events/2025-02-12-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-02-12.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-02-12-hwc-europe
Participants
Welcome to HWC!
Libraries and books
zachary.kai Just found this blog post on the supposed rarity friendliness: https://birming.com/rarity-friendliness/
capjamesg mentioned https://taylor.town/junk- https://mandarismoore.com/2025/02/08/homebrew-website-club-meeting.html
- Libraries are awesome. Free as Air, Free As Water, Free As Knowledge is a speech by Bruce Sterling from 1992 on the incredible subversiveness of libraries
- Things to borrow/use in libraries:
- CDs (music/audiobooks
- DVDs
- Makerspaces
- Zines
- Graphic novels
- Meeting rooms
- Seeds (what? amazing!)
- "Borrow-a-person" (an hour of interesting people's time who volunteer)
- Historical documents
- Vinyl
- Cassetes
- Musical instruments
- Asking people questions who are specialists / have historical knowledge
- Things libraries should / maybe are already doing
- Web archiving?
- Hastings Library of Things
- Community sharing
- Zine collections
- James thinking: How do we make sure the values of the web are passed down through generations?
- Borrow a reader: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U4M-_wOgHPs
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oregon_Trail
- Talking with folks on trains: interesting and enjoyable but seemingly more acceptable on long distance than communter lines. Ditto with buses
- Books people are reading as an opener for conversations with strangers
- https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44421460-before-the-coffee-gets-cold
- James now resolves to use Open Library or something other than GoodReads :D ** https://openlibrary.org/books/OL31947012M/Before_the_Coffee_Gets_Cold
- Other Book Tracking Options
- Thing related to borrowing books that may interest people: https://tantek.com/2024/120/t1/library-of-infinite-loan
- Writing tools and collaborative writing tools
- WriteBook: https://once.com/writebook
- https://ellipsus.com/ - I heard a lot of good things about it, but did not try it
- great webdesign on that site imo
- How James designs his homepage feed
- Post titles and show the first few sentences
- The homepage shows six posts
- RSS feed gets the full content and 20 posts
- James' RSS is generated from https://jamesg.blog/longform-feed
- James doesn't use "Read more" links
Accessibility: Links and image alt text
- Descriptive text for links for screen readers to give people context
- Another method is using aria-labels or the title attribute
- Question: How to make five links in a sentence accessible?
- You can link with a bibliography instead of inline
- Don't use "logo" as the descriptor for a link to a homepage that contains an image
- "My approach to "Alt Text" by Adrian Roselli is well worth a read
- "coffee cat"
- "the fact there is no simple answer is correct"
- Some great links in this about comics and accessibilty https://epubsecrets.com/the-accessiverse-on-accessible-comics.php
- Accessibility for artwork: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/complex-images
- "it's funny how the design of a platform reinforces the way that you use it"
- Being interested in the web for its artistic potential
- Tension between usability and creativity
- prefers-reduced-motion
- The fun of making on the web
Links, &c.
- https://inclusivedesignprinciples.info/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jodi_(art_collective) (thanks for adding!)
- "ludic": "showing spontaneous and undirected playfulness."
- "In a world... where there was a text editor"
- James note for
Paul Watson The text highlight on "
"TITLE OF ARTWORK - image described in detail below under the heading Image Description" " on https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/complex-images is unreadable in dark mode. - thanks for spotting - I'll get that fixed!
Text Adventure Games (and accessibility!)
- Zork intro reference:
- https://gunkies.org/wiki/Zork#Introduction
- If you are interested ot learn about text-based adventure games the documentary GET LAMP is well worth a watch and freely available
- There are enough "interactive fiction" aka "text adventure" to have a wikipedia category: Interactive fiction engines
- Adding an accessible introduction to a website that helps someone relying on assistive technologies picture the website. Things you can describe include:
- Layout
- Typography type
- Holiday theme
- Colour theme (i.e. green text w/ black background)
- Use skip intro / skip navigation / skip to the bottom / skip to the top
What we're doing on our websites
- Showing principles on our homepage
- Redesigning navigations
- https://dead.garden/books
- James made
Impressen
- impressum
- A barrier to inviting people to start their own websites
- A benefit of using Instagram, etc. is that nobody adds impressums and it is perceived you don't need one
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RXJKdh1KZ0w
- Don Novello / Lazlo Letters
- https://openlibrary.org/works/OL15843732W/The_Lazlo_letters?edition=key%3A/books/OL4539488M
- fonts
- turn your handwriting into font https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
Joe Crawford turned his (mix of block and cursive) writing into a font https://artlung.com/blog/2018/03/12/wow-calligraphr-com/
- turn your handwriting into font https://www.calligraphr.com/en/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eudora_(email_client)
- Coffee cup in a settings pane:
- Coffee cup in a settings pane:
- Computer architectures changed; wasn't updated as computers developed.
