While at the 2017 IndieWeb Summit, I sat down with some of the participants to ask "Why did you involved with IndieWeb?" Hi, I'm Jean MacDonald and my website is jean.micro.blog. I recently became involved with micro.blog, which is a new platform and social media setup for short-form content which is created by Manton Reece, and that has reignited my interest in the IndieWeb and getting away from Twitter and Facebook. What is the next thing you're hoping to do with your website? I want to work on a custom CSS for the theme that I'm using for jean.micro.blog. That's one of the themes that comes with the hosting and I would like to tweak it, naturally, for myself, and so that was my next project. Well thank you so much. You're welcome. --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of August 12th - 18th, 2017. This Week in the IndieWeb is a weekly digest of activities of the IndieWeb community at indieweb.org. It contains recent and upcoming events, posts from IndieNews, and a summary of wiki edits. This Week in the IndieWeb is sent out Fridays at 2pm Pacific time, with this audio edition appearing the following day. 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. On August 14th, the Electronic Frontier Foundation hosted a "Building the IndieWeb" meetup in Austin, Texas featuring a talk by IndieWeb community member Tom Brown of herestomwiththeweather.com. As a result of the meeting, it appears that Austin may soon have a regular Homebrew Website Club meetup, with their first meeting on September 6th. Homebrew Website Club met on August 15th in Edmonton, Canada. The next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club meeting is August 23rd, with Brighton, London, Baltimore, Frederick, and San Francisco confirmed so far, as well as a virtual Homebrew Website Club at Central European 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 A reminder that there will be an IndieWebCamp tent and events at the upcoming Campfire Journalism Festival in Dortmund, Germand on September 8th and 9th. Check the newsletter for details on how to attend. 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. --- 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. Sven Knebel, at svneknebel.de, published a post titled "IRC notifications with TikTokBot (on Debian 8)". The post contains technical details on TikTokBot, a framework for building chat bots for IRC and Slack written by Aaron Parecki, and on configuring TikTokBot to send notifications about events related to your website. Chris Aldrich, at boffosocko.com, published a post titled "Post Kinds Plugin for WordPress". In it is a deep introduction to this IndieWeb-friendly plugin for WordPress websites which enables the easy posting and display of types far beyond the usual "article", including photos, videos, bookmarks, checkins, posts about reading, listening, or watching media, and more. The article also includes specific tips such as configuring bookmarklets to make posting as quick as possible. Anyone who is thinking of or is already using WordPress for their personal site should give it a read. René Meister, at renem.net, published a German-language post whose title translates as "Less social media, more people". In it, the author frames the problem of information overload on social networks as a problem with the definition of the word "information". The article describes their plans to replace reading ad-funded, interaction-driven social media sites with RSS feeds, and encouraging bloggers to adopt the practice of publishing on their own site before syndicating to social networks, as well as using webmentions to move discussion back to independent websites. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. New Community Members Two new user pages were added to the wiki this week. First, is Matt Lee, whose website is at mat.tl. Matt describes himself as one of the folks behind Libre.fm and GNU Social, has worked with the Free Software Foundation, and is currently working on free software at Creative Commons. Next up is Manton Reece, whose website is at manton.org. Manton is the creator of micro.blog and a co-author of the JSON Feed specification. He also produces podcasts such as Core Intuition and Timetable. We'd like to extend a warm welcome to these new community members. 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 some serious wiki gardening by Tantek Celik, several new pages were created to capture info and notes about the San Francisco and UK IndieWebCamps that took place in 2014. You can find links to these in the newsletter. Services and Organizations The "like" page was updated with a link to post by Laurel Wamsley on npr.org titled "Quoting Mandela, Obama's Tweet After Charlottesville is the Most-Liked Ever." The tweet in question, published August 12th, has over 4.4 million likes as of the time of this recording. The "data-portability" page was updated with links about a US District Court order requiring Microsoft's social networking silo LinkedIn to allow "hiQ Labs" to crawl and collect profile data that LinkedIn users have marked as public information. hiQ Labs, which uses LinkedIn data to build algorithms for predicting employee behavior, sued after receiving a letter from LinkedIn instructing them to stop scraping data from the silo. The "Signal" page was updated with a link to a guide by Barton Gellman on GitHub titled "Signal as a Newsroom Dropbox". The guide is aimed at news organizations that are interested in using the Signal end-to-end encrypted messaging app as a private gateway for potential sources to contact them. IndieWeb Development A new page was created for "Certificate Transparency" - an initiative to publicly and verifiably log new TLS certificates, which are most commonly used to encrypt and verify web traffic to HTTPS websites. The page includes links to tools and services to help quickly detect incorrect or malicious certificates. The "selfauth" page has been updated with information on installing and configuring the standalone authorization endpoint. Folks who are interested in signing into services using web sign-in, such as the IndieWeb wiki and micropub clients like Quill, but do not want to delegate the sign-in process to silos like Twitter or GitHub, may want to give selfauth a try. The "IPFS" and "Dat" pages were each updated with links to articles in the "So you want to decentralize your website" series from Tom MacWright at macwright.org. Each article describes how to use one of these decentralized networking technologies to serve a copy of your website and includes details about the tools used. Relatedly, a new page was created for "Beaker", a browser that natively supports the Dat protocol. --- 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 included the tracks Day 85 - Suit, Day 48 - Glitch, Day 49 - Floating, Day 9, and Day 11 of 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.