events/2025-08-13-hwc-europe
Homebrew Website Club Europe/London was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-08-13.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-08-13-hwc-europe
Participants
- ... add names
zacharykai - https://zacharykai.net
capjamesg
Ross A. Baker https://rossabaker.com/Thomas Vander Wal https://vanderwal.net
Reilly Spitzfaden https://reillypascal.com/Joe Crawford https://artlung.com/
jo https://dead.garden
benji https://benji.dog
gRegor Morrill https://gregorlove.com
Angelo Gladding
Britt Coxon
Tantek Γelik
Notes
- Welcome to HWC!
- Using tab groups to organise your tabs
- How to save tabs to a list of links on your hard drive?
- Use case: to save research references as you browse the web
- Obsidian Web Clipper might be useful: https://obsidian.md/clipper
- an addon https://addons.mozilla.org/de/firefox/addon/onetab/?utm_source=firefox-browser&utm_medium=firefox-browser&utm_content=discopane-entry-link
- OneTab on Chrome: https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/onetab/chphlpgkkbolifaimnlloiipkdnihall?hl=en
- Right click + copy a bookmark folder (tested in Firefox), then paste into Obsidian. This will give a list of properly formatted links, including subfolders, with the folder/subfolder names listed above the appropriate sections.
- Making your lights change when you receive a Webmention
- You could have holiday animations too!
- https://librewolf.net/
- Make sure security updates are synced if you are using a browser fork
Website Updates
- zacharykai
- Set up an instance of FreshRSS on the VPS
- Redesigned the footer (again...)
- Working on setting up Listmonk
- Refactoring my code to make it easier to read on my personal site
- Moving stuff from my personal site to lunaseeker.com for better organization
- Simplified my site's stylesheet dramatically
- Made my bookmarks page more usable!
- Ross A. Baker
- synchronized his Pixelfed to a new gallery section: https://rossabaker.com/gallery/
- early stages of Twitter archive, 2009-2022
Thomas Vander Wal
- Trying to get Google search providing results again
- Planning out my own search on vanderwal.net
- Working on non-public exposed data model and forms
- working on to pages that will likely make it to the lab
- capjamesg
- is building a mobile HTML editor, and working on integrating his static site closer with Ghost
- is considering making a /ethics page on his website.
- is excited for Taylor Swift's new album
- Blogging, optimizing, FrESH yesterday. events/2025-08-12-front-end-study-hall
- https://artlung.com/ continues apace!
- My Likes are worth a click! https://artlung.com/likes/
- Joe's tilde site has become a de facto changelog
- The Firefox isn't a fox, it's a red panda!
- TIL!
- Hosting websites at home
- home_server has several considerations / guidance for running a website at home
- Personal notes discussion
- Tracking dates/times/locations written in?
- James' posts are dated automatically, but he doesn't capture where something was written in explicitly.
- James sometimes mentions location in his personal writing though
- Ross A. Baker obsessively notes local time zones... the blogs from work trips are one hour off the rest!
- Challenge: Write a blog post in a new place for 30 days
- The BBC is good at keeping links alive over time!!!
- WordPress uses post numbers as UUIDs, comes from autoincrementing keys in MySQL (which WP uses?)
- Danger of autoincremented: they are enumerable so you can discover new posts without them being explicitly linked
- Silliness: https://everyuuid.com/
- Computerphile Distributed Systems' YouTube videos are a great introduction to distributed systems
- microservices: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d8NDgwOllaI
- Reilly's /now page (https://reillyspitzfaden.com/now/) uses this bash script to generate markdown files for statuslog; note the ipinfo.io line for location:
```sh
- !/bin/sh
date=$(date +"%Y-%m-%dT%H:%M:%S%z") location=$(curl -s ipinfo.io | jq -r '.city + ", " + .region') slug="${date}-status" fullpath=pages/now/$slug.md cat >> $fullpath << EOF --- date: $date location: $location tags:
- status
permalink: false --- EOF ```
- James has been publishing blog posts without categories by accident because Ghost doesn't show the category editor field by default in the Ghost editor. You have to click to see the field.
- "Why do I have to click twice to get that?" -- a quote from a UX discussion that Michael had.
- effervescence
- Unusual words for unnusual feelings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sehnsucht (German, no word for it in English), the "oceanic feeling" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oceanic_feeling
- More words that don't translate directly into English: https://eunoia.world/
- Kupietz lists a few favorite foreign words that don't quite have English equivalents on his Vocabulary page: https://michaelkupietz.com/vocabulary/ (Farkakte, Agita)
- "I saw a snail today. Effervescent." (https://cockmcstuffins.tumblr.com/post/173037113454/bella-was-lucky-she-didnt-have-a-cell-phone-of)
- Tumblr has RSS: add /rss to the end of URLs
- Tumblr RSS feed pattern: add /rss to the the tumblr subdomain. For tumblr.jamesg.blog that is https://tumblr.jamesg.blog/rss
- Blog post idea: words from your community
- interesting words
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zwiebelfisch
- relative of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake
- "Otorhinolaryngology"
- https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Zwiebelfisch
- Game: "regionally appropriate Scrabble"; use dialect from where you are from
- The feeling of hearing a word that so well encapsulates a feeling you know
- perseverate - repeat or prolong an action, thought, or utterance after the stimulus that prompted it has ceased.
