events/2025-08-27-hwc-europe

Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-08-27.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-08-27-hwc-europe

Participants

• Joe Crawford
• Template:zacharykai - https://zacharykai.net/
• capjamesg
• Ricardo Chavez - https://www.ricardochavezt.com/
• Angelo Gladding
• gRegor Morrill
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Britt Coxon
• benji
• ... add names

Notes

• Welcome to HWC!
• New iOS, MacOS are on their way
• Manny reckoning with the audio element
  • https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/audio
• Worth checking if the styles of HTML elements for which Apple has default styles will change in any way
• The system Safari will change in design: https://9to5mac.com/2025/06/09/safari-gets-the-ios-26-treatment-with-new-liquid-glass-interface/
• The new Safari interface may need you to tune where task bars are that are usually at the bottom of the page, since Liquid Glass elements may overlay
• Limits of "low-code": not very accessible
• Good design should be accessible by default
• mandaris is looking to reevaluate cards and go to a more reading-first layout possible
• a thing a friend of Joe Crawford said the other day about group text chat: "that's the best social media" (a closed set of people you care about in conversation in texts, etc)

• What are we working on?
  • zacharykaiwrites - redesigning Road Less Read (https://roadlessread.com) and converting it to Static HTML
• Joe Crawford - next front end study hall tomorrow: https://events.indieweb.org/2025/08/front-end-study-hall-035-bkD9G9V4HZaz ; and I've been blogging; adding likes and things to my blogroll https://artlung.com/likes/ https://artlung.com/blogroll/ and I also made a little demo with animated conic gradients that also follows a cursor and can respond to clicks https://codepen.io/artlung/full/ByoVdGj
  • Joe has updated https://artlung.com/blogroll/ so that the linked blogroll.opml file is up to date
  • capjamesg is working on Breakfast and Coffee, and his web reader.
    • https://breakfastand.coffee/ (you link to the source but it appears to be private repo https://github.com/capjamesg/breakfast-and-coffee )
• Michael fixed his server after it ran out of space.
  • https://michaelkupietz.com/post-migration-steps-when-migrating-or-restoring-linux-from-backup/
  • Michael also created some visualization tools for stock options which he may later post to his website (No, this is not an options visualizer, those are easy. This is a new idea.)

• Local Hero is this month's Movie Club
  • https://vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2128

• h-review
  • Discussion about new review-of https://github.com/microformats/h-entry/issues/32
  • review
  • h-review

• Movie pages on our websites / posting about movies
  • Michael has written almost 1,000 movie reviews!
  • https://jamesg.blog/movies
  • A 2023/SD session: 2023/SD/movieviewings. Benji had expressed some interest in building something, perhaps similar to indieweb.xyz for people to syndicate reviews to. No video of the session, unfortunately.

• Starting a project with experimentation to see what shape you want it to take before trying to polish it

• Websites just for one's self
  • Idea: Turning your notes / movie list into a personal site that is local HTML for you or only on your network
  • Example: https://luke.hsiao.dev/blog/housing-documentation/
  • Capability URLs: https://www.w3.org/TR/capability-urls/
  • You can set start pages in browsers to a local HTML file
  • A website may start as a local HTML page!
  • Thomas started his website with a links page that he later published on the web
  • James is curious about having static HTML pages for various archives
  • Ana would be interested in a personal recipes website; having a search feature and a randomise feature would be interesting

• Buiilding websites as a way to learn a new tool

• Internet history
  • https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GoTo_(US_company)
  • https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/
• which recently posted the post https://thehistoryoftheweb.com/do-blogs-need-to-be-so-lonely/ (Do blogs need to be so lonely?)

• Publishing unpolished topics on your website
  • Someone had a website with a button that said "nudge me if you want me to finish this" -- could be Maggie Appleton
  • A good way to help you get motivated to start a post
  • draft
  • digital_garden
  • Using symbols to indicate the maturity of a note (seedling, etc.)
  • https://notes.andymatuschak.org/About_these_notes has lots of interconnected notes
  • https://austinhenley.com/blog/notyetwritten.html

• Does anyone make unlisted pages to share drafts with friends?
  • A few of us have!

• The joy of reading why people have included our websites on their blogroll
• Adding descriptions to one's blogroll; could be website taglines, or manually written
• James has an example at https://jamesg.blog/wander
• "six word review"
  • https://themorningnews.org/six-word-reviews-of-1302-sxsw-mp3s/
    • whimsy and concision all in one

• Keeping blogrolls up to date is hard

• Creating a single page on your site that lists all posts so you can use control+f to search through the titles

• Communicating that people can use HTML you have written
• license
• https://creativecommons.org/share-your-work/
• Some people use CC for their blog posts
• rel=license

• Benji has added pages to his website based on things he captured elsewhere previously (i.e. took notes, then posted to Letterboxd, then published to website)

• If you are changing your wording to fit into a Mastodon post, it may be a good blog post!

