Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of May 12th - 18th, 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 May 16th in Nürnberg and Brighton. Join us again for the next Homebrew Website Club on May 29th in Baltimore, and on May 30th in Nürnberg, and San Francisco, along with a virtual Homebrew Website Club at US Eastern Time. 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 open 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 take place before Open Source Bridge, which is celebrating its 10th and final year on Friday June 29th. Learn more, and register for the Summit now, at 2018.indieweb.org. 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 In "An Indieweb Podcast Episode 5: Indieweb Summit and More", hosts David Shanske and Chris Aldrich discuss their experiences with past IndieWeb events, what to expect from the upcoming IndieWeb Summit, and ways to get involved. In episode 17 of Jeena's Excellent Encounters, Jeena talks with fellow long-time IndieWeb community member Martijn van der Ven. Along they way, they introduce IndieWeb concepts like backfeed and webmention, discuss concrete steps for getting started with a new IndieWeb-friendly site, and ponder the differences between moral and regulatory views about privacy with respect to what we post online. --- 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, shared a video from re:publica 2018, where earlier this month Jim Groom of Reclaim Hosting spoke about the history of the Domain of One's Own project. Groom encouraged educational institutions to put individual educators and students, and their websites, at the center of online initiatives, warning against locking up data in silos that rely on invasive surveillance to offer so-called "personalization". Amanda Rush, at arush.io, shared two posts about her plans to leave social media silos, stop syndicating her content out, and go "full IndieWeb". Among the major motivations she cites are Twitter's plans to shut down their streaming API, an API which powers many accessibility-focused alternative Twitter clients. Malcolm Blaney, at unicyclic.com, announced a new project that uses personal websites to record and track payments between individuals. Available at indiepay.me, the site records posts announcing and confirming payments, and tracks balances owed. It serves as a proof of concept demonstrating how permanent posts on personal sites under our control can provide value in new ways. Eddie Hinkle, at eddiehinkle.com, published "Indigenous Development Log #2". In it, he talks about new features and bugfixes for version 0.3 of his combination indie reader and Micropub app for iOS. The release will serve as a step towards his goal of a 1.0 release in time for the IndieWeb Summit in late June. Jacky Alciné, at jacky.wtf, published "My Commitments to the IndieWeb in 2018". In it, he demonstrates improved display of webmention responses he receives on his site. He also lays out plans for a desktop native live-posting or streaming client to make it easier to post to his site. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members John Graffio joins us from graffio.com. John describes himself as a "resolute researcher and developer who leaves no stone unturned in the pursuit of something interesting." Eureka Chen joins us from eureka.name. Eureka is, quote, "An older programmer who is free to live in a decentralized online world. Walk[ing] on both ends of traditional culture and modern civilization". Gareth Fleming joins us from d3z.me. Gareth is, quote, "a human on the Internet" and says he is, quote, "smart enough to know he's not smart enough". 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 Thanks to Eureka Chen for translating the main page and the Getting Started page of indieweb.org into Simplified Chinese. We really appreciate the effort to make the IndieWeb community more accessible. Cathie LeBlanc, at cathieleblanc.com, shared two posts about her IndieWeb journey. In "IndieWeb Overview", LeBlanc discusses some difficulties with extracting an overall picture of IndieWeb technologies from the indieweb.org wiki, which lacks a linear presentation. In "Why We Need the #IndieWeb: A Short History", LeBlanc gives her personal history of publishing on the web starting in 1993, her excitement about "the democratic promises of Web 2.0", frustrations with silos like Twitter and Facebook, and a return to the "hotlist", a personal directory of links to pages around the web. # Services and Organizations If you run a website with a .io domain name, you may want to be aware of a recent story by Tomislav Lombarovic, posted to the uptimechecker.io blog this week. In it, the author recounts the story of losing control of their domain for an entire week due to policy and automation issues between registrar domains.com and the company that manages .io domains. This issue comes up about six months after NIC.io, the company that manages registrations and DNS for .io domains, came under fire for a domain name resolution service outage which caused all .io domains to go offline. John O'Nolan and Hannah Wolfe posted a 5 year retrospective about the Ghost CMS this week. After 5 years of development and three million dollars in revenue, they discuss the challenges and successes they've encountered in building a decentralized, non-profit company built around and Open Source project. # IndieWeb Development In case you missed it, the IndieAuth plugin for WordPress, which allows users to log in to IndieAuth-enabled services using their own domain, received a major upgrade recently. The new 2.0 version now provides a standalone authorization endpoint, making it possible for any WordPress site to be a full IndieAuth provider with no reliance on third-party services. Other new pages added to indieweb.org this week include: Ekster, embed, and list. Follow the links in the newsletter to learn more about, or add detail to, these new terms. --- 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.