- monozukuri: thing-making
- irusu: pretending to be out when someone knocks at your door
- https://www.scotsman.com/arts-and-culture/scottish-word-of-the-week-wheesht-1579180
- "First used in the 14th century, βwheeshtβ has the handy bonus of being very adaptable. It can be used as a verb, a noun, and an interjection as in asking someone to βhaud their wheeshtβ."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_effervescence
- Notable this week: for good internet swag? metal indieweb swag that donates to the org, by Nick Simson:
- Kupietz's sun: (also from yesterday for links, dev comments) events/2025-08-12-front-end-study-hall#Michael.27s_Sun
- Also posted notes on pushing back on a trollish commenter
- Close to publishing his 1000th movie review
- Added a "latest movie reviews" section to his website sidebar
- WordPress' main primitives are pages and posts, and also attachments
- You can create custom post types, too. https://learn.wordpress.org/lesson/custom-post-types/
- Idea: Bookwyrm for albums
- Writing about music that you enjoy
- A way to start a conversation / find people who also like the same music / have experiences related to a song you have mentioned.
- /elsewhere, a place to list your other web presences (i.e. other websites, accounts) (e.g. https://artlung.com/elsewhere/ )
- Idea: create a timeline of old accounts / when you used them / when the silo stopped running
- You could use this to create a timeline of Git projects
- From Joe's updates listed on his Tilde Club page: https://tilde.club/~artlung/
- IndieWebCamps has a timeline too
- Idea: create a timeline of old accounts / when you used them / when the silo stopped running
Timeline example
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_Cure_band_members#Timeline
- https://www.historicaltechtree.com/
- timeline has a text-based representation
- IndieWebCamps
- Rebuilding old silo UIs for your own website to show how your profile looked
- A silo closing down doesn't stop you from being on the web
- https://playground.jamesg.blog/authorship.html
- https://playground.jamesg.blog/blackout-poetry.html blackout poetry
- jo redesigned dead.garden.
- The colour scheme is now monochrome, implemented using the saturate() CSS function.
- Using the element to make something stand out with colour.
- The art pages have colour too because it is important in the context of the art.
- Using a handwritten font for sidenotes.
- https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/filter-function/saturate
- https://github.com/grassmunk/Chicago95
- gRegor Morrill is now using libravatar https://www.libravatar.org/ to get profile pictures for people commenting who leave an email address: https://gregorlove.com/2025/08/i-updated-my-site/
- How Ross does it: https://rossabaker.com/configs/libravatar/
- gRegor Morrill recommends writing about music too! Latest example: https://gregorlove.com/2025/07/music-monday-olafur-arnalds/
- https://rossabaker.com/configs/libravatar/ shows date of publication and last edit
- "last significant modification date"
- Question: how to get file edited date for use in a static site generator (i.e. 11ty)?
- 11ty has a last-modified variable that is "hit-or-miss", based on the Git commit date values.
- https://www.11ty.dev/docs/dates/
- RCS, an archaic version control system, used to have keywords that would expand. Some people have tried to recreate it in Git (untested): https://github.com/turon/git-rcs-keywords
- Question: does anyone have a good way to show changes on the page over time / the original post vs. the current state?
- Having a diff file that shows the difference between changes
- Wikipedia (and the IndieWeb wiki) has a diff interface too
- https://jamesg.blog/assets/video/2024/12/etherpadscroll.mov
- Add /timeslider to the URL of an etherpad, or click the clock icon
humans.txt
- If you put HTML in
tags, the web browser will still render the code - Michael now has a [code] shortcode to make sure code snippets are properly escaped
- This runs before many of the WP hooks to make sure the text renders properly
RSS feeds
- https://www.feedvalidator.org/ works well to validate the feed
- Monocle's preview tool is also helpful: https://monocle.p3k.io/preview
- https://turner.enemyterritory.org/user/carrvo/index
- Feedvalidator has a couple recommendations: https://www.feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=https%3A%2F%2Fturner.enemyterritory.org%2Fuser%2Fcarrvo%2Fwebpages.rss.xml
- About half of the people on the call have manually written RSS
- RSS to HTML tools exist, like https://rss.bloople.net/
- granary https://granary.io lets you convert between formats, like RSS, Atom, and mf2
- gRegor Morrill uses and recommends this to convert an HTML+microformats2 page into Atom, for example: https://gregorlove.com/stream/feed.atom is set up to redirect to Granary for the feed of https://gregorlove.com/stream/
- Webmention: https://github.com/carrvo/SVNmentions
To jQuery or not to jQuery
- https://youmightnotneedjquery.com/
- "jQuery" begins with "J" (and so does "JavaScript"!)
