events/2025-02-19-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-02-19.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-02-19-hwc-europe
Participants
capjamesg - https://jamesg.blog
zachary.kai - https://zacharykai.net
Mark Sutherland - https://marksuth.dev
Paul Watson - https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk
Joe Crawford https://artlung.com/
benji https://benji.dog
- Template:carrvo
Mike Kupietz
- ... add names
Notes
- Page idea for
zachary.kai from
capjamesg - a list of Australian media people should know about/try
- IndieWeb_Movie_Club
- This month: Watch any version of Romeo & Juliet! https://marksuth.dev/posts/2025/02/indieweb-movie-club-feb-2025-romeo-juliet
- Introductions
- https://www.johnwalker.nl/
- James: The SGDs mention is cool!
- https://jamesg.blog/2025/02/12/sustainable-living
- Using your website to start conversations
- This is a fun part of running a website!
- And the conversation doesn't have to happen on platforms you don't own, like Facebook.
- Making websites green
- Minimal designs
- Using a host that uses renewable energy
- https://cat.org.uk/
- Unoffice Hours: https://unofficehours.com/
- People usually only book a conversation if they're keen to talk to you
- An interesting way of connecting one-on-one
- Everyone can share what interests them on their website
- Having a website encourages us to ask "who are we / who are we not?"
- Having a blog lets you build the habit of writing more
- Blogging as a mental gym
- Gyms have all the equipment you need, and plenty of benefits of going: meeting people, exercise, community.
- You've got to go to the gym to see the benefits
- When we write
- James: no set time, but he takes notes throughout the day, some of which become blog posts.
- https://betterweb.club/
- Self-hosting is a spectrum from running a server in your closet to a cloud host to using a silo.
- Moving away from GitHub
- What are the benefits / trade-offs
- Discovery is harder on tools that aren't GitHub
- GitHub has a robust index of projects
- Community-oriented Git hosts may be interesting where you can see what other users are sharing (like Gitea)
- GitHub is a silo
- More people talking about indieweb principles is exciting; there is a growing realisation of the trade-offs of depending on large services.
- Google's dominance can come up in ways you wouldn't think
- Trying to access a spreadsheet someone shares
- Submissions for a magazine having to be in a particular document format
- Assumptions in form design (i.e. giving a phone number assumes you have a phone number; restricting a spreadsheet to Google users assumes all of the target audience has a Google account)
- Many people assume you have a social media account (i.e. Instagram) as a contact method
What have you done with your website?
Joe Crawford is hosting IndieWeb Carnival this month: "Affirmations" is the theme
- https://artlung.com/affirmations-ic/ (Day 19, 18 submissions so far! Join us!)
- Creating a new framework for pages on his site https://artlung.com/blog/2025/02/18/experimenting-with-new-pages/
- Posted the demo promised: https://turner.enemyterritory.org/shared/repo/user/carrvo/website/Journey-to-MIndie.html
- and POSSEd to YouTube https://youtu.be/TzNnigFu7l8?si=NbjKABdEGJTPEibd
- What we are working on with our websites this week
- Building a guestbook https://zacharykai.net/guestbook
- James is redesigning his website: https://jamesg.blog/graph-demo
- Previous versions: https://jamesg.blog/assets/images/2024/06/previous_theme.webp
- Another design concept: https://jamesg.blog/2025/01/16/learning-about-web-design
- Some more designs recently at https://jamesg.blog/2025/01/20/designs-from-the-last-few-months
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/grid-template-areas
- A good solution for layouts with a specific structure in mind
- Posting TILs on our websites
- Simon Willison has a dedicated TIL site https://til.simonwillison.net/
- You can write short things
- Another example: https://jvns.ca/til/
Joe Crawford Trying to work on lighter-weight new pages, like https://artlung.com/projects/
- Hoping to have a more intuitive way to do Webmentions
- Pages for a history of older versions of your website
- https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/info/history
- You were a member of a webring back in the first version linked on that page!
- Tool: Save your website to the Internet Archive
- https://help.archive.org/help/save-pages-in-the-wayback-machine/**
- With the trouble that archive.org had recently I setup an instance of https://archivebox.io/ for as a personal archive, just in case.
- Contact pages
- https://tantek.com/contact
- https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/contact
- Not having a contact form means bots cannot fill it out
- Question for designing: how many clicks does it take for someone to be able to reach out?
- Follow up: Can you put links directly to messaging apps?
- But your goal may not be to have a one-click solution.
- What matters is thinking about the design -- thinking about how much friction you want.
