events/2025-08-20-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-08-20.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-08-20-hwc-europe
Participants
- pcarrier
zacharykaiwrites - https://zacharykai.net/
capjamesgJoe Crawford
Thomas Vander Wal
Ross A. Baker
Piya https://pjg1.site
Britt Coxon
benji
Al Abut
Notes
- Welcome to HWC!
- Keyboards, musical and technical
- Domain registrars
- Netim is a European domain registar that Zachary uses
- A few people use Namecheap
- James uses DNSimple but wants to move because you have to pay for DNS
- What we have been doing on our website
pcarrier.com has been working on his keyboard map web page https://pcarrier.com/totem
- We need a dancing banana GIF for the IndieWeb
- "homebrew candy club"
- pass around recipes to make your own candy
- If your website had a scent/flavour, what would it be?
- Vanilla, a palate cleanser (thank you for correcting my spelling; I can never spell that word)
- mustard flavoured ice cream (pcarrier.com)
- James: Petrichor (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petrichor)
- AI being unreliable!
- Mike demoing his Big Diffr, browser-based diff tool
- James fixed a bug that broke most of the
atags on his website- It was caused by three lines of code that were not properly indented by accident
- James' site builds are now three seconds long because he now uses incremental builds
- I also made https://jamesg.blog/green, and am thinking a lot about sustainability (through environmental, software, and personal / time lenses)
- pcarrier.com you may appreciate https://www.seangoedecke.com/good-system-design/. I read it this week and found it interesting. Piya you may like this blog post too! β
β
- https://danq.me/2025/08/15/details-summary-lightboxes-in-pure-html-css/
- How to do galleries in HTML
- Designing templates that fit our content well
- Semantic markup is easier to read / understand, both as a code writer and someone reading your website
- Ross A. Baker created a script to export his Pixelfed account as JSON
- https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/pixelfed-cli
- With Hugo content adapters (https://gohugo.io/content-management/content-adapters/), can integrate photos into site without any intermediate Markdown files
- That API is similar to Mastodon's. Might be able to double dip.
- pcarrier is almost ready to announce his keyboard layout. Big fan of the form factor and ease of flashing OSS firmwares.
- How we writeframe / make prototypes of designs
- Paper - James (and designing in the browser too!)
- Balsamiq - https://balsamiq.com/
- TLDraw - Benji, https://www.tldraw.com/
- Q: Do people wireframe, or do people go straight into coding?
- pcarrier wireframes in Concepts on iPad mini
- https://kinopio.club/ mind mapper tool very visual
- https://kinopio.club/hello-kinopio-Scx50xabuE5Hf_PvqQMjE
- Shareable URLs are amazing
- Open call for feedback: If you have feedback for how we can improve this meetup, please let James or Mark know!
- "websitey" -- Benji
Events-o-rama
- What we do at in person HWC events?
- Chatting about websites!
- HWC Edinburgh is held in a coffee shop bi-weekly. We have a writing hour every ~second Tuesday of the month, and a regular HWC to chat about our website on the last Tuesday of every month.
- Homebrew_Website_Club has organising information
- See also build_a_website_in_an_hour/organizing for a build a website in an hour event
- What would our dream web events be
- A lunch and learn meetup about the web / skill sharing
- Something a bit informal would be nice, especially to attract people not already in the IndieWeb scene
- James would love to do more local meetups
- Thomas appreciates events with lots of demos of what people are working on
- HWC is doing well in terms of structure
- A lunch and learn meetup about the web / skill sharing
- When you organise in person events, you have to be on the ball. It's totally possible to organise in person events though!
- San Diego tech meetup: https://marchmingle.com/
- Other meetup formats: speed networking, coffee morning, coworking, collaborating on personal projects, University meetups
- Web San Diego did happy hours, coffee meetups, going to watch a movie, and other event types
- Took lots of work but had lots of creativity
- https://minnestar.org/minnebar/
- "hacker time" -- an hour to work on websites that Benji helped organise
- UX Speakeasy in San Diego does events that are akin to speed dating "speed networking" to meet potential collaborators
- Variety is a nice way to do an event
- https://www.emfcamp.org/
- https://creativemornings.com/fieldtrips
- More pop ups that are more speciifc on technical details / maybe using breakout rooms too
- Create_Day - could potentially do breakout rooms during create day
- Idea: having protocol around contact information or preferences for link sharing so people can follow up on ideas from HWCs
- IWC Leicester is something that there is interest in organising. James and Mark will share more information in the coming months as we think more about planning.
- What pop ups would people be interested in?
- The diversity of topics expands our understanding of making websites / our world views
- Accessibility demos help us learn more about accessibility on our websites
- Notes are a valuable part of our sessions; the document can live on the web via the wiki forever for others to discover / read / use.
- If you are doing something cool, write about it!
- James would love to do an in-person event in his local area
- Having detailed information about codes of conduct, venue, transit, parking, accessibility considerations, are all essential for in-person events.
- Having all practical information you anticipate things will need is essential.
- Fish and chip shops
- "Battered: why half of UKβs fish and chip shops face closure" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UhtCkbKDnTk
- Tea and young people: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gpll9l535o
- https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006qfvv
- Arg! Shipping forecast is part of what is now Blocked outside the UK now.
