events/2025-02-26-hwc-europe

Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-02-26.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-02-26-hwc-europe

Participants

• Joe Crawford
• Paul Watson
• capjamesg
• Al Abut
• Zachary Kai: https://zacharykai.net
• benji https://benji.dog
• Kevin Marks (late)
• Template:carrvo
• Tantek Çelik

• ... add names

Notes

• Welcome to HWC!
• MathML follow up from FreSH this week
  • MathML editor: http://www.imatheq.com/imatheq/com/imatheq/math-equation-editor-latex-mathml.html
• IndieWeb Carnivals
  • Movie Club for this month
  • Affirmations carnival has 26 submissions this month https://artlung.com/affirmations-ic/
• IndieWeb_Movie_Club
• https://jamesg.blog/movies
• /starbucks pages on personal websites
  • There is no /starbucks page on https://slashpages.net/ but there is /chipotle
    • Joe Crawford has now implemented a /starbucks page https://artlung.com/starbucks/ but is open to a better slug to enumerate coffee or tea or other drinks
• What we are doing on our websites
  • Zachary added Webmention support to their website
  • James has been working on his feed reader
  • We're talking about websites today!
  • Zoyander is experimenting with PeerTube - https://peertube.intrapology.com
  • PeerTube supports federation via ActivityPub so you can connect with others
    • Choosing who to federate with can take time
    • Someone can subscribe to a PeerTube account on Mastodon / other ActivityPub tools
    • https://bookwyrm.social/ lets you follow Mastodon accounts, and vice versa
• Paul added a text fragments to a quotation on a recent blog post (https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/link-dump-feb-2025)
  • Links say "View in context" and link directly to the part of a page that Paul has quoted
  • Substack seems to override HTML fragments / highlights in Firefox; the behaviour is inconsistent across browsers.
• https://www.kevinmarks.com/mentionquote
  • https://github.com/kevinmarks/cassis-autolink-py
  • How does Mastodon, etc. interpret fragment links?
  • Internet Explorer limit was ~2000 [Joe, please correct me!]
  • Bluesky may be limits on URL sizes.
  • https://docs.bsky.app/docs/advanced-guides/post-richtext
• https://www.benji.dog/wikipedia/

• https://data.fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk/id/object/2810
• https://epeus.blogspot.com/

• Book recommendations
  • Same as Ever book
  • Inventing the Renissance book

• 100 page idea book post by Tracy
  • https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/17/in-praise-of-the-hundred-page-idea/

• https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/blogs/artists-notebook/posts/copyright-and-ai-consultation, inspired by Angelo Gladding's blogging.

turning text reference links into blockquotes as part of autolink https://www.kevinmarks.com/mentionquote

• https://jamesg.blog/buttons
• /88x31s
• 88×31 Buttons overlaid on a picture of my jacket: https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/info/version
• https://gifcities.org

https://gifcities.org/?q=indie

• 

• Offline support
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Progressive_web_apps/Tutorials/js13kGames/Offline_Service_workers

https://wikitok.vercel.app/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_edit_wars_on_Wikipedia (actually, this is the one I meant: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lamest_edit_wars)

• https://www.depthsofwiki.com/ Depths of Wikipedia is a live show about obscure Wikipedia pages
• https://www.instagram.com/depthsofwikipedia/?hl=en

• James now has a Starbucks page on his website: https://jamesg.blog/starbucks

• Readers can present content how they like
• Kevin demo'd an Instagram reader that looks like Pinterest, made ~a decade ago when Instagram had an API.

https://web.archive.org/web/20120419002042/http://pestagram.com:80/

https://github.com/kevinmarks/Pestagram

• Content types on AP
  • Images, videos, spoiler tags

Possible Topics

• enabling /MFA on (1) your email inbox(es), (2) domain registrar account(s), (3) web host(s)
• who is using what European domain registrar(s) and/or web host(s), and opinions/features?
• ...

• Projects in the IndieWeb org on GitHub
  • Usually projects are moved if it is collaborative and has community adoption
  • We encourage people to start a project in their own GitHub / GitLab / code forge / website.
  • We also encourage people to look at existing projects to see what can be improved!

• Starting collaborative projects
  • Create a repo, start with a statement of intent of what you want to build / your vision
  • Share with others who may be interested!

• Jump into a new project!

• How Linus started Linux
  • https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2015/08/how-linux-was-born-as-told-by-linus-torvalds-himself/
  • https://web.archive.org/web/20060502194630/https://groups.google.co.uk/group/comp.os.minix/browse_thread/thread/76536d1fb451ac60/b813d52cbc5a044b
• https://groups.google.com/g/comp.os.minix/c/dlNtH7RRrGA/m/SwRavCzVE7gJ
• See "Aug 25, 1991"

• A new slashpage - for pizza - https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/pizza
  • Now I would like a pizza

• Finding motivation to start new projects
  • A project you are thinking about for a while may be a good sign you want to make it
  • Setting a direction for yourself -- "I want to walk that way; let's start figuring out things that are involved and the steps I can take."
  • inspiration that strikes late at night and won't let you go
  • Starting small and building something for yourself.
  • If you have an end goal it is easy to tie yourself into the goal and lose track of what it is you wanted to accomplish.
  • Don't focus on the bridge five steps away when walking through the forest; focus on what's in front of you -- the immediate thing.
  • No premature optimisations.
  • You could focus on approaching projects that you can do in a day.
  • Working on something when the idea comes, even if it's late at night.