- Out of the old http://webdesign-l.com/ mailing list were built:
- Spam classification services information on http://www.hesketh.com/
- http://enemieslist.com/
- Backup, backup, check backups
- discovery looking up the url https://painandsuffering.com/
- Copyright 2020 pain
- Words
- Gee-gaw
- gimcrack https://www.google.com/search?q=gimcrack+etymology
- Knick-knack, bauble, trinket, knickknack, gewgaw, kickshaw and tchotchke
- Surviving words from the 1820-1830s craze of inventing grandiloquent neologisms: bamboozle skedaddle absquatulate hornswoggle discombobulate bloviate
- Band names and food
- IndieWeb Carnival: https://artlung.com/affirmations-ic/
- AVIF support: https://caniuse.com/avif
- ^ And a 10th submission came in during this call!
- Joe's first AVIF usage: https://artlung.com/blog/2025/02/09/every-wave-is-still-a-lesson/
- 10x smaller than a GIF made from a video of same dimensions
- AVIF support in PHP is only in PHP 8.1 https://www.php.net/manual/en/function.imageavif.php
- https://caniuse.com/avif "Since January 2024, this feature works across the latest devices and major browser versions" - the last to add support was Microsoft Edge
- ffmpeg can turn video files into avif with a command like
ffmpeg -i Dream_crop_102.mov -r 15 -vf scale=400:-1 OUTPUT_400.avif
- "the blog post I never published" -- carnival theme idea
- "dead letter office" for drafts
- https://notion.so
- James uses notes
- Tantek: notes/drafts are mycellium networks of notes
- it's okay that they are invisible
- sometimes ideas emerge into a mushroom (blog post)
- mascot#Interest a mushroom is a potential mascot to represent the indieweb, in the dark, growing despite inhospitable conditions
- "kerplunked"
Re.
- James note for Paul Watson The text highlight on "
"TITLE OF ARTWORK - image described in detail below under the heading Image Description" " on https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/complex-images is unreadable in dark mode. -- had to drop off the call, but that should be fixed now (might need a hard refresh)
- Looks great!
Which HTML element are you
- "I was going to peg you for a
hr"- "that is a compliment, i think!"
- James:
p/blockquote - Jo:
section - Michael:
blink(relevant history)- Sara:
ruby - Benji:
noscript - Joe:
nobr(but reality is <details> with too much in it); what it does, it does perfectly and simply - Angelo:
object(nb. pronounced as in verb "I object", not as in noun "this is an object") - Tantek:
a href; connecting people; get you to where you are going<mark>tag https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/mark- might be
<cite>
- Sara:
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/fencedframe
- Get points for guessing your friends' HTML element that they think describes them best
History of Markup
- w3.org/history
- https://www.w3.org/History/1945/vbush/
- "JSON made the web shittier in a way that XML tried and failed." -Tantek
- "The fault tolerance of HTML is an accident of history, that's my hot take" -Tantek
Note Taking
- Taking notes - challenges
- paper vs electronic
- cursive vs block letters
- must be able to synthesize thoughts and be readable
- Sketchnoting
- "The Sketchnote Handbook" by Mike Rohde
- Some examples of sketchnotes from
- "cursive" vs "print"
- Example image
- 1960s Braun industrial design vs Jony Ives's Apple design https://imgur.com/apple-vs-braun-Nd4JI
- Kalispell MT Flathead Beacon Police Blotter: https://flatheadbeacon.com/section/police-blotter/ - not a lot happening in Kalispell