- microgravity and tee steeping discussion
- Tea in the International Space Station: https://www.gctc.ru/main.php?id=712
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freeze-dried_ice_cream
- ISS Espresso Machine: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISSpresso
- https://jamesg.blog/2025/08/19/local-hero
- IndieWeb_Movie_Club
- August IndieWeb Movie Club - Local Hero - https://vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2128
- Surfing blogs
- Joe's blogroll which includes surfing links https://artlung.com/blogroll/?filter=surf
- Red telephone box implemented in CSS?
- https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2491014/Dozens-blue-wifi-boxes-materialise-Leeds-city-centre.html
- https://jamesg.blog/2021/01/14/coffee-chat-with-cheapshot
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_box
- What about a phone box where you could go to get website advice?
- What is the web equivalent of a community message board?
- Historical: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SF_Net
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meshtastic
- James also made https://jamesg.blog/rhubarb this week
- Al is thinking about blurring the space between the web and physical environments
- Bookshelf tracking, bike journey coordination
- Universal Basic Coffee?
- Yes ^^
- In terms of in person events, the variety of venues from HTML Day this month is incredible https://www.are.na/html-energy/html-day-2025-photo-album
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2600:_The_Hacker_Quarterly includes photos of phone booths
- https://torontophreak.com/
- https://www.vermontpublic.org/local-news/2025-07-22/vermont-engineer-revives-pay-phones-for-free-calls-in-areas-with-poor-cell-service
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W3UZ74ZpZ2c - Netherlands garbage collection
- James' drawing of a HWC coffee cup:
G
- https://lab.artlung.com
- https://playground.jamesg.blog
- Using labs as a reference that documents code you plan to use, one-off experiments
- Whimsical new social network, Org-Social: https://github.com/tanrax/org-social/
- All posts aggregated from Org mode markup (e.g., https://rossabaker.com/social.org)
- Very Indie, not necessarily Webby
- CSS units list: https://michaelkupietz.com/comprehensive-list-of-css-units/
- https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/07/infinite-pixels/ and https://meyerweb.com/eric/thoughts/2025/08/20/to-infinity-but-not-beyond/ -- blog posts on the infinity unit
- Container queries: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/CSS_containment/Container_queries, cqw for container width and cqh for container height
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/length#vmin
> Nix: How would your jet pack make the world a better place? > Young Frank Walker: Can't it just be fun? - Tomorrowland
- Piya thinking of starting an HTML/CSS playground inspired by http://playground.jamesg.blog and http://lab.artlung.com
** Have a few lab-like posts on my current site that I'd like to move - https://pjg1.site (β€οΈ great site!)
- https://artlung.com/videos/reels/
- https://artlung.com/videos/reels/ti994a-iwc/ (includes link to TI-99 emulator and source code)
- The idea of a playground may extend further than HTML / reference materials
- You could have a playground for experiental writing, poetry, and anything creative you want to play with
- https://muan.co/
- https://muan.co/notes has a checkbox "tag filter" that lets you filter pages by category
- Less distracting having a dark mode website all day than a light mode website all day
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@media/prefers-color-scheme
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/color-scheme
- :root { color-scheme: light dark; }
- one line gets you a light dark scheme instantly, but *then* every usage of color in a stylesheet needs to be considered
Gotta run to another meeting. Great seeing yall - benji <3 (π β€οΈ)
- Pierre's desk setup: https://nothing.pcarrier.com/posts/desk/
- Great blog post about design: "Visual design rules you can safely follow every time" https://anthonyhobday.com/sideprojects/saferules/
- Re: dark mode. The first suggestion on the list is "Use near-black and near-white instead of pure black and white"
- Dark mode can be hard for people who have astigmatism
- https://stephaniewalter.design/blog/dark-mode-accessibility-myth-debunked/
- Reader mode availability is the escape hatch for designs which don't allow for user choice
- Catering to users who use heavy night shift
- James thinks about this because he uses night shift a lot, especially in the evenings https://github.com/w3c/csswg-drafts/issues/8546r
- Dark mode inspiration:
** https://www.darkmodedesign.com/ ** https://www.dark.design/
The code Firefox uses for reader view: https://github.com/mozilla/readability
https://catskull.net/assume-people-use-reader-mode.html
Proposal: CSS Media Query for Browser Reader Views (from 2023)
- Ambient light/dark mode on Android devices based on a light sensor
- Dark mode after sunset / light mode in day
- Ambient changes may be unexpected for many users
- https://ident.me/json could have sunset and sunrise times.
- James' mascot / seasonal emoji could change based on day / night
- Tension: user wants preferences but developers need to account for and test support for all of those preferences.
- Discussed in Good Internet magazine: "Can accessibility be whimsical?" https://goodinternetmagazine.com/can-accessibility-be-whimsical/
- Calculating sunset has many nuances -- elevation, lat, long, and other geographical considerations
- https://david.shanske.com/ - does locative weather and other stats to posts - includes WordPress plugins to provide that kind of data
- https://david.shanske.com/2020/04/12/thinking-about-weather/
- weather
- https://wordpress.org/plugins/simple-location/ (
David Shanske's plugin for WordPress to allow display of locative and weather data)
- approximate sun shine map - https://www.suncalc.org/#/27.6936,-97.5195,3/2025.08.20/16:39/1/3