events/2025-03-12-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-03-12.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-03-12-hwc-europe
Participants
Joe Crawford
capjamesg
zacharykai
Mark Sutherland
Ross A. Baker is distracted by work but trying to meet some other time zones
bkardell
benji
Tantek Γelik
pcarrier.com
Notes
- Welcome to HWC!
Current IndieWeb Events
- If you are interested in a pop-up about video workflows for indieweb add your name in the wiki pop-up#IndieWeb_Video
- IndieWeb Movie Club for March is What's Up Doc (1972) https://artlung.com/whatsupdoc-imc/
- Digression on Virtual Machines
Microcasts Discussion
- Microcast microcast
- Listening to blogs as podcasts
- I listen to many blog posts by having TTS read them to me (
jo)
- I listen to many blog posts by having TTS read them to me (
- Listening to blogs as podcasts
- "Drink my coffee in the morning, read my RSS"; following people writing on the web.
- Problem: Feeling like you're drowning in content; lots of tabs, endless scroll, not the attention budget to manage open tabs of content to read.
- We have time to *listen* but not to *read*?
- Molly White does
- Reader Mode: you can have posts read to you
- https://web.archive.org/web/20031207144002fw_/http://www.spacebrothers.com/robotradio/
- Readability plugin for Firefox https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/readability-based-reader-view/
- We've had the tech for thishttps://granary.io/for 20+ years https://web.archive.org/web/20031207144002fw_/http://www.spacebrothers.com/robotradio/
- James has done audio posts in the past that are < 10-15 mins: https://jamesg.blog/2024/10/09/performance
- They were unique to make!
- Recording podcasts takes time
- Recording
- Trimming files
- Editing
- Getting file formats right
- Uploading files
- Audio engineering / getting the podcast to sound good
- This Week in the IndieWeb podcast: this-week-in-the-indieweb
- Browsers have "reader mode" that can do text to speech
- https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/pocket/
- Speech synthesis built into browsers:
https://jlelse.blog/posts/february-2025
https://granary.io/ "Granary for audio"
- Use case: preference for listening vs. reading.
- Take text, run text-to-speech technology to generate a podcast
- Text -> audio / podcast with RSS
- Shouldn't use AI
- There may be existing accessibility tools out there that are relevant
- This could be part of a /reader interface that lets someone run TTS on a blog post
- Brian - found a comment in FreshRSS https://github.com/FreshRSS/FreshRSS/issues/4760#issuecomment-1437434768
- a person using the feature of FreshRSS to *create* feeds fed into an app called Readably then read by an Android app called Voice Aloud Reader https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.hyperionics.avar&hl=en_US
- Definitely for me
What we're doing on our websites this week
- Adding movie reviews to website - https://www.trovster.com/movies
- Working with a dataset of Academy Awards movies
- Using machine tags to navigate through films
- Making a list of winning movies one hasn't watched
- Simplifying things on site back-end
- Removing code that is no longer needed
- Working on video management with Git LFS
- Accounting for files, are files backed up
- Making sure the presence of files is intuitive
- Adding code snippet line numbers
- Adding movie reviews to website - https://www.trovster.com/movies
- Similar movies / books on our personal websites
- James wants to create pages like "Books like {book}" with my recommendations
- Example from Zachary: https://www.roadlessread.com/books-like-nimona/
- It's cool to see people interested in personal recommendations
- Similar recommendations means you won't find the things that are different to something
- "All great art takes a familiar idea and juxtaposes it with a new idea."
- James' movie recommendations: https://jamesg.blog/movies
- There are lots of parameters in recommending a movie
- A friend recommending a movie may encourage you to prioritize it
- Find similar bands: https://www.music-map.com/
- Similar songs: https://www.chosic.com/playlist-generator/
- https://www.gnoosic.com/
- https://www.music-map.com/taylor+swift
- Idea: a physical dial that lets you change the music map to vary the degree of similarity or difference
- "More static websites, please"
- Software development practice: take a day to analyze how you could remove code that is no longer used / could be abstracted, etc.
- Workplaces with periodic code removal - afternoons, or addressing technical debt
XSLT usage quite low: https://chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/79
W3C Breakouts Day 2025:
W3C Authentic Web mini workshop was this morning:
- https://www.w3.org/events/meetings/ca79dd08-3124-438a-9f02-e426074b0923/ has links to resources
Casio watch
- https://jamesg.blog/2024/05/25/new-publishing-workflow
- https://www.benji.dog/colophon/
- 88x31 stickers
- https://jamesg.blog/88x31
- https://jamesg.blog/buttons
- Idea: 88x31 flipbook
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenticular_printing
- https://www.benji.dog/colophon/
Owning your links
- Top level paths like /github/<repo> redirects to your github.com/<account>/<repo>
- If you move to another Git tool, your links will still work!
- /wiki
- What other paths are people using?
- /tip, /pay
- Related: /links
- https://bkardell.com/links
- /links could redirect to a LinkTree until you make a /links page, if you like the design of LinkTree
- Appeal of LinkTree: simple design
- When is it viable / appropriate to have a permanent link to something vs. a temporary link?
- Joe sharing a story of Artists signing paintings with IG handles
- What if they lose the handle / delete their account?
- Related: https://www.mollywhite.net/verify/
- Domain names as handles (i.e. instagram.com/@example.com)
- Interesting idea, but there are many security considerations
- https://www.instagram.com/benji.dog/
- Not benji.dog
- What makes a good slug?
- Memorable
- Idea: FrESH session for making your own /linktree or /links page
- Putting this on the FrESH todo list
- /links page ideas
- https://artlung.com/links
- Glitch had a template for making your own LinkTree page called Glitch in Bio
- What
Pablo Morales uses for his CMS
- Participate in the IndieWeb Carnival!
https://pcarrier.com/toys/rand https://hellnet.work/8831/
Firefox 88x31 buttons:
And some direct links:
- Context collision when you blog and syndicate to another platform and the content doesn't show up the way that you want
- https://kwon.nyc/links/
- Randomness in CSS! https://hypersphere.blog/blog/randomness-in-css-using-trigonometry/
- Works with sin/cos etc