events/2025-08-06-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-08-06.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-08-06-hwc-europe
Participants
jo's room)- jo https://dead.garden
- Jon Brookes https://headshed.dev/missivz/ https://headshed.dev/uploadz/
capjamesg
gRegor Morrill https://gregorlove.com/- Template:pjg1 https://pjg1.site
- Template:zacharykai - https://zacharykai.net/
Al Abut
Reilly Spitzfaden https://reillyspitzfaden.com
mandarisJoe Crawford (dropped in for a second but had to jet, dropped in and then jetted again)
Ross A. Baker https://rossabaker.com/
benji https://benji.dogThomas Vander Wal https://vanderwal.net
Angelo Gladding
- ... add names
Notes
- Welcome to Homebrew Website Club!
- https://http.cat
- POSSE
- Jon is using Astro and Laravel
- https://marksuth.dev/ uses Laravel
- https://github.com/capjamesg/aurora
- The tools we use to make our websites
- James uses Ghost and Aurora
- Jo uses HTML, SFTP, and the command line with https://github.com/cfenollosa/bashblog (fork here https://github.com/deathcomestotime/indieweb-bashblog)
zacharykai just uses static html files uploaded via SFTP to the web host (also has a VPS)- Al Abut uses Astro to build a static website (with one new experimental section that pulls in data from Notion's API) and triggers builds by pushing up commits to GitHub which triggers a new build where it's hosted on Netlify
- Reilly Spitzfaden uses 11ty; pushes to GitHub, which triggers Netlify build.
- Ross A. Baker uses Hugo, pushes to his self-hosted Forgejo, which triggers Nix build
- Template:pjg1 uses Jekyll to build files locally, and hosts on GitHub Pages
Thomas Vander Wal uses home rolled PHP CMS from 2000, but also has another site on WordPress
- Previewing posts before we publish them
- Hosting images on Flickr to use on our websites (Michael does this)
- https://hetzner.com
- https://contabo.com/en/
- https://www.hetzner.com/storage/object-storage/
- https://git-lfs.com/ for large file storage on Git Git_Large_File_Storage
- James' website likes to take an unscheduled holiday on Christmas
- The decision to use a server vs. not use a server
- Trade-off between having more control / limiting maintenance costs
- if "laziness is the mother of invention" then "necessity is the father"
- Authoring HTML on our phones?
- The IndieWeb Movie Club for the month is Local Hero (https://vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2128)
- "if it's not in etherpad it doesn't exist" :D
- Loura, you may like the https://magicalgurll.com/ website. I (James) saw it this week and loved the design! It reminds me a bit of your video game theme.
- I missed the full conversation but similar video game feeling: https://ellesho.me
- XSLT for styling feeds XSLT
- https://reillyspitzfaden.com/feed.xml
- https://reillyspitzfaden.com/styles/rss-styles.xsl
- inspired by https://rachsmith.com/feed.xml
- Someone found the link before me :D - James
- https://www.kupietz.com/filemaker-ddr-analyzer/ - not really a website thing, generated by doing an XSL transform on FileMaker's giant XML database design reports to turn them into a CSV of entity relations, then analyzed in a database to map dependencies between any two entities, which then spits out a .DOT directed graph file for a webassembly port of GraphViz to display online.
- https://reillyspitzfaden.com/feed.xml
- Ways to make RSS more approachable / interesting
- James uses https://subscribeopenly.net/subscribe/?url=https://jamesg.blog/feeds/posts.xml to link to his feed, so people don't see the XML.
- Al Abut is building a site to keep track of library books he has checked out, and which ones are due soon.
- Data is collected in Notion and then turned into a website: https://alabut.com/projects/library/list
- Data is also collected from the automated emails and scraped into a google sheet, which then imports or updates records in Notion.
- James' vinyl project: https://jamesg.blog/2024/03/16/vinyl-record-indexing
- IndieWeb Book Club for keeping track of books: http://indiebookclub.biz/
- Notion MCP, for use with AI tools: https://developers.notion.com/docs/mcp
- https://help.obsidian.md/bases (in beta right now, coming soon) are like Notion databases but in Obsidian
- https://library.jamesg.blog/
- Have we sent a website to space?
- https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/esrs/hdev/
- WWW but intergalactic
- https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/tim-peake-parents-stem-astro-pi-raspberry-pi-computers-space-launch/
- How to brew coffee in space: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PvIT3l9QYnQ
- Al's blog post about the coffee brand that's been to space, Death Wish Coffee: https://alabut.com/writing/coffeeforpics/
- Death Wish's press release about their trip to the ISS: https://www.timesunion.com/business/article/Death-Wish-Coffee-returning-to-International-13935222.php
- Zachary edited his website from his phone during the call!
