Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of March 17th - 23rd, 2018. 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. Most meetings take place every other Wednesday, from 6:30pm to 7:30pm. Homebrew Website Club met on March 21st in Nuremberg (sort of) and San Francisco. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. A special shout out to Joschi Kuphal of jkphl.is for holding it down solo in Nuremburg this week. Due to heavy snows, Baltimore's March 20th Homebrew Website Club meetup has been postponed, and will now take places on Tuesday March 21st. Then, join us at a very special Homebrew Website Club on April 4th, for a "404" celebration of websites which are no more. Meetups in Nuremberg and San Francisco are confirmed so far. 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 Dates have been announced for IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf, scheduled to take place May 5th and 6th at sipgate in Düsseldorf, Germany, just before the beyond tellerand event. Learn more and register now at indieweb.org/2018/Düsseldorf. Save the dates for the 2018 IndieWeb Summit, which will take place on Tuesday June 26th and Wednesday June 27th in Portland, Oregon. The two-day summit will be a part of the larger week-long Open Source Bridge conference. Organizers and volunteers are invited to contribute at indieweb.org/2018. 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. --- # Podcasts Chris Aldrich of boffosocko.com, and David Shanske of david.shanske.com, have published a podcast pilot called "An IndieWeb Podcast: Episode 0 'Considering the User'". In it, they discuss a post by Eli Mellen about making the IndieWeb more accessible to non-developers. --- 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. Eli Mellen published a post at eli.li titled "Dear IndieWeb, it may be time to start considering the user, not just the technical spec." In it, Mellen calls for lower barriers to entry for IndieWeb tools, specifically with improvements to jargon-heavy documentation and error messages which reference technical specifications. Manton Reece published a post at manton.org titled "IndieWeb generation 4 and hosted domains". In it, Manton describes his approach to empowering users of micro.blog and making posting to your own site as easy as Twitter. Quote: "Owning your content isn’t about portable software. It’s about portable URLs and data. It’s about domain names." --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Ravi Sagar joins us from ravisagar.in. Ravi is an Atlassian Consultant and Drupal Expert who in his free time takes pictures of, quote, "anything that generates curiosity in me". 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 Musicians often promote their work and engage with fans on social media silos, from MySpace of the early 2000s to Facebook, today. If you post or promote your music to your own site, be sure to document that on the new "musician" page. A new "Post about the Indieweb" this week from Chris Beckstrom, at chrisbeckstrom.com, titled "About this Website". In it, Beckstrom details his reasons for joining the IndieWeb, and some technical specs of his WordPress site with support for Webmention, POSSE, and Micropub. # Services and Organizations Revelations that social media manipulation firm Cambridge Analytica exfiltrated relationship, likes, and other personal data of over 50 million Facebook users have kicked off a rash of discussions about Facebook's business model of surveillance. The "silo-quits" page has been updated with links to pieces by several folks about their plans to quit Facebook while taking their posts, photos, and more when they go. Similarly, the "delete your account" page was updated with links to some posts about leaving Facebook, including a call by Brian Acton, co-founder of the Facebook-owned WhatsApp messenger, for Facebook users to delete their accounts. In fact, Facebook's "trend"s this week showcased stories about Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, who had his companies' pages deleted from Facebook. If you aren't yet ready to quit Facebook, you may be interested in a new guide from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about how to turn off or limit the kinds of API platform sharing that allow third-party apps to collect data about you. You can find a link to that guide on the "Facebook" page. # IndieWeb Development Developers who work with data formatted in "JSON", or JavaScript Object Notation, may be interested to know that there are several specs which define the data interchange language, the most recent of which was RFC 8259, published in December of last year. The editor of that RFC, Tim Bray, actually recommends that developers use I-JSON, defined in RFC 7493, to avoid some of the, quote, "legal-but-dumbass" things that JSON allows, such as duplicate member names and non-UTF-8 encodings. Jonathan Lacour, of cleverdevil.io, has shared a work-in-progress Micropub server called "Puny". Written in Python, the server can accept media, make new posts, and render post content. It pairs well with PunyAuth, another open source project from Lacour that implements IndieAuth for logging in to Micropub clients. Popular work-in-progress iOS indie reader and micropub client Indigenous may soon have a matching Android app. Developed by Kristof de Jaeger, the project is still in early development, but you can find more information on the "Indigenous_for_android" page. Other new terms on the website this week: Webstagram, incron, PyPy, ZODB, series, Testing 123.., IMDb, 301, 302, and 447. Follow the links in the newsletter to learn more about and add detail to these new pages. --- 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.