The first HWC of the month, let’s talk bigger picture IndieWeb, beyond our personal websites. The “guiding compass” is a twist on a standard HWC with an emphasis on community collaboration. This is a new, evolving format.
Excited to give a slightly different format a whirl!
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve …
Made it to Homebrew Website Club after a long month of NaNoWriMo!
Shared that I finished my novel rewrite and got onto the topic of science fiction. Johannes gave The Ministry for the Future a bad review — too naively detached from reality, and somehow cheating to jump ahead to everyone getting along from… today. He’d been excited to read optimistic sci-fi, but the execution failed. We agreed that it’s frustrating that so much sci-fi now is dystopian, and doesn’t offer a hopeful path forward out of our quagmire. I’ve been feeling lately, as have several of my writing friends, that we want to write optimistic sci-fi — I wonder if we can break free of our dystopian imaginations. It’s easy to imagine the worst… can we imagine the harder solution, to get to the best? Heard some writers positing that dystopia somehow feels more believable, more real, and that we critique utopia more.
David reminded us about websites 😅 and shared the 2021 IndieWeb gift calendar as well as the 2022-01-01 “commitments” to ship something on your own website. I’m tempted to do something for both / either, but have been burned by overcommitting myself before and doing too many “challenges” in a row… but also, website stuff is fun… so maybe?
I’m planning to go to IndieWeb Create Day on Christmas Day, and haven’t decided yet whether I’ll work on something for myself or do some more work on the mushrooms 🍄
For IndieWeb gifts… I wrote up most of a post of how I’ve been trying to get Indigenous working as a Microsub server through my website. But, I can’t actually post it since my subscriptions won’t show up in the app 🙃 I’m not sure what the problem is… I suspect the Microsub endpoint isn’t working properly? The endpoint isn’t showing up in Indigenous even after refreshing… But, my subscriptions do show up in Monocle if I activate the Microsub server via Aperture 🤔 Micropub is working in Indigenous, but a different WordPress widget creates that endpoint. I’m probably missing something 🤷♀️
Maybe working some more on my IndieWeb homepage proposal would count as an IndieWeb gift? 🤔 Someone brought it up in the chat the other day which prompted Aaron to compile a bunch of how-to and improvement resources on the wiki, and made me itchy to work on it again. What’s holding me up is not knowing how to do formatting in Markup, which is a silly thing to put me off it. I also don’t know how to add images to the wiki lol. Reminder to self: ask in the chat for someone to point me to Markup / wiki formatting guidelines, and the wiki image etiquette.
I’ve also been thinking about a more dramatic proposal for the homepage, with much shorter and more pointed messaging (feeding off interest following the Facebook / Meta literally-destroying-society-for-money-also-making-teenager-girls-suicidal crap and Web3 crypto bullshit), that would take a lot of information off and move it to an “About” page. I’ve been pondering whether it would be off-brand to make something too slick-looking for the homepage because IndieWeb is not corporate. My personal inclination as a graphic designer is to make the homepage look more in line with modern sites and less wiki-y but maybe that’s the wrong approach. What I’d really like to do is mock up how I’d design the homepage to look if it wasn’t a wiki site, but I don’t want to bother if it’s not possible to make a wiki page look flash 🤷♀️ I’ll probably keep it on the back burner for now, I guess unless someone pokes me about it or I need a break from editing 😂
What’s Friday Funday?
A casual after-work hangout for people with their own websites to talk about things besides websites! Get to know other people in the IndieWeb, beyond the IndieWeb.
Drop in for a few minutes or stay for the whole evening. Bring your beverage of choice, or dinner if it’s that ti…
Looking forward to hanging out with folks this Friday!
I might do some pie prep while we chat 🍏 I was thinking about doing a fall themed block print but I should probably apply my full attention with sharp tools involved 😉
Come hang out with us for casual conversations and a chance to network and get to know others in the community. These hangouts happen twice a week to accommodate multiple timezones across the globe. Join at the time that works best for you! Everyone is welcome and those new to Climate Designers are especially encouraged to drop by learn what’s up.
I don’t really know any other graphic designers but it’d be nice to meet some! I’ll give this a go.
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Thinking about self-hosting connected with self-sufficiency — you can run a small (transportable) server (Raspberry Pi) off of a solar panel or a Prius battery and a tank of gas. I want to see some post-apocalyptic stories with people running their own servers in their little self-powered villages.
Discussing writing in a chain, from website to website, made me think about the future of the book. I read something recently talking about how ebooks substantially mimic the form of a paper book, and have been pondering what else a digital book could be, using the power of the internet. I could see online publishing making collaborative works with multiple authors easier to write (not sure exactly what that would look like though), and collaborative worlds, where authors write books set in the same universe, having an entire website be essentially a multi-volume book.