- https://jamesg.blog/kittyscript
- "I'm sure this is really helpful for cats who know English"
- "I'm pretty sure cats understand strings" :D
- Kupietz's cli-based website interface has an easter egg where you can localize the command language to 'pirate': https://michaelkupietz.com/cli.html?language=pirate (type 'shanties' at the prompt to see the commands.)
- geiger counter midi music https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_JxWM8iQSA
- "finally music on cd" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zuAH8QUTufg
- Yasunao Tone - Solo For Wounded CD (1997): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYBki7ixg68
- Google indexing tips
- Include a rel=canonical to tell Google what the canonical URL is, so Google doesn't have to try and figure out the canonical URL itself
- Add a sitemap.xml file so Google can easily find URLs on your site
- I have code to generate that file *from* a flat file of urls: https://gist.github.com/artlung/210438
- If you have more than 10000 links, https://gist.github.com/artlung/613e6ac577a170bf2b4b9045486f129e
- Then you can point at the one, or multiple sitemap xml files from robots.txt
Options to not get "AI Overview" in search
- https://udm14.com/ -- disable AI overviews in Google and various other rich snippets
- https://tenbluelinks.org/ -- instructions to update search on desktop and mobile to disable AI overview by default
- https://startpage.com privacy friendly search + options to not use AI
- You can set these up on your phone too!
- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/laylavish/uBlockOrigin-HUGE-AI-Blocklist/main/list.txt -- looks like a custom syntax for identifying elements / DOM nodes.
- You can use uBlock Origin to block content on a page by selector in cluding has-text() to include text content in the selector
- James does this to block various elements on websites that he finds distracting
- https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id6745342698
Filter Copilot from GitHub:
- https://codeberg.org/rossabaker/github-copilot-filters
- An increasingly futile effort, but less is better than all...
- jo made this flyer
- https://cari.institute/ of aesthetics
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazz_(design)
- Reminds me of
- Houston Astros uniforms of the era: https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/shows/houston-matters/2018/04/16/279344/the-long-lost-story-behind-the-astros-famous-rainbow-uniforms-2/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweetheart_Cup_Company made a big coffee cup from concrete
- Idea: a website that collects coffee cups from history
- https://dead.garden/418
- https://jamesg.blog/mugs
- https://jamesg.blog/coffee-cups
- https://www.benji.dog/articles/my-favorite-mugs/
- NYC Greek coffee cups - https://nycoffeecup.com/?srsltid=AfmBOooJ6WhtLnQooydjXLJjXf4wIRYRiTYOcmOhAmTSAWlbQmWqkajm
- Caching: remember to ask people to clear their caches if you have made a change that may be cached
- James' thought for static sites: caching has been more trouble than the performance gain it gives
- Pressing the authorship button will clear authorship for everyone
- Light switches and thermostats
- Ross A. Baker apologizes for the barking dachshund. (Can we add this to the template?)
- We didn't hear it! :D
- jQuery revisiting: https://lab.artlung.com/rosetta/?jquery https://lab.artlung.com/rosetta/?vanilla ~ I just added a 2025 edition of the same handlers I had created back in 2010 to enumerate how to do event handlers that do some different dom manipulation and ajax calls which are far simpler to do these days.
- We also talked about the importance and significance of jQuery back during Front End Study Hall 27 events/2025-05-08-front-end-study-hall
- Ethics / policies on websites
- https://reillyspitzfaden.com/ai-policy/
- https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/ethics.html
- dead.garden has principles on the home page
- https://tracydurnell.com/2025/01/21/guiding-principles-for-my-website/
- https://fyr.io/nope
- https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/e/2PACX-1vThO3so7dDshcfzNUlDZ0SDs1c-pxpU0llcLHEgNoAiLdcBWOP5RQrnrF6GcXRUtYhYs1fSg7uSc6dF/pubhtml?gid=204057601&single=true
- https://blog.avas.space/about-me/#mark-yesnopemark
E-40, βChoices (Yep)β https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRChz-OYi9o
- https://evy.garden/manifesto/
- https://lagomor.ph/info/values/
- James' writing on technology design principles: https://jamesg.blog/2025/03/05/technology-design-principles, and https://jamesg.blog/2025/02/10/designing-technology
- Joe Crawford does not have a unified statement of ethics but web pages bring to the fore a number of issues including ethics of software, data collection, journalism, photography, proper quoting of sources and republishing ethical considerations.
- James is thinking about a Ghost Micropub tool that takes a Micropub request and POSTs it to Ghost with a HTML tag.
- schrodinger's notification: "I may or may not have been notified"
- https://orangegnome.com/posts/3633/team-fat-posts
- Ross A. Baker is horrified as a back-end developer but finds it interesting as an IndieWebber...
- Example of James' search: https://jamesg.blog/search-pages?q=artlung.com&page=1
- https://ragt.ag/books gets a list of books with microformats properties
- Goal is for book pages and the /books page to aggregate all information about each book
- h-book is a great name for a book :)
- Idea: You could show links to others' websites who have also reviewed a book you have read
Micropub popup? pop-up#Micropub
- URL poems