- Reilly Spitzfaden looking for accessible but visually distinct code comment colors
- E.g., https://reillyspitzfaden.com/posts/2025/05/databending-part-4/
- https://catppuccin.com/ colour theme
- https://rosepinetheme.com/
- Prot's Emacs themes
- more contrast: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/modus-themes
- more colorful: https://protesilaos.com/emacs/ef-themes
- more monochromatic: https://github.com/protesilaos/doric-themes
- Tools to figure out colors
- https://accessiblepalette.com/
- https://randoma11y.com/
- https://huetone.ardov.me/
- https://developer.paciellogroup.com/color-contrast-checker/ (just saw this on the Fediverse!)
- Editing colours and checking accessibility using Firefox:
- The colour picker lets you see, in real time, the contrast between the colour you have selected and the background.
- James uses the https://pygments.org/ Python package to generate syntax highlighting. It has a few colour schemes you can choose from.
- IndieWeb Carnival for this month https://marisabel.nl/public/blog/IndieWeb_Carnival_August_2025_:_Colors
- https://ruffle.rs/ (not Flutter)
- Dunstan Orchard's old blog, which used a Flash header that showed the weather, sun moving across the sky, sheep moving in the field - https://1976design.com/blog/
- Information about the panorama: https://www.1976design.com/blog/colophon/#the-pano
- There are 90 variations of the header of his site, static images, it appears: https://www.1976design.com/blog/colophon/panoramas/
- jo is thinking about colour schemes for her website.
- digital_garden
- Some naming ideas for slash pages: slash pages, "shelf", digital garden, "wiki-like"
- https://valentine.bearblog.dev/
- "have a look through the shelves:"
- Tracking movies on our websites
Thomas Vander Wal is working on this!
- https://jamesg.blog/movies
- Letterboxd, lists we maintain ourselves
- https://www.benji.dog/watched
- movie
- https://dead.garden/films/ (I get the letterboxd rss for my reviews and let https://rss.bloople.net/ render it)
- Benji's micropub client for publishing movie posts: https://sparkles.sploot.com
- Benji demo'd how he publishes movies to his website with Sparkles then syndicates them to Letterboxd (using POSSE)
- http://github.com/benjifs/micropub
- Using Python and beautifulsoup to find broken links
- https://ahrefs.com/broken-link-checker is great for finding broken links too
- James and Michael have used this for their personal websites
- If a link is broken on your website you may replace it with an Internet Archive link
- Waybackify is a WordPress/Perl script combo
- https://www.jwz.org/blog/2019/02/waybackify/ https://www.jwz.org/hacks/ is an older set of files to implement forcing older links to point at Internet Archive
- I believe
David Shanske is looking for solutions to this common problem
- Linkrot is endemic and has a solid wikipedia entry https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Link_rot
- https://subethaedit.net/ ("Google Docs before Google Docs") with powerful collaborative text editing
- Higher fidelity screenshot of the UI:
- Google Wave Demo - https://www.google.com/search?num=10&sca_esv=56a8724cb68766c6&sxsrf=AE3TifP2NDGPR810riXKPi1E_BvndjVJJw:1754509793683&udm=7&fbs=AIIjpHxU7SXXniUZfeShr2fp4giZ1Y6MJ25_tmWITc7uy4KIeuYzzFkfneXafNx6OMdA4MQRJc_t_TQjwHYrzlkIauOKj9nSuujpEIbB1x32lFLEvPT3JmO8mWQjm2X3w-eMKXZ0RUYhz1JSpwmiVqRbYKaSUH5IT0DtjseXr7pWbySQW2IansKYxVko0I4Xq9VSCktKDaAksofpR02O_Zlq1OtpJOB00g&q=google+wave&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjmpIeo-vaOAxVdD1kFHf9rAj8QtKgLegQIDhAB&biw=1946&bih=1065&dpr=2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:7d94abe0,vid:eKUAqNGVwX0,st:0
- Higher fidelity screenshot of the UI:
- CRDTs for collaborative text editing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict-free_replicated_data_type
- Group using CRDTs to build a tool: https://www.inkandswitch.com/essay/local-first/
- https://massive.wiki/
- https://getdrafts.com/
- Pattern: capture information first, process / syndicate it later.
- Related principle from design process: know which mode you're in, divergent or convergent.
- https://voltagecontrol.com/articles/the-synergy-of-diverge-and-converge-in-design-thinking
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/shift-happened-part-2-small-apps-loosely-joined-thomas-vander-wal
- the canonocal page - https://personalinfocloud.com/blog/2014/04/08/shift-happened-part-2-small-apps-loosely-joined/ on Personal InfoCloud
- https://fed.brid.gy/
- https://wafrn.net/ ("The Social network that respects you.")
