Kicking off IndieWeb Summit 2018!!

IndieWeb Summit is here, YouTube blocks Blender, and RPGs on your TLDs. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for June 16th - 22nd, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

The 2018 IndieWeb Summit is now less than a week away, and I'd like to personally invite you, (yes, you!) to join us there.

IWS kicks off with a pre-party on Monday evening at the Pine Street Market where you can enjoy some great handmade food and drinks. More importantly, you can meet and befriend some of the most earnest and clever folks I know when it comes to having fun being yourself on the web. You're likely to share stories about how awful silos like Facebook and Twitter have become, get inspired to build things you didn't even know you wanted to put on your website, and hatch schemes for what you'd love to learn, discuss, and build over the next two days.

Tuesday is a day of discussions and, while there will be some extremely great keynote talks and a chance to show off your favorite feature on your own site, most of the day is reserved for discussions chosen by the folks who attend. I've seen sessions range from the extremely technical (build a Micropub server in 40 minutes) to the extremely personal (what is the meaning of identity on the web?). If you've got burning questions, you can volunteer to lead a session on a topic even (especially?) if you're not an expert. If you're not sure sit in on whatever feels interesting to you! There is no pressure to be clever.

Wednesday is all about creating. Take something you learned from Tuesday, or just something you've been meaning to do, and build it! There will be some optional HowTo sessions for some of the technical IndieWeb building blocks, and lots of knowledgable folks who would love to answer questions and even collaborate on projects. At the end of the day, you can show off what you've got. Or not! It's your website, no pressure.

As the producer of a weekly informational podcast about the IndieWeb, I would love to chat with anyone who is willing! I'll be conducting one-minute interviews on what inspired folks to get involved in the IndieWeb and what they're working on for their personal website. If you want to be interviewed, but we don't find time during the Summit, I'll be around Portland on Thursday, and on Friday I'll be around the Open Source Bridge un-conference.

IndieWeb Summit was one of the most inspiring events for me when I attended my first one in 2017. In the year since I have been inspired to add tons of new things to my website and built out some new IndieWeb-related tools, which I've (sort of) kept track of. Additionally, Homebrew Website Club Baltimore celebrated our 1-year anniversary, and hosted Baltimore's first IndieWebCamp!

So, no matter where you are in terms of technical skills, what your website currently looks like or does, or whether it even exists yet, I encourage you to join us at IndieWeb Summit!

Countdown to the IndieWeb Summit, improvements for WordPress beginners, and a new kind of book club. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for June 9th - 15th, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

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)!

Panic at the GitHub, IndieAuth clarifications, and Bridgy’s farewell to Facebook. Also, I have a cold. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for June 2nd - 8th, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!

I had the streaming bug, today, so I made a couple of videos of writing the script for, and recording, this week’s This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition.

Direct Link: Script writing for This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition

Direct Link: Recording This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition

Replacing Facebook with newsletters, “Taking Back the Web”, and privacy-preserving maps. It’s the audio edition for This Week in the IndieWeb for May 26th - June 1st, 2018.

You can find all of my audio editions and subscribe with your favorite podcast app here: martymcgui.re/podcasts/indieweb/.

Music from Aaron Parecki’s 100DaysOfMusic project: Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11

Thanks to everyone in the IndieWeb chat for their feedback and suggestions. Please drop me a note if there are any changes you’d like to see for this audio edition!