events/2025-09-10-hwc-eastern
Homebrew Website Club - Eastern was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-09-10.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-09-10-hwc-eastern
Participants
Joe Crawford
Thomas Vander Wal https://vanderwal.net
Ross A. Baker https://rossabaker.com
mandaris https://mandarismoore.com/
gRegor Morrill https://gregorlove.com
Anthony Ciccarello https://www.ciccarello.me
Angelo Gladding https://ragt.ag
Pat Oyson-Matthan https://garden.patsitive.co.nz
Notes
- Welcome to HWC Eastern! Goal is for these to be every 2 weeks alternating with HWC Pacific!
- Music is the best. Discussing
- porting music playlists - find random online service and convert as needed
- PDF tools - many are built into Firefox (Thomas moved away from ARC and into Zen browser (*https://zen-browser.app/) which is Firefox based) - This is Thomas' work and research browser that can take a beating and have multiple disparate spaces.
- DevonThink allows a continuous single PDF view of a webpage (single giant document)
What did you build today?
- Manny built some anxiety
- David wrote a long rambling on shared rides locations (blog)
- Thomas plan is to investigate Firefox because of strong PDF tools
- Regular expressions and fart jokes - Ross
- Joe investigated stripes https://codepen.io/artlung/pen/xbwePrd border-image-source
- gRegor nothing personal but added https://gregorlove.com/2025/09/lessons-custom-wordpress-plugins/ recently
- Addendum: I guess I did some small personal things: I changed the slug on this post and found that the redirects weren't working for the public -- I had the code handling that behind an admin-only flag, oops! Updated and tested agan and redirects work now, like https://gregorlove.com/starbucks redirects to my coffee page
- https://wordpress.stackexchange.com/questions/13/updates-for-a-private-plugin
- Pat recorded a podcast. She's a frequent guest on the Salon Success podcast https://monaco.ac.nz/category/business/salon-success-podcast/
Playlists
- Playlists are proprietary - same version of a track is not always available to be played
- https://song.link
- https://song.link/i/1660600181
- API, but no new keys and low rate limit: https://linktree.notion.site/API-d0ebe08a5e304a55928405eb682f6741
- Fascinating stuff. Makes me want to add export or even auto-generate some alternate playlists on other services
What will you build in the next 2 weeks
- mandaris - moving to Codeberg https://codeberg.org/
- there are limitations with GitHub, reconclling technology choices
- https://giveupgithub.org
- Ross automate PESOS pipeline - Mastodon and Pixelfed. Learning some python for that
- Dagster https://dagster.io/ - "assets and ops" (raw data from mastodon, merge data into complete document) - maybe get twitter archive as well - then put them into Hugo content adapters
- Football data analytics
- Thomas
- Get August movie club out
- Search for his own website. - enjoying searching 2100 blog posts
- Playing with analytics
- Angelo
- sign into my site and support github - to step through indie signup
- doppler color code thing - and indieauth
- Pat
- Working on a Podcast - New Zealand podcast
From https://indielogin.com/setup, PGP is having issues and disabled for now.
Modern uses for PGP
- IndieLogin, comes and goes (see above)
- Encrypted e-mail (content, but not headers!)
- Profile verification. e.g., https://keyoxide.org/wkd/ross%40rossabaker.com Keyoxide
- The JVM ecosystem uses it for signing publsihed artifacts
More on Music
- playlist
- Libre.fm froze new users but still works fine
- Crucial Tracks - Manny uses that, as does Nick Simson
- Music a hard problem (licensing, lock in, silos)
- gRegor Morrill kind of surprisingly, YouTube Music seems to work when you share a playlist, even if you're not signed in with a YT account: https://gregorlove.com/2019/06/here-is-the-playlist-i-made/
- Thomas' playlist from Tidal for Friday Morning playlist - https://tidal.com/playlist/b8d5b886-8acf-4849-bed4-02895492921a
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tidal_(service)
- Tidal
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rdio : gone almost 10 years, but not forgotten
- https://musicbrainz.org/
- Slacker Radio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiveOne
- BMG: "12 CDs for a penny!"
- For any API call, pagination is important
- Indie sharing of playlists
- Classical music is a whole nother beast - 100%
Plans in the next 2 weeks
- Anthony C
- Books and "watch"es on his site
- View Transitions https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/View_Transition_API
- Debugging them is difficult (to and from both need to account for it)
- Recent photo posts https://www.ciccarello.me/posts/2025/09/10/64baf/
- Has a micropub endpoint
- Photo Storage! - the NAS is slow - painful
- 45000 photos
- 27000 photos
- Pat working on documenting the digital garden Obsidian plugin
- Will get back to it with another assignment
- Has been working on URL patterns (urls ought to be stable) (urls ought to be human readable)
- How to do redirects?
- Thinking about using frontmatter for redirects 'dg-permalink' as 'main' or 'true' URI and 'aliases' as redirect options but ideally allow wildcards to work
- https://httpd.apache.org/docs/current/mod/mod_speling.html
- https://serverfault.com/questions/955100/mod-speling-case-insensitive-urls-not-working
- Testing of Angelo's https://ragt.ag/guests
- Logging in through IndieWeb allows guests to see semi-private posts and edit
gRegor's color after signing in on angelo's site
- color:#1af901
Angelo's link for gRegor to test web sign in: https://ragt.ag/guests/sign-in?me=gregorlove.com&use_web_signin=true