and content in a web page, like this course on O'Reilly. Would be useful for DHF's learning system courses. Could also be fun to have This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition show previews of the pages being discussed as they are being discussed.
  • We discussed capturing notes with the lowest friction tools then moving them into more useful/durable systems later.
  • We talked about podcasting tools. Dedicated recorders for in-the-field recording, Audacity for editing.
  • We talked about the recent announcement from Adafruit's founder/owner/engineer ladyada finding herself locked out of her Facebook account with no apparently recourse. This led to general discussion of silos and monopolies, systems that are secretly bad for you because they stalk you or share you or your contacts' data, systems that are directly bad for you like Candy Crush and other addictive apps.
  • Talked about some decentralized systems, like MaidSafe (decentralized p2p filestore, incentivized w/ a cryptocurrency), and Beaker's new decentralized Twitter-alike Rotonde (decentralized p2p websites, host it yourself or pay someone to mirror).

Left-to-right: martymcgui.re, bouhmad.com, maryreisenwitz.com, rhearamakrishnan.com, angelosresu.me

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center for the next one! Look for the announcement soon!

Wed Oct 4

HWC Baltimore 2017-10-04 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's first October 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on October 4th.

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

martymcgui.re — Went to IndieWebCamp NYC last weekend! Had a really great time (that he really needs to write up). Figured out how to show closed captions / subtitles on audio content (and needs to write that up). Recently decided that Jekyll was slowing him down too much and decided to jump to Hugo. First steps there - use a sacrificial website to learn on that is much simpler, in this case the We Have to Ask Podcast. Also showed off Rob Weychert's website as one that impressed him from IWC NYC due to the really nice typography, spacing, layout.

djfalcon23.github.io — Added a new slideshow feature. Can now show a model slideshow of past projects. In true HWC fashion, he pushed this feature live during the demo. Will be adding similar modal displays for PDF documents and videos.

lizboren.art — Been changing her art portfolio site. It's hosted on ArtStation which has a pretty affordable "pro" level with good editing tools. She's been happy with it for now. Slightly more problematic is that her .art domain was registered on her behalf by her school and now she doesn't know how to get access to manage it. We tried to use the WHOIS info to track down who to contact at the controlling registrar.

jonathanprozzi.net — Been working on a site for work at Digital Harbor Foundation. They are relaunching blueprint.digitalharbor.org educator resource portal. They've been working on a clear structured landing page for people that are not registered for it, as well as cleaning up navigation for users who are registered. It's a WordPress site and they've been moving their content into "Sensei", a WordPress add-on for education content from WooCommerce.

Other things:

  • We talked about doing design research and taking inspiration from sites that are similar to what you're working on.
  • Talked about the different approaches needed when working on content and structure versus working on making something attractive.
  • Went around talking about pet peeves about the web: bad graphic design, not having an obvious login button, sites that use social logins (e.g. GitHub or Twitter) when they don't work, crucial interactions in modals that aren't clickable on mobile, surveillance and adware crap.
  • Talked about the recent "alternative to ads" where the page runs a JavaScript bitcoin miner, and how wasteful this is in terms of energy vs. coins earned. Maybe all machines need mining ASICs? Talked about other alternatives like Brave and Flattr, compulsory licensing models and Doctorow's Eastern Standard Tribe, paywalls, paying for things with Bitcoin in general, money as an abstract concept.

Left-to-right:lizboren.art, martymcgui.re, jonathanprozzi.net, djfalcon23.github.io

Thanks to everybody who came out! We look forward to seeing you on October 18th at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center!

Wed Sep 20

HWC Baltimore 2017-09-20 Wrap-Up

Baltimore's second September 2017 meetup for Homebrew Website Club met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on September 20th. It was our one-year anniversary, given that our first meeting occurred on September 21st, 2016.

We celebrated with cookies!

Insomnia cookies and IndieWebCamp stickers

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

jonathanprozzi.net – Set up bridgy on his new WordPress site since last time. Working on a post detailing his move from Hugo to WordPress. Hoping it serves as documentation to help with outreach to other folks who already use WordPress, or folks looking to start a new personal website. Also hoping the bridgy publish works, since this is his first time posting with it.

maryreisenwitz.com – Working on web content for a DHF digital fabrication course that starts next week, starting with Autodesk Fusion 360. It's organized as "lessons" on a WordPress site at learn.digitalharbor.org.

bouhmad.com – Prepping to launch his personal site at that URL. Has a local development version, written in Hugo. Will be posting about security research.

rhearamakrishnan.com – Working on her portfolio website, which mostly links to writing she has had published elsewhere. Wants to make sure all the outgoing links still work, update the look. Also has a lot of visual content like zines that she wants to display in an appealing way. Currently publishes via GitHub Pages, facing a learning curve making styling changes, but is sticking with it and wants to keep things simple.

martymcgui.re – Super excited that we have had a year of HWC Baltimore meetups! Looking forward to more outreach in the year ahead, finding ways to reach people who don't yet know that they want to be part of the IndieWeb. On his personal site, been working on a per-month archive view. Playing both with Jekyll plugins to generate the pages and with learning CSS Grid to do the layout, because it's new and shiny. The slowness of Jekyll is really tempting him to jump to Hugo, despite knowing it will be a huge pain.

Shawn Grimes – Working on web content for a different DHF learning system called Blueprint. Currently focused on things like that rather than his personal website.

Other things:

  • We talked about some of the pros/cons of static site generators vs WordPress. E.g. security needs, ease of posting, etc. etc. etc...
  • We talked about Hugo being good for archiving content like old Evernote notes. You can make an archive that is more browsable/searchable than the Evernote exports and doesn't require Evernote.
  • Talked about ways of taking and organizing notes, differing needs (e.g. need to write down something quickly, so a mobile interface is key). Some different options came up, like laverna.cculyssesapp.com.
  • Talked about reasons not to store things on clouds like Evernote and Dropbox, targeted advertising. Tools to prevent surveillance such as Better and Firefox Focus.
  • Talked about some general intro-to-IndieWeb stuff, how it got started, building blocks like POSSE and webmentions, and making progress through small incremental steps.
Back row: Shawn, Jonathan, Adam, Rhea, Mary. Front: Marty

We're very happy to have reached the milestone of a year of (nearly-) regular meetings! Thanks to everyone who has come out to be a part of these meetups so far.

We hope you'll join us again on for another HWC Baltimore meetup at Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center! Our next meetups will be October 4th followed by another on October 18th.