events/2025-09-10-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-09-10.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-09-10-hwc-europe
Participants
zacharykaiwrites - https://zacharykai.net/
Mark Sutherland - https://marksuth.dev
capjamesg - https://jamesg.blogThomas Vander Wal - https://vanderwal.net
mandaris - https://mandarismoore.com/
Angelo Gladding - https://ragt.ag
Al Abut - https://alabut.com
Tantek Γelik β https://tantek.com/- Ricardo - https://www.ricardochavezt.com/
benji - https://benji.dog
Notes
- Rainbows and Skittles
- Homebrew Website Club? More everything goes club! And that's how we like it.
- Homecut Website Club? HWCs about club sandwiches???
- HomeFry Website Club -- discussing air fryers
- The curse/blessing of the internet: so much to read. Open tabs, bookmarks, rss feeds...it never ends!
- When to clear out your tabs.
- When was the last time someone could have reached the end of the internet?
- /rick-roll page on one's website?
- During Meetings how can in mind indieweb-relevant!
HWC Announcements
- We are going to keep these meetings to two hours.
- Constraints are excellent! Creativity thrives with limits, and languishes without it.
- When you give a demo, please make sure you share the IndieWeb relevance! Focus on the what you made.
What Have People Been Doing On Their Websites This Week?
- zacharykaiwrites has been refactoring code on https://lunaseeker.com/ (making it easier to read)
- Also added a colophon/changelog: https://lunaseeker.com/colophon
- Started IndieWeb Book Club, to begin in October: IndieWeb_Book_Club
Joe Crawford and
Al Abut added entries. Thanks for starting this zacharykaiwrites!- Hosting this month's IndieWeb Movie Club: https://zacharykai.net/notes/iwmsep25 We're watching the Wild Robot, so come join us!
- Wrote a rhyming poem about the internet during this session: https://zacharykai.net/jots#10sep25
- Blogging! Likes! Videos! Working on projects. Several posts under https://artlung.com/blog/
- Best Gamepad API support is in Microsoft Edge for using gamepad controllers
- edge://surf
- Makes times without internet far more fun! Never make it far, though.
- Mark is thinking about adding gamepad support to his website
- zacharykaiwrites's suggestion: add a platformer where you have to collect Pride flags
- edge://surf (a pseudo protocol unique to Microsoft Edge)
- Theory: someone could register a custom protocol handler in Firefox so that surf://surf does something
- https://superuser.com/questions/1814748/how-to-assign-a-command-to-a-microsoft-edge-pseudo-protocol-on-windows-10-with
- You can navigate the Xbox online website using your Xbox controller, which works really well
- Multi-player websites
- You could have a mode in your website where if two Gamepads are connected, your website splits into two so multiple people can play on a website at the same time
- James + Joe collaborated on a description for the IndieWeb Eastern meetup today, in real time but exclusively in the document and not on a call
- Real-time collaboration
- Figma is realtime
- Google Docs is realtime and also async. As is Etherpad, as is happening right now!
- Miro and Mural web-based white boards with collab as its normal function
- Et
- How often do we use collaborative tools synchronously vs. async?
- Realtime collaborative programming: could Etherpad serve this purpose? Google docs? Pastebins?
- Is there a CodePen for multiple people? JetBrains CodeWithMe
- https://www.jetbrains.com/code-with-me/
- There is a free Community version which gives you 30 mins of collaboration with up to three people
- "Google Docs but for code"
- Google Docs before it was that was Writely: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Docs#History
- https://tuple.app/ is a popular "pair programming" app for macOS, but focuses on whole-desktop sharing rather than web-native collaboration - James; it's me :)
- https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
- Using VS Code
- zacharykaiwrites uses VSCodium, an open-source fork, almost daily (and adores it!)
- VSCode 'Live Share' for real-time coding collaboration
- https://marketplace.visualstudio.com/items?itemName=MS-vsliveshare.vsliveshare
- which file are you using
- Manny asked what do you use to code?
- Thomas: I no longer use VS Code and moved to PHP Storm and PyCharmer, but also use Nova from Panic Software for general maintanance of my vanderwal.net site
- https://air-fryer.jamesg.blog/
- James could collect links related to air fryers here!