• https://turner.enemyterritory.org/user/carrvo/index

https://crispsandwi.ch/@mattround/114069930133388685 “Reminder for the web devs out there: if you can make a website, you can make a webgame All of the 2D stuff on my site just uses ordinary HTML/CSS/JS, eg the items in Styscraper are DIVs with background images, there's no framework or special renderer. Browsers are a lot faster nowadays!”

• • "Crisp sandwich day": https://vole.wtf/crisp-sandwich-day/

https://vole.wtf/styscraper/ https://vole.wtf/british-seaside/

• "analysis paralysis"

• https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/epistolary
• "epistemology" - The Ada Palmer book I recommended is at least partly about epistemology
  • Seeing that I made a typo made me laugh :D
• We used two words that start with "epist-"!
• Also epistolary https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistolary_novel

• Layers in software development: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OSI_model
• When you build software, you could create an API for someone to use or make a UI that people can use
• Frameworks take time to learn

• Binary Cmdlets for script-component interoperability: https://github.com/carrvo/BinaryCmdlet-Demos
• Interactive webserver in PowerShell: https://github.com/carrvo/WebHost/blob/master/PowerShellHttpModule/README.md

• What we're planning to do for the next week
  • Writing on our websites
  • Adding features to https://www.lazaruscorporation.co.uk/cutup/text-mixing-desk
  • Joe Crawford Updating MathML page on artlung lab https://lab.artlung.com/mathml/
  • After posting to Bluesky, Kevin shared https://www.kevinmarks.com/htmlversustex
  • Adding portfolio content to our websites

• Live updating pages
  • The page updates if the content on the server has changed
  • https://webmention.herokuapp.com/ updates live
    • Uses the background notification API in the browser?

• Pattern: read structured text (i.e. from a wiki) and create a new representation of it.
  • https://artlung.com/indieweb/ as an example

• world cafe chat on IRC in internet cafes in 1994/95
• the magic of getting an interaction from somebody who is across the planet
  • there is a lot to explore here from a deliberate design perspective
  • mental health and joyful experiences should be core considerations in tool design

Notifications

• push_notification#Distraction
• we (IndieWeb) can focus on mental health and more joyful experiences, rather than services who want to just get your time in front of their app or your passive surveillance data

• what jo did on their website during the call: https://dead.garden/art/posts/baranosoretsu.html

• "why is social media not fun anymore?" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwIYwsONFes

• benji is working on an RSS feed for the IndieWeb Movie Club and IndieWeb Carnival
  • Has a demo working on localhost right now
  • Building websites that interpret raw data and add functionality, etc.

• "mashup" web concept
• "make stuff out of the web"
  • Open data
  • Having a personal website where you talk to the world is valuable

• https://jamesg.blog/hwc-notes
• https://indiewebforum.eu/

• Communicating URLs to people; the joy of being able to say "go to artlung.com/books" for example that lists the books you looked at.
  • WordPress auto-redirects (like http://artlung.com/pizza)
  • Being able to open your website to answer a question
    • Others may look something up in their notes; we can look things up on our websites.
    • People IRL may not be interested in your website, but it's still useful to one's self.
    • Digital gardening is related to the idea of all the slash pages we have been talking about.

• RSS is something that younger people don't really know about
  • We shouldn't let that get lost!
  • Podcasts is a good context -- you don't need to subscribe via Spotify, etc.; you can download the mp4/mp3.
  • Many email clients support RSS, like Outlook.
• Sites that support RSS/Atom
  • YouTube
  • Reddit
  • GitHub
  • Tumblr
  • BlueSky
  • Mastodon
  • Many news sites have RSS support
• Eric M showed off https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/awesome-rss/ at events/2025-02-25-front-end-study-hall
  • Unrelated to RSS I learned more about LaTeX yesterday and I added to https://lab.artlung.com/mathml/ with some of what I learned yesterday.

• https://darekkay.com/blog/rss-subscriber-count/
• "Web-headedness"

• A reader could broadcast the number of subscribers on a reader
  • This could be done in a user agent

Scraping various home pages for lists of links to turn into a feed - good or bad idea?

• Inoreader has a feature that lets you manually create a feed for a page if one isn't found
• js;dr may be a problem
• Links may be wrapped (like the ones on https://news.google.com/home?hl=en-GB&gl=GB&ceid=GB:en)
• There may be a social media account with RSS support (i.e. Mastodon) for a website that doesn't have an RSS feed

• Instagram is hostile to the web.
  • There are many features that are technically possible that Instagram disables / doesn't offer (no feeds, etc.); the reason why many open web technologies are not embraced is because it's not in their interest.
  • The IG app supports DMs
  • Q: Can you bookmark the URL that lists your most recent DMs?
  • Q: Can you bookmark deep links to chats?
  • "Why is Instagram limited in annoying ways?": answering this question in a way that gets people thinking about the nature of social networks.

• How can we help the younger generation learn more about RSS / open web standards?

• Send people to indieweb.org if they are tired of the status quo :D

• Not everyone has the tools that we all have.
• Experiences of using Google Drive because we have to for a collaborative project, not because we want to; there being few intuitive experiences.
• Assumptions that someone uses a tool (i.e. asking for someone's IG account to exchange contact info, asking someone to write in a Google Doc who doesn't have an account / doesn't want to use the service).

• Complexities of installing Etherpad.
• "@abc" doesn't include the context of the service that someone uses (did the author assume that someone would look tem up on IG?); what if the author doesn't have the same handle on all services. As more social medias pop up, it is hard to guarantee you can use the same name.

• Configuration as a way for someone to design a solution toward their needs.
  • Software that can do many things can do the one thing someone wants.