- Using your domain name as an ID, e.g. on discord.
- Downside of services offering usernames that allow "." as a character without domain name authentication is that "." can't be taken as verification.
Joe Crawford has Doraemon on his desk today https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doraemon
- And when I acquired that robot cat: https://artlung.com/blog/2015/12/22/christmas-new-bot-tuesday-everyones-favorite-transdimensional-robot-cat-doreamon/
- Fun: building your website in a 2000s aesthetic.
- Building a site in Windows XP
- Encouragements:
- Set up multi-factor authentication on your email, domain registrar, and web host.
- Consider putting a proper rel=icon on their homepage icon
- Make a web manifest.json file that lets someone use your site as a progressive web app; there are lots of platform-specific features too.
https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/how-to-favicon-in-2021-six-files-that-fit-most-needs
- How we feel about having different categories of content
- TILs being a separate entity vs. being part of your main site
- Do all posts go in your RSS feed?
- What if Mastodon posts are a first-class part of a website?
- Idea: every day has a page that aggegates lots of content (short things, TILs, long form)
- Cultural Futures Conference 2025 - more info at https://www.culturalfuturesfoundry.com/conference-2025/
- Day 1: Inclusive communities (11am-3pm GMT on March 1st 2025)
- Day 2: Inclusive storytelling (11am-3pm GMT on March 2nd 2025)
- Online only, free to attend, but you need to book tickets via https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/cultural-futures-conference-march-1st-and-2nd-2025-tickets-1237342487689
Paul Watson taking part in a panel on Day 2 about "Storytelling in the 21st-century"
- Having different post types on our websites
- /feeds page that lists different feeds your website supports
- Example: https://benji.dog/feeds
- https://adactio.com supports several different types of feeds
- Having separate feeds adds a maintenance burden, but gives users options
- It would be good if web readers let you filter feeds by RSS category
- /feeds page that lists different feeds your website supports
- James' web reader, https://artemis.jamesg.blog (invite code "coffee"), supports filtering feeds
- Designed for high-volume feeds like news sites
- Web readers we use
- FreshRSS
- FreshRSS https://www.freshrss.org/ has mechanisms for filtering and aggregating
- Inoreader
- ...
- FreshRSS
- Benji: Drawing designs on post-it notes -- dreams for new designs
- James has been trying to sketch more designs
- Web reader features
- Allow a user to pause a feed for a while (maybe time-based); a snooze button on a feed, maybe more ideal for high-volume feeds.
- James' use case is for managing higher-volume feeds; he wants to stay subscribed, but not seeing the content for a while. (i.e. if you are taking a break from learning about a topic and want to snooze feeds)
- Move feeds into an archive folder
- Fraidycat RSS reader had a feature to select between real-time vs. slower cadences for polling.
- Inoreader supports adding Rules for managing your feed / categorising posts in a feed automatically.
- https://jamesg.blog/2025/02/13/html-quiz
- "It's okay." --
capjamesg
- "It's good." -- Joe
- "It's okay." --
- Making a list of saved Wikipedia articles that we like
- RSS feed of words we like
1968 Romeo and Juliet: https://rogersmovienation.com/2023/02/26/classic-film-review-a-romeo-and-juliet-1968-shakespeare-could-have-called-his-own/#jp-carousel-137547
- IndieWeb_Carnival
- Would people sign up to a notification that says when the next IndieWeb Carnival is out?
- James: there is something nice about the current setup where you seem to discover the next topic by following blogs
- Discovery vs. push
- IndieWeb Carnival RSS feed? Would reminders be helpful?
- feeds.indieweb.org
- Carnival
- This Week in the IndieWeb
- RSS feed for events
- Downsides of scheduling events automatically
Atom feed for IndieWeb Carnival Revision History page: https://indieweb.org/wiki/index.php?title=IndieWeb_Carnival&feed=atom&action=history
You can follow the changes on any IndieWeb.org page by going to "View History" then picking "Atom" from the "Tools" dropdown
- Relative date for event feeds (i.e. "starting in 10 mins")
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Canvas_API/Manipulating_video_using_canvas
- Mr Blobby: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rNkgDJpcuwU
- Ideas:
- "Carnival Catchup" Participating in Carnivals you missed (see a list at IndieWeb_Carnival)
- Blog post on how we chose our domain names
- There is precedent for doing round-up posts after the Carnival month has passed
- Grouping links is always useful!
- "I should know more about the TLDs I am using"
- "Do whatever's fun; don't worry about if it's good"
- "Drawing from the right side of the brain" book