- https://granary.io/
fedicon videos : https://spectra.video/c/fedicon_videos/videos
- Template:Angelo demoed a really cool project and led to a few "Angeloisms" that were worth capturing
- "you made a useful 404 page! that's so cool!"
- Re: Al's "write down the idea"; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LVeAuwU-uuU
- "i'm routinely amazed by my past work"
- "it's gold, it's gone" (the rollercoaster of emotions around finding and immediately losing a great idea)
- "python restricts my ability to introspect"
- "the minutes got spicy, as they do"
- "sometimes just a pinch of markdown is enough"
- Angelo's approach to making his website infinitely malleable reminds of several important concepts:
- Logo turtles as a way to program/create/think
- Tim Berners-Lee's book on "read/write/web" origins of the initial concepts of the web
- Donald Knuth's literate programming - code should be not just readable but heavily documented and narrative in nature, more like language than just purely math and equations
- Ross A. Baker's configs section is based on this concept.
- Favorite implementation: https://orgmode.org/
- Standing on the shoulders of giants
- Angelo made https://ragt.ag/books
- The web as a combined browser/composer -- a vision of TBL
- "you're an old soul clinging onto the wisdom of yesterdecades greats"
- http://www.rememberaaronsw.com/memories/We-have-lost-a-fighter.html
- "And so here was this person who, on the face of it, was a coder. He knew that by writing code that was one way of changing the world. You could change the world directly by giving somebody a hug. You could write a piece of code that would make life easy for a whole lot of people. You could build a website which would make it easier for people to communicate, to work together."
Combining ideas to build a new web
- "Seeing people use Netlify makes my stomach churn."
- Making personal websites with the idea that the website could be used by a friend
- Having friends around to help you with your website makes it fun / easy to build collaborative primitaves for your website
- You need collaboration to write collaborative tools
- Questions help us think through problems (and others' questions help us form our ideas)
- When you think about websites as for friends, you can focus on the creative parts rather than the spam parts.
- "Remove people from the room who's first response/mindset to a new idea are all the reasons why of βit can't workβ. - Steve Blank
- and bring them back in when you need to validate it
- "Opinions aren't ideas" - Jony Ive at a Stripe session on creativity
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wLb9g_8r-mE
- James: "how can we make our websites more collaborative and social spaces, like the intent of the original web?"
- James' question and Angelo's creativity was a great example of "a force dyad" - two people who push each other's boundaries that are individually unique and yet complimentary in ways that couldn't create the same levels of insight on it's own.
- Super nerdy explanation of a force dyad in Star Wars: https://star-wars-canon.fandom.com/wiki/Force_dyad
- "the devil's in the details" - Taylor Swift https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HpxX4ZE4KWE
- "read write web"
- Compounding complexity in collaborative software is a problem. But if you start small you can make cool things!
- benji shared his experience with HTML Day and how hard it was for people to put their website up on the web
- "I love helping people 1-on-1, but I can't help the world put their website up"
- Al Abut saw this same obstacle point whenever teaching people html basics - making the page on their local computer is fun and easy, sharing and hosting is insanely hard (and scary)
- So what would a service to host HTML (maybe not even CSS) look like in a simple scalable way?
- Template:Angelo "what I want is neocities but with php, your own personal little nginx."
- Like a shared codepen?
- You can invite more contributors to Ghost
https://jamesg.blog/literate-programming https://jamesg.blog/2025/08/06/drum-roll-please
- https://dead.garden/blog/this-post-was-typewritten.html
- Printing out our blog posts
- https://goodinternetmagazine.com/
- https://boston-html-day.neocities.org/collab -- HTML written on paper
- Print out a page, add hand-written edits, then get those computers back into an Etherpad box
- Print out code and write on it -- annotate, share ideas!
- "bounce between what each medium is good at" -- combining the paper and the digital (and, by extension, using static and dynamic)
- hand-written annotations on a website would be cool!
- or little doodles on the sides
- "i'm waiting for the day your website has marginalia"
- https://youtu.be/0lL3PODLf_A?t=7 -- Blues Brothers apartment
- Jo's photo from HWC: https://dead.garden/photos/hwc.webp
- https://dead.garden/art/posts/pruefung.html
- Al misses drawing in sketchbooks and on whiteboards in the office environment
- His article on how to do group brainstorming with sketch pads: https://zapier.com/blog/run-a-design-studio/
- "group collaborativeness"
- capjamesg There are really interesting spheres to the social relationships in the indieweb (text, video, in person, audio), and you can assemble your own experience.
- Al Abut keeps threatening to make a physical magazine documenting the indieweb community or even smaller social circlesindee
- The military phrase for redundancy for important things, like coffee: "Two is one, one is none." 3-2-1 backup plan?
- Gutting a book: https://vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2125