• The friction of managing static websites; having to open a code editor to publish content.
• The pattern of building lots of infrastructure but forgetting to write :D

• Benji has his Micropub client bookmarked on his phone that he can use to post to his website

• Idea: Ghost Micropub translator

• The importance of tools being customisable so you can shape it in the way you want
• Design consideration for Micropub clients: make it easy to add custom attributes that will be saved to front matter
• https://github.com/benjifs/micropub/tree/main/src
• https://github.com/benjifs/serverless-micropub
• https://github.com/benjifs/serverless-webmentions

• https://breakfastand.coffee
  • You can submit via the website or webmention

• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/accent-color (availability may be somewhat limited, but MDN seems out of date)

• Pagination
  • Thomas is demo'ing a wireframe for a new pagination design for his website that lets you go between chronological pages and date-based pagination
  • Shows sparklines below each year
  • Design goal: avoiding lots of blank archive pages when there were no posts published which would be a problem if there were pages for every month since the blog was published
    • James' idea:

   "The last time I posted before August 2025 was June 2025.
   The next time I posted after August 2025 was September 2025."

• • /page/1/ doesn't have permanence; as you publish posts, everything will be shifted
  • Aaron example: https://aaronparecki.com/articles?before=20220129T135321-0800
  • Pagination: pagination
  • For Thomas Vander Wal: indiebookclub has some open source code for how it queries the "next" and "last" post IDs for pagination: https://github.com/gRegorLove/indiebookclub/blob/main/app/Controller/UsersController.php#L25
    • And queries in the Entry model: https://github.com/gRegorLove/indiebookclub/blob/main/app/Model/Entry.php#L385 https://github.com/gRegorLove/indiebookclub/blob/main/app/Model/Entry.php#L405
    • These were borrowed/inspired by Aaron Parecki's Teacup

• Things we want to do
  • Make a place to show talks we plan to do in the future and where they will be presented
  • https://ohhelloana.blog/talks/
  • Gregor is thinking about taking a /following page that lists sites you follow and converting it into an OPML file, and have the OPML synced with your website. This would let you update your website and then automatically subscribe to a website.
  • Ricardo is thinking about digital gardens and building https://www.ricardochavezt.com/garden.
    • Working on exporting data from Notion to go on the digital garden website, specifically the list of links saved in Notion. The section is called "Open Tabs", which are tabs that were kept open for a while, were interesting, and that Ricardo wanted to save for later.

• Talks
  • Writing a blog post to announce when you are presenting a talk
  • Gathering positive feedback to put on your website as a reminder of how good your talk was!
  • If feedback is from social media, you may want to get feedback to copy-paste it so that you have a copy on your website
  • You may want to create an archived copy of your talk if there is a video so that you have a copy in case the original is no longer available
  • Create a transcript of your talk that people can read

Following page and how it might be used

• Using your blogroll as a list of sites whose Webmentions you will automatically accept and publish; otherwise, Webmentions could be private until you allow them
• following
• blogroll
• My example: https://gregorlove.com/following/
  • I'm thinking it would be cool to have this parsed into an OPML and then automatically updated in my feed reader, so update blogs I want to follow in one place only, my site!
  • Previously: this following page was set up as an allowlist for Vouch extension to Webmention. My webmention plugin would process this following page and automatically allow webmentions from those sites, otherwise hold them for review. Vouch never really took off, and this page has become stale. :)
  • Python package XTrees parses XML and writes to it well - https://docs.python.org/3/library/xml.etree.elementtree.html

• Jekyll Tumblr exporter: https://import.jekyllrb.com/docs/tumblr/
• You could also export from Tumblr using their API or RSS

James working on Artemis and would like to encrypt feed URLs, because people can subscribe to private feeds. James is also thinking about collaborative blogging.

• Collaborative blogging ideas
  • "seasons" like podcasts where you have a prompt for a month, take a break, then do another prompt if ther eis continued interest.
  • Having different styles for different themes
    • jamesg.blog/project-a and ragt.ag/project-a could have their own styles
  • Using your site as a means for a friend to publish

• https://img.triapul.cz/sect.html

pop-up#Micropub

• "personal websites and the law" zine at https://blog.avas.space/zine-law/

• Angelo is working on https://ragt.ag/species which aggregates posts from other web pages
  • Would like to put photos of each species on his website
  • Being able to make posts, aggregate them, and create queries is powerful
  • Use iNaturalist as a fallback if you don't have species information; otherwise, show your species page
• Micropub requests to get posts should only show public posts unless the user is authenticated, in which case posts available to the person given their authentication token and status should also be returned (what scopes they have). Q: How do you make an authenticated Micropub query? A: it's a Bearer token in the header or a token in the query parameter.
• Scopes: scope
• https://micropub.spec.indieweb.org/#queryin

• Micropub pop up: make a list of things you want to discuss and make sure it is on the wiki!
• James would love Ghost to support tabular data entry

• https://www.inaturalist.org/pages/api+reference
  • ragt.ag/species has an autocomplete feature for species search which uses the iNaturalist API

• Your blogroll could list all the times that you have linked to someone's blogroll