- The HTML document we worked on: https://gist.github.com/capjamesg/6bc46475140904c30eb8ecb70b3c8855
- images/d/d4/IWC_Vector.svg
- https://jamesg.blog/hwc-demo.html
- Ninja: "it's a motorcycle and an air fryer all in one"
- IndieWeb_Book_Club
- https://library.jamesg.blog -- contains a list of the style guides James has
- James did show and tell of his style guides :D
- Ricardo has been working on https://www.ricardochavezt.com/garden, which used to be an embed of a Notion database and now shows direct links on the page. The data is in the GitHub repository.
- Planning to switch to Obsidian instead of Notion. Obsidian has a new plugin for bases which is similar to the Notion database system.
- zacharykaiwrites is learning how to use Bases and is loving it!
- The important thing is to have a workflow that works for you, otherwise you don't update things as regularly.
- https://artlung.com/likes is a list of likes
- Thomas is working on pagination
- Playing with plain text search, and figuring out how to design the search UX for his website
- Thinking about an archive view with a sparkline for each month
- https://aaronparecki.com/2025 -- something to look at, https://aaronparecki.com/2025/01/03
- When to switch your profile photo
- Seasonal profile pictures
- Taking a photo and being like "oh, this looks nice, I'll use it!"
- GitHub as a self-diary of your projects
- Mark's profile picture updates with a Konami code
- Angelo has updated his personal Etherpad from a v1 to a current v2
- And is looking at plugins
- Angelo wants to allow users signed in to his website to have their identity carry on to Etherpad, so people can sign in to ragt.ag and be signed into the Etherpads on his website too.
- Maybe their username could be their domain name? The user could have a consistent colour?
- The system could automatically calculate the primary colour of your home page and use it as your highlight colour.
- The site meta theme tag would be relevant
- https://static.etherpad.org/index.html
- Etherpad
- Avoiding the spam/abuse problem with Etherpad
- The admin panel doesn't have lots of features until you add extensions
- Al Abut is planning to remove video embeds from Vimeo from his work portfolio. Vimeo just got acquired by notorious chop shop Bending Spoons today (they gut every company they buy, keep the product on a lifeline and reap the profits while they destroy the community).
- https://www.reuters.com/technology/italys-bending-spoons-take-vimeo-private-138-billion-deal-2025-09-10/
- They've used this playbook with countless popular apps, e.g. recently with the cycling community of Komoot, last year with Evernote, also Meetup and WeTransfer
- https://blog.jim-nielsen.com/2025/dont-forget-meta-theme-color/
- Dopplr colour hash algorithm
- cities uses the Dopplr algorithm
- https://pin13.net/city-color.php?city=Portland
- Edinburgh is green! Fitting!
- https://optional.is/required/2010/12/13/hls-world-map/
- from city-color.php:
substr(md5($_REQUEST['city']), 0, 6) - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Really_Simple_Licensing
- https://www.theverge.com/news/775072/rsl-standard-licensing-ai-publishing-reddit-yahoo-medium
- Consideration for video publishing on your website
- You may opt to use a CDN
- The Internet Archive is a place that you can upload videos too
- You can embed Internet Archive video links into MediaWiki
- Video HTML tag is good; the MDN video tag page is recommended
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Reference/Elements/video
- Al used to have his entire website be a splash page for a slideshow with background video: https://alabut.com/about/
- Handbrake is a good tool for compressing videos before you publish them on your website https://handbrake.fr/
- James is moving mp3s from his podcast to audio tags on his website
Serverless Indieauth implementation
- What we want to do in the next week
- Joe is working on older projects, blogging, publishing likes
- Mark wants to write a blog post
- Thomas wants to do the write-up of the movie club
- Benji: writing docs for IndieAuth serverless
- James wants to publish a new indieweb-utils release
- Angelo is implementing the Dopplr colour algorithm
- Tantek wants to write a report about a 50k race; thinking about conventions for simple, plain-text timelines
- Writing prompt: write about a grocery shop that you frequent!
"what's the conversion between a big tesco and a walmart?"
- Dopplr would be a cool thing to bring back!