events/2025-05-24-hwc-galactic
Galactic Bonus Homebrew Website Club was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-05-24.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-05-24-hwc-galactic
Participants
jo
Tracy Durnell
Anthony Ciccarello
Joe Crawford
- Template:vanderwal
- ... add names
Notes
- Welcome to a special, weekend edition of HWC!
- Jason Cosper, faced with comment management, added office hours for when he can accept comments:
- https://jasoncosper.com/no-comments-after-business-hours/
- WordPress, requires blocks editor
- When James designed Artemis, he wanted there to be a log out button on every page.
- The software is designed to read, then log out and do something else.
- Like Club Penguin having a logout button on the main gameplay page.
- Tools make us more likely to do something
- 'Super Log-Off'? Teens Bring Street Smarts to Facebook (2010)
- https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/super-log-off-teens-bring-street-smarts-facebook/story?id=12131071
- "Mikalah, for example, an 18-year-old teenager interviewed by boyd, has already hopped between five high schools, and doesn't just log out of Facebook when she goes offline. She deactivates her account altogether."
- Our interfaces shape our behavior
- Rudy, fellow evolt denizen from the 1990s to
Joe Crawford
- https://rudy.ca/doomsday.html
- https://jamesg.blog/2025/05/22/making-things-happen
- Go make a web page!
- Creative Mornings field trips have technical staff to help in the background of events.
- James is planning to watch https://creativemornings.com/talks/michael-macleod-reclaiming-the-news-and-reconnecting-communities/1 soon, about a Substack publication that has grown popular in Edinburgh.
- IndieWeb-style earrings
- "A writer writes" (but writing is about more too)
- https://internetphonebook.net/
- Sold out, *mostly* but a few (3?) bookships around the world have a few https://internetphonebook.net/index.html#stocklist
- https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
- Stickers on laptops
- https://www.brendanschlagel.com/canon/
- Reminds me of the old radio show This I Believe https://thisibelieve.org/
- James' equivalent: https://jamesg.blog/link-garden
- What we've been doing
- Michael changed his permailnk structure to remove categories
- James has been working on his rel=edit extension
- Joe has been working on his CSS click.
- Tracy is thinking about Canons.
- Why does Maggie Appleton like this book? She shares books she likes but does not say why
- A consideration if you are making a personal library online
- Books I've read that significantly influenced how I see the world.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antilibrary
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annals_of_the_Former_World
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McPhee
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Creative_nonfiction
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arctic_Dreams
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Thomas - "The Lives Of A Cell: Notes Of A Biology Watcher" and "The Medusa And The Snail" - two wonderful books of very short, very interesting essays and observations, favorites of Kupietz
- https://www.amazon.co.uk/Giving-Good-Weight-John-McPhee/dp/0374516006
- Local Environment Impact Meeting Article
- Ragt.ag has a public comment on their site Public Comment for Hermosa Place Tree Removals
- https://tracydurnell.com/2023/10/14/public-comment-on-kirklands-stores-to-shores-greenway/
- Thomas' DC posts with DC tag - https://vanderwal.net/random/category.php?cat=35
- Carnival this month:
You can make a profile picture with https://faces.notion.com
- this is great
https://werd.io/ shares posts with comments.
Challenge of writing about politics
- How do you write in a less inflamitory way
- Focus on the issue rather than on the parties
- "This post is three years old" disclaimers on your website; a way to indicate a post is aging.
- The Guardian does this.
- Helpful to have dates on content that can go out of date (e.g. software libraries)
- How do we promote the older articles on our website?
- How do dates impact how we perceive whether a website is active?
- Weekly or annual posts can feel strange if not posted on a consistent schedule
Anthony Ciccarello is currently 2 years behind on an annual birding post
Anthony Ciccarello would still like to post the draft of his trip 5+ years ago
- Dates give context to an article
- Some posts could easily be years old or very new, but are hard to tell
- An old post that is still true can hold more weight than a recent hot take
- Having related links can give context and make it easy to learn more about a topic
- Previous/next links are easy to add navigation but it isn't always topical
Anthony Ciccarello Has had some series (e.g. Italy Travel) and would link back to the series start.
- James noted discomfort from looking back at his old posts
- You may be -- delightfully -- surprised about something you wrote on the past!
Retroactively posting that you didn't post in a month.
- "this month [un]intentionally left blank"
- garden metaphor: how gardens are made of lots of plants
- Just like our websites!
- Comments can be rapidly spreading weeds :(
- https://jasoncosper.com/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toki_Pona
- Generator for Lorem ipsum in alternate character sets
https://generator.lorem-ipsum.info/_letzebuergesch
- A book with no "e"s https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gadsby_(novel)
- another book with no e https://openlibrary.org/books/OL32609669M
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thing_Explainer - uses only the 1000 most common English words
- English character counts
- "constrained writing"
- IndieWeb Carnival: write an article without a letter.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dvorak_keyboard_layout
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keyboard_layout
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Latin-script_keyboard_layouts
- What is the best way to ask a question and get a response from lots of people, in the context of collaborative building?
- GitHub PRs aren't ideal for a lot of people.
- Depends on the audience.
- "What if I wanted a creative paragraph that doesn't contain the letter E?", and assemble all examples from bloggers and non-bloggers.
- https://www.bulwer-lytton.com/2024 facilitates submissions from lots of people.
- Having an easy way to share the post.
- Communicating how you plan to use the data is essential.
- Copyright is a question; Creative Commons can help. It has 30-40 languages translated.
public domain contains no "e"s
Stream of thought: making collective things.
Projects that come to mind:
- Collaborative writing with others - Internet Phone Book - Good Internet Magazine (https://goodinternetmagazine.com/) - Alt Text Selfies (https://alttextselfies.net/)
Idea: place to share plant growth online
- Plants growing through the cracks in the concrete.
- Watching trees grow over long periods of time.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coleus_scutellarioides is the tree on
jo's desk
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poinsettia
- Opportunities for exquisite corpse creativity
- https://marigold.town/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habbo
- T-Nature, yes Template:Artlung has a robot on the theme of nature, (Anthony and Jo and Michael showed off plants of theirs1)
- User control / curation
- Doomscroll is the opposite -- when the algorithm gives you things that you don't really fully control.
- Tuning the levers should a feature.
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThY5_MUQi8g
- exile by Taylor Swift and Bon Iver
- What is the web equivalent of "layers", like in music?
- Is it like a long press or hover?
- Technically: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/@layer
- Graphic maps between web links, like a digital garden map
- Artistic productions have multiple layers of meaning, implicit and explicit.
- Web layers
- Some people go to your homepage
- Some people read often but don't click around every page
- Some people read lots on your site
- We all know our own websites the best
- Layers in terms of keeping your content organised.
- Building your site to award exploration
- Intention for Michael in his website design
- Blog post idea: Your favourite HTTP status code.
- https://http.cat
- James blog post idea: 302 Found
- Do we have a list of IndieWeb Carnival ideas?
- Should we make one on the wiki page?
- Could plants be a topic?