Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of March 31st - April 6th, 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. A special 404 edition of Homebrew Website Club took place on April 4th in Nurnberg, London, and San Francisco. Check out the newsletter for photos and links to notes from the meetups, including some folks favorite sites that are now missing from the web. Join us this week on April 10th in Baltimore for an off-week Homebrew Website Club. And the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club is April 18th, with Nurnberg and San Francisco confirmed so far. Also on April 18th, Portland will be hosting Homebrew Microblog Meetup, a combination of Homebrew Website Club and a Micro.blog community meetup. 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. In IndieWeb related events, VRM Day 2018a and the 26th Internet Identity Workshop took place on April 2nd through 5th at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California. The inaugural Open Domains Lab took place on April 5th in De Pere, Wisconsin. The event was a part of the local Domain of One's Own project, and offered participants a dedicated time to work on their domains and websites alongside others doing the same. On April 10th, the GTALUG Meeting in Toronto, Canada will play host to a talk about the IndieWeb by community member Myles Braithwaite. --- # Podcasts In Percolator episode 19, Aaron Parecki discusses the soft launch of his indie reader Monocle, a user-facing client for the developing microsub standard, as well as Aperture, the companion microsub server which handles feed fetching and parsing. He talks about moving more and more of his reading out of IRC and into his indie reader setup, including some thoughts on developing feeds for non-public data. --- 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. Making the rounds again this week is a post by Chris Aldrich titled "An Introduction to the IndieWeb". Originally published at altplatform.org in July of last year, the piece is an excellent primer on reasons for the IndieWeb, an introduction to some key IndieWeb building blocks and philosophy, as well as how to meet folks in the community. The post can now be found on Chris' site at boffosocko.com. Another post from Chris making the rounds this week is "Fragmentions for Better Highlighting and Direct References on the Web". In it, Chris describes how to create shareable direct links to any phrase on any post on his site using special URLs and a small piece of JavaScript called "fragmention". The process is made easier with another bit of JavaScript, named "fragmentioner", which detects when the user has selected some text and offers a popup to link directly to the highlighted selection. A new version of the "Indieweb" module for Drupal was released this week by author Kristof De Jaeger, also known as swentel. The latest version brings several IndieWeb building blocks to Drupal-based websites, including Webmention with webmention.io, syndication to social media silos via Bridgy Publish, posting with third-party tools via Micropub and IndieAuth, and more. Christophe Ducamp published a French-language post at xtof.micro.blog, the title of which translates to "IndieWeb 4th generation and hosted domains". Inspired by a recent post with a similar name from micro.blog creator Manton Reece, Christophe describes the steps and stumbles he has recently taken in getting his own site plugged into the community at micro.blog. He hopes that his documentation will help grow the French-speaking community on the IndieWeb-friendly microblogging service. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members William Ian O'Byrne joins us from wiobyrne.com. Ian is an educator, researcher, and speaker whose work centers on teaching, learning, and technology. Davy Tyrrell joins us from davy.tyrrell.co. Davy is working on a new personal site with IndieWeb features. Dylan Harris joins us from reliable.servesarcasm.com. Dylan is an arts voyager, with poetry, photography and music out there, as well as a computer nerd, building software, fascinated by sci & tech. Mike Stapp joins us from MikeStapp.com. Mike is a Boston-based software developer and front end architect of NetApp’s Cloud Insights and OnCommand Insight. Ryan Johnson joins us from iambismark.net. His about page is pretty empty, but here's a thought from one of his posts, quote: "Time and money are sunk costs. Code never is. Delete early and delete often." Rajiv Abraham joins us from abraham.uno. Though new to the IndieWeb, he is an indie blogger who has been blogging on self-hosted WordPress blogs since 2004. 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 An "embargo" is the publishing practice of requiring exclusive rights to publish an article on the publisher’s website for some amount of time (typically days, sometimes months) before the author may publish it on their own personal site. Examples include GoDaddy's Garage blog, where some IndieWeb community members have submitted articles and were required to wait a few days before republishing them on their own. Ten Days of Twitter is an online course aimed at educators and researchers which, in 10 minutes a day over 10 days, gets participants tweeting and building up a professional network. This could potentially be used as a model for helping people gradually set up their own online IndieWeb presence. A new "IndieWeb for Business" page was created this week to help folks currently running or looking to build a business presence on the web that can engage with customers but isn't solely dependent on social media silos for data like reviews, purchases, and more. If you're currently running a business website with an IndieWeb bent, or hoping to start one, give the page a look. # Services and Organizations According a piece by Sewell Chan at The New York Times, new rules proposed by the U.S. State Department will require nearly all applicants for a United States entry visa — an estimated 14.7 million people a year — will be asked to submit their social media user names for the past five years. Presumably social media content posted by applicants could be used as grounds to deny a visa. Reporting about Facebook continues to surface in the wake of recent news about Cambridge Analytica. A piece at Buzzfeed.com by Ryan Mac, Charlie Warzel, and Alex Kantrowitz digs into the leak of a June 2016 memo from then-Facebook VP Andrew Bosworth. In the memo, Bosworth called for Facebook to, quote, "connect more people" even if, quote, "it costs a life by exposing someone to bullies" or if, quote "someone dies in a terrorist attack coordinated on our tools". John O'Nolan, lead developer of the Ghost content management service, has announced that after 4 years and 11,000 users, they are shutting down the public Slack that was previously used for support and community. O'Nolan credits Slack with huge growth for the community, but says that it is time to move to a different model. Community discussions can now be found on forum.ghost.org, powered by Discourse. Nicholas Diakopoulos published a piece in the Columbia Journalism Review titled "The bots beat: How not to get punked by automation". In it, Diakopoulos examines how bots manipulate the trending topics features of silos like Twitter and Facebook to push products and agendas, concluding, quote, "Trends are basically over — they’re too easy to manipulate." Restaurant reservation service OpenTable has announced that they will be shutting down their photos-of-food-sharing silo Foodspotting. Users are encouraged to download their photos from the service by May 25th, a process which requires sending an email to foodspotting@opentable.com. # IndieWeb Development Having trouble adding IndieWeb features to your WordPress-based site? Your answer might be on the new WordPress/FAQ page. Experienced WordPress users are encouraged to add their own stumbling blocks and troubleshooting tips. Gargron, lead developer of the self-hosted federated social network Mastodon announced this week that he would not be making plans to support Webmention for notifying external sites about toots with outgoing replies and mentions. He cited concerns about leaking content of private posts. Angelo Gladding, of lahacker.net, has published a new version of canopy, the software that runs an IndieWeb-technology-based social network of the same name. Written in Python, and with a one-line installer, Gladding encourages new users and developers to try it out. JF2 is a simplified and normalized JSON-based format of parsed microformats2 data. Developers working with JF2 for parsers, webmention handling, content management systems, and more may want to take a look at Grant Richmond's collection of JF2 formatted posts, linked from the JF2 page on indieweb.org. Available at grumble.isgeek.net, Grumble is a fully client-side Micropub client. This means that all posted content only touches your browser and your Micropub endpoint, though it does require your personal site to support CORS headers. Other new terms in the newsletter this week include: microsub bridge, local development, Ten Days of Twitter, OER, Night Owl, and tf;dr. Check the links in the newsletter for more information about, or to add new 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.