Blaise posited that knowing how to use Git is the literacy of the future. When my nieces were teenagers I was tempted to buy them their own domain names and encourage them to do something with it, on the feeling that everyone should have their own site, but never did because I felt like they needed to be driven to learn it themselves. Not sure if that was the right call or not. Maybe I should have asked them if they’d be interested in it. Or talked to them about having my own website. Do The Youth see having your own website as irrelevant in the age of social media?
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Johannes showed off the website for the hydroponic system he built. (In relation to my IndieWeb pop-up proposal for a discussion about the intersection of analog and digital worlds.) Got a bit carried away talking about plants, but I could talk about plants all night 🌱
Got three suggestions for the filters I recently added to my Reading List page, based on this tutorial but which wasn’t working properly — items did not appear on load as they were supposed to. Unfortunately, none of the three suggestions seemed to work (though I may have used them incorrectly). I decided I don’t have time to learn Javascript right now to figure out why what should work, isn’t, so I used a workaround and manually added the class “show” to each item so that on load they appear, and then the filter takes away the “show” class and re-adds it as appropriate 🤷♀️
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Discussed the need for an Indie Web logo or icon in a square-ish dimension. Angelo pointed out that at icon size the colors of the logo look astonishingly similar to MasterCard.
Will we be ready for an in-person event in the spring? What could that look like? Along with discussion about simultaneous smaller local events, also chatted about the idea of renting out a couple suites at a hotel or doing an actual Indie Web Camp. A couple spots I thought of that potentially could work for a less tech-centric location up here might be a McMenamins, or a State Park facility like Ramblewood Retreat Center out by Sequim. Curious how expensive a small event space would be at The Lodge at St. Edwards State Park.
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Fun discussion today about using your own website as an IndieWeb dating profile (and meeting friends). Incorporating mini quizzes or questionnaires into your site to gauge compatibility, or recommending content to readers. We were throwing around how you could be recommended to meet other IndieWeb users who shared your interests — I was thinking kind of like Last.fm shows you “neighbors” who share your taste in music — someone else suggested showing overlap between liked / saved articles. Another idea someone threw out was using AI to compare writing styles and somehow use that to suggest shared interests and compatibility.
Talked about how important a good avatar photo is, as we were looking through nownownow to check out various websites for topic inspiration. Angelo recalled an old OkCupid profile photo meta analysis that recommended what made a photo more attractive, like good times of day to take your photo (take-home: “flash adds 7 years”).
Suggested to Jacob the idea of having a place on their website where folks could recommend things directly to them (perhaps with some suggestions / parameters for the types of things they might like). Another way to do that, that’s probably more IndieWebby, could be tagging people from posts on your own website, if they accept or can be notified about that.
Angelo showed a fun site he’s working on as a directory of IndieWeb websites, using a visual forest metaphor. I like the idea of adding more sensory info to the website experience, incorporating some gifs / sprites as tasteful accents (like ripples of water on a stream) and some forest sounds with parallax like VR (scroll closer to the stream and the water sounds get louder, scroll up to the top of the canopy and birdsong gets louder).
Tossed around the idea of a little community challenge, to interact with the websites of three other IndieWebbers who you might not know.
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Angelo started throwing some more colors into the IndieWeb wiki’s custom.css and looks like the expanded palette needs some more expansion on the lighter side. To do item for me!
We checked out Kicks Condor‘s new project, the Multiverse, which feels like old web but new again, a mashup of forums/comment threads, blogging, MySpace, with a retro-modern neon pastel color palette and old-school Windows tiling patterns that somehow also feels very now. Because you can put text and graphics wherever the fuck you want within the post, they can be like collages and moodboards in a way Pinterest claimed to be except not commercialized because it’s not all focused on linking back to everything else (although could be bad for people stealing from artists and not giving credit).
I appreciate the way Kicks’ website asks more of the internet, doesn’t accept the usual as a limitation and goes all in on adding layers and interactivity and making it feel more organic and casual and conversational. Side-branching conversations inline with the text that’s being commented on in a way that still feels like conversations and not like a Word doc comments thread. TBH their homepage is so much and so different it’s almost hard to read but it’s still cool.
One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. Let’s talk about what we would like to do in 2021 now that it is here. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you…
Shared my mushroom mascots around and we all liked the different types of mushrooms best. Got some support for the mushroom design tilted back to show its gills.
Some future add-on projects for the IndieWeb wiki: updating the colors in the wiki, and changing the sponsors not to show on the footer of each page, but maybe on the homepage and as a page of its own or even on an about page. (Also the contrast on the sponsors footer is way too low.) Looking at recurring sponsors might want to figure out a way to recognize those too.
(Note to self: might want to make “support us” an action to highlight on the homepage proposal 😉 )
Question about the philosophy of subscribing: right now we have feeds but we might really want to follow people, or cats, or houses. What if you could subscribe to a person, and then select the types of things you wanted to see from them (maybe category of content, or maybe format – like if all I want to see is photos).