Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of April 28th - May 4th, 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 1st in Baltimore, and on May 2nd in Nurnberg, London, and San Francisco, along with a return of virtual Homebrew Website Club at Central European time. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in the newsletter. Join us again for another Homebrew Website Club on May 15th in Baltimore and on May 16th in Nurnberg. 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 IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf is being held this weekend on May 5th and 6th at sipgate in Düsseldorf, Germany. You can find notes from the sessions at indieweb.org/2018/Düsseldorf and we'll have more details on those discussions here next week. 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 Episode 5 of Eddie Hinkle's "30 and Counting", Eddie details part of his strategy for leaving Facebook, sending periodic email newsletters containing several posts. He discusses some options for allowing recipients to respond to the individual posts included in each newsletter, and to have those responses appear on his site. In episode 3 of "An Indieweb Podcast", hosts David Shanske and Chris Aldrich talk syndication - the art of copying content from your own site to social networking silos where they can reach wider audiences. They discuss recently announced changes to Facebook's API which may make automatic syndication there impossible, but point out that this is not the first time Facebook has made changes with this kind of impact. Chris Aldrich also published a long-form "Introduction to IndieWeb on WordPress", or "Setting up WordPress for IndieWeb use". Available in both video and audio formats, this two hour tutorial demonstrates how to configure a fresh WordPress install to provide IndieWeb features like microformats, Webmention, and backfeeding of responses from social silos with bridgy. --- 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. Continuing a prolific week, Chris Aldrich published "A pencast overview (with audio and recorded visual diagrams) of IndieWeb technologies" to his site at boffosocko.com. This PDF, usable in Adobe Reader X, uses live drawing and audio commentary to explain several IndieWeb building blocks. It serves as a high-level companion to his longer how-to video for setting up an IndieWeb-friendly WordPress site. Aaron Davis published a post on "Building Digital Workflows" at readwriterespond.com. In it, Davis documents recent changes he has made to his workflows for organizing, consuming, and creating content, such as using Pocket to collect and listen to articles, Inoreader to manage favorite reading sources, Trello to organize projects and documents, Typely to edit with Markdown, and Noterlive to capture event notes while sharing them to Twitter. Aaron Davis also shared "The value of rituals in a digital world" from Radio National's Future Tense podcast. He points out Alexandra Samuel's argument in the piece that ‘digital rituals’ are associated with the notions of reflection and community. Davis notes that current IndieWeb publishing practices often feel ritualistic because they require extra steps compared to social silos. He ponders whether the amount of reflection he sees in IndieWeb posts will decrease as the tools become more streamlined. Eddie Hinkle published "Indigenous Development Log #1" to his site at eddiehinkle.com. In it, Eddie introduces the current beta of Indigenous, his indie reader for iOS which allows users to read content from around the web via Microsub and respond on their own sites with Micropub. He plans to continue the series with shorter updates for future releases of the app. Sebastian Greger published a post that is generating a lot of feedback this week. In "The Indieweb privacy challenge (Webmentions, silo backfeeds, and the GDPR)", available on his site at sebastiangreger.net, Greger examines what the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation might mean for the IndieWeb, particularly around practices like displaying responses from social silos on personal sites. The GDPR, which dictates whether and how private data can be collected and processed, becomes enforceable on May 25th. René Meister published "Indieweb und die DSGVO", a German-language response to Greger's post that seems to match the sentiments of many in the IndieWeb community. In it, Meister says that Greger's post is well worth reading, but that he will wait and see how, if at all, he may change the way his website displays responses from users of Twitter and other silos. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Cathie LeBlanc joins us from cathieleblanc.com. Cathie has been working on the web since 1992 and has been self-hosting her website for a long time. She has recently begun thinking about self-hosting as a tool to help students change their relationship to knowledge production and consumption. River MacLeod joins us from river.cat. River likes computering, adventures through time and space, being a cat, and has recently been cruising around the Baltic. Belén García de Pablos joins us from belengar.eu. Belén has 14 years of experience in management and team leadership, and for the past 6 years has been in charge of marketing and communication as Director of Communications at the Naval Architects Professional Board and Association of Spain. Ana R joins us from ohhelloana.blog. Ana is a front end developer in London who started developing for the web over 10 years ago, as a hobby. She is interested in ethics, indie web, sustainability and cats. 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 Some discussion this week about "pronunciation" - specifically, online means using text or audio to indicate how to say a person's name. Some examples include linking to an audio file of the preferred pronunciation or displaying an International Phonetic Alphabet rendition of the name. Prompted by a post by Kim Landwehr at kimlosey.me, the "Webmention-faq" has been updated with details about when webmentions work, how to tell if a site supports receiving webmentions, and more. Some discussion has been collected about "navigation", specifically the hotly debated topic about "forward" and "backward" arrows when navigating through timelines, and whether left or right are the "correct" direction for indicating future and past. # Services and Organizations GitHub Pages, a service for hosting open source static website content, announced this week that they have added support for HTTPS on custom domains. Previously, GitHub Pages offered custom domains only with unencrypted HTTP traffic, though it was possible to proxy sites securely through a separate service like CloudFlare. After weeks of posts about quitting Facebook in the wake of revelations about abuses of its user data, a piece by Sarah Jeong published at The Verge calls into question just how difficult this can be. In "I tried leaving Facebook. I couldn’t", Jeong details her sometimes adversarial history with Facebook, why she took a year off, and why she ultimately came back. # IndieWeb Development Users of static site builders like Jekyll and Hugo who use webmention.io to collect webmentions may be interested in "Morris". Available on GitHub, Morris is a self-hosted PHP endpoint that collects webmention data via webmention.io's webhook feature, allowing static site generators to include comment data at build time without polling the webmention.io service. Guidelines and example markup have been added for compact ways to display reaction emoji posts, also known as "reacji". Users of Twitter thread archiving service "Storify", which is scheduled to shut down this year, may be interested in a post by Lea Verou which describes a way to more quickly export JSON and HTML versions of your archived Twitter threads using your browser's developer console. Similarly, users of video streaming service "Netflix" may be interested in a recent post by Marty McGuire which describes how to extract your watch list, show ratings, and watch history data from the service, also using your browser's developer console. Developers of plugins for WordPress may be interested in new documentation around "disclosure". Added in WordPress version 4.9, plugin authors can now offer suggested additions to a site's Privacy Policy when the plugin is activated. Other new pages added to indieweb.org this week include: .app, uri, urn, and WEF. 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.