Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of January 21st - 27th, 2023. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2023-01-27.html This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities in the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of website updates. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing over the weekend. 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. Homebrew Website Club met on January 25th with a virtual meetup at 6pm US/Pacific time. Discussion topics included posting about films, webmention, planning a potential Palm Springs meetup, and more. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Join us again on February 1st for the next Homebrew Website Club, with virtual meetups scheduled at 7pm for Europe and London, and at 6pm for US/Pacific. You can always find info about the next upcoming Homebrew Website Club meetups and other IndieWeb events at events.indieweb.org. If you're an organizer, please remember to update the site with information about your venue, times, and how to RSVP. 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. Tentative planning has begun for a possible IndieWeb Summit in 2023. Discussions are just starting and include locating a venue in Portland, establishing COVID precautions, and more. Want to help? Visit the /Planning page, where plans are also beginning to take shape for IndieWebCamps in cities like Dusseldorf, Berlin, and Brighton. --- ## Podcasts This week The Rocket podcast posted episoded #422 - Third-Party Rocket. In it, they discuss the fallout of Twitter's decision to cut off API access to third-party clients, CNET publishing machine-generated financial articles, and more. The episode also features an ad for micro.blog. --- 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. Tantek, at tantek.com, posted about some of the apparent opposing forces in the IndieWeb, such as decentralization, independence, plurality, DNS, corporate infrastructure, standards, and more. While tensions between these concepts can be the target of criticism, he encourages us to explore them in the context of solving real user needs for participating directly on the web. Caleb, at calebhearth.com, published "This Gem is Mentionable". In it, he introduces "Mentionable", a library for accepting and processing Webmentions for sites powered by Ruby on Rails. Alex, at lagomor.ph, published "Fun with Hyperlocal Data". In it, the author describes their home sensor network and how they display temperature data on their website. Sophie, at localghost.dev, published "Everything should have an API: adventures in trying to automate stuff". In it, the author shares research into automatically collecting and publishing her activity from siloed services dedicated to gaming, listening, reading, and more. Looking to host your tweets on your own site? Darius at tinysubversions.com published "Make your own simple, public, searchable Twitter archive", an in-browser tool that converts your exported Twitter data into an archive of HTML files ready to publish online. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. ## New Community Members Ken joins us from ken.fyi. Ken uses his site to collect thoughts and share ideas about creativity, urbanism, technology, and more. Greg joins us from gregmakes.xyz. Greg uses their site to post inside thoughts on the outside. They're currently working on adding webmention support. Iván joins us from imposible.blog. Iván is relaunching his blog to post about personal topics as well as a log of his journey as a web developer. Kriselda Gray joins us from earthboundvalkyrie.com. She uses her site to post about "whatever comes to mind", including politics, faith, humor, entertainment, and the news. 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 "Eat what you cook", an encouragement to create tools for your own use, and to be a regular user of the tools you create, is a concept that can have some nuance. A chef may taste a meal before serving it to a customer, but that's different from eating the full dish for sustenance. Likewise, be sure to "taste" (aka test) tools you make before using them yourself, and certainly before offering them up to others. ## Services and Organizations Managing a personal music collection? Inspired by the enclosure of the free CDDB project in the year 2000, MusicBrainz is an open-source encyclopedia and database of music information. The entire database is available for download, under Creative Commons licenses. With several waves of new users over the past year, things continue to evolve in the largely ActivityPub-powered "Fediverse". This week a selection of criticisms were added to the wiki, including: replicating poor community behaviors from Twitter, complexities of user and admin experience, and more examples of users moving off of Mastodon in favor of syndicating from their own site, or via services like micro.blog. ## IndieWeb Development If you use Bridgy Fed to syndicate between your personal site and the Fediverse, you can now add a follow form to your site. Popular on Mastodon prior to version 4, these forms invite a visitor to enter their own Fediverse address to be redirected to a page where they can follow your posts in one click. Two new open source projects were shared on the wiki this week. First up, James shared a tool to generate screenshots of your pages when they're shared on social platforms with Open Graph previews. Next, Ben Pate has released an early version of Emissary, which aims to give users a private space on the web that interoperates with ActivityPub and IndieWeb building blocks. Though it comes with risk, and is certainly frowned on in professional environments, "testing in production" can be a particularly expedient way to see if code changes function as expected for your own site. Follow the links in the newsletter to learn more about, add detail to, and - sometimes - find memes about these topics. --- 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.