Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of December 23rd - 29th, 2017. This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities of the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of wiki edits. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing the following day. You can find the web edition of This Week in the IndieWeb, including all links and an archive of all past editions at indieweb.org/this-week --- Events Homebrew Website Club is a bi-weekly meetup of people passionate about or interested in creating, improving, building, and designing their own website. Most meetings take place every other Wednesday, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. Homebrew Website Club met on December 27th in San Francisco, as well as two virtual meetups at Central European Time and US Eastern Time. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Homebrew Website Club will next meet on January 9th in Baltimore. Then the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club meeting will take place on January 10th, with Nuremberg, Brighton, London, San Francisco, and a virtual HWC at Central European Time confirmed so far. Homebrew Website Club Berlin will meet the following day, on January 11th. If you're an organizer, please remember to update the wiki with information about your venue, times, and how to RSVP. And remember you can always find info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetups at indieweb.org/next-hwc Interested in starting a Homebrew Website Club in your city? It can be as simple as grabbing a friend and heading to your favorite coffee shop, bar, living room, or any other meeting place. You can find plenty of information about Homebrew Website Club, including tips for how to organize your own, at indieweb.org/hwc Registration is now open for the first IndieWebCamp Baltimore, scheduled to take place January 20th and 21st at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. Learn more and register now at 2018.indieweb.org/baltimore All IndieWeb events follow the IndieWeb Code of Conduct, which can be found at indieweb.org/coc. And, all IndieWeb events are volunteer-run, so if you are interested in helping organize, getting the word out, finding sponsors, and more let us know in the chat at chat.indieweb.org. --- Here is a brief summary of posts collected this week by IndieNews, a community-curated list of articles relevant to the IndieWeb. You can read more, or submit posts of your own, at news.indieweb.org. Aaron Davis, at readwriterespond.com, published a post titled "Co-claiming and Gathering Together – Developing Read Write Collect". In it, Davis reflects on the development of a new site to bring together the disparate pieces that he posts elsewhere on the web, as well as multiple personal sites. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. # New Community Members A new user page was created for Roshan Vidyashankar, at roshanvid.com. Roshan is a software engineer whose interests include human-computer interaction, music and audio, and education. A new user page was created for Tom Schenkenberg, at schenkenberg.nl. Tom is a personal technology enthusiast and co-founder of a web application software development company in the Netherlands. If you haven't already, now is a good time to create your own user page. It's a great way to introduce yourself to the IndieWeb community, and to collect the things that you are working on, or want to work on, for your personal website. For more details, visit indieweb.org/wikifying. # Community and Concepts A new page was created for "cities", a list of cities which have hosted an IndieWebCamp, a regular Homebrew Website Club meetup, or both. If you're an organizer, be sure to add a page for your city! A new page was created for "challenge", an event-like post which serves as an invitation for people to post achievements towards some goal. For example, exercise-tracking silo Strava allows users to create and join challenges such as setting a run distance goal. Additionally, the IndieWeb-friendly micro.blog microblogging service recently held a seven day photo challenge. Several updates were made to the 2018-01-01-commitments page, which tracks commitments by members of the IndieWeb community to make improvements to their own sites by the end of the year, or to set new goals for the coming year. If you haven't already, now is the time to add yours! Similarly, the 2017-12-indieweb-challenge page, which aims to collectively ship something IndieWeb-related every day of December, has been updated with several new things this week. This is the first year for the IndieWeb Challenge, which wraps up this weekend, and has seen posts for 21 out of 29 days of December to date. And along the same lines, the 2017-review page, which lists IndieWeb and IndieWebCamp accomplishments and related news for all of 2017, saw several updates this week. If you've accomplished new things for your personal site, or the community at large, in the past year, don't forget to add it to the page! # Services and Organizations The "OkCupid" page was updated with a link to an announcement from the dating silo that they will be removing the username feature from their site and requiring users to identify themselves by their real names. The page was also updated with a link to a post on The Verge strong criticizing this decision. The "Facebook Master Algorithm" page was updated with a link to a thread on Twitter by Hellchick which begins "For those of you who work in social media, I need to share the story of my friend who died, and I didn't know because algorithms." In it, she describes being surprised to learn of the hospitalization and death of a long-time friend. Although her friend had posted about being in the hospital, the algorithm had chosen not to display these posts, which several mutual friends confirmed they never saw. # IndieWeb Development The "OwnYourSwarm" page was updated with a link to a new feature announcement by creator Aaron Parecki. OwnYourSwarm, which uses micropub to syndicate check-ins from the Swarm location tracking silo to your personal site, now includes a new property indicating whether another Swarm user was the one that checked you in. A new page was created for "youtube-dl", a command line program to download video and audio from the YouTube video hosting silo. youtube-dl also supports other popular hosting and streaming sites, including Vimeo and SoundCloud, and may be useful for developers seeking to create archives from their video posts. Finally, thank you so much for listening. This is the final episode of This Week in the IndieWeb Audio Edition for 2017. It has been a privilege to learn so much from the community this year, to meet and interview so many of you, and to start this podcast as a way of giving back. I look forward to continuing, and improving, in 2018. Until then, I wish you a happy new year, and all the best. --- That's going to do it for this week. Thank you for listening! This English version of This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition was read and produced by Marty McGuire. If you have suggestions for improving this audio edition of the newsletter, please feel free to contact Marty in the IndieWeb chat This Week in the IndieWeb and the IndieNews services are provided by Aaron Parecki. Music for this episode comes from Aaron Parecki's 100 Days of Music project. Find out more at 100.aaronparecki.com. Learn more about the IndieWeb at indieweb.org, and join the discussion via Slack, IRC, or the web at chat.indieweb.org.