Over the past few months, I've featured brief interviews from 16 community members recorded at IndieWeb Summit in Portland and at IndieWebCamp NYC. I'm currently out of interviews, but I'd love to know your IndieWeb story! I'll be conducting remote interviews over Mumble, Appear.in, Discord, or the audio/video system of your choice. If you'd like to appear in a brief, one-minute interview on this podcast, let me know in the #indieweb-meta channel on IRC or Slack, just ask for "schmarty". Alternatively, you can make a post on your site stating your interest. Including a link to my site at martymcgui.re, and send a webmention to let me know about it. I look forward to hearing from you! --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of October 28th - November 3rd, 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. Homebrew Website Club met on November 1st in Nuremberg, Brighton, Baltimore, Frederick, and San Francisco, as well as a virtual homebrew website club at Central European Time. You can find photos and links to notes from the events in this week's newsletter. Homebrew Website Club will meet in Portland on November 8th. And the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club is November 15th, with Brighton, Baltimore, and San Francisco 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 IndieWebCamp Berlin takes place this weekend at Contentful GmbH in Berlin, Germany. Follow along in the #indieweb chat and at indieweb.org/2017/Berlin. Planning is in progress for IndieWebCamp Austin, scheduled to take place December 9th and 10th. Learn more and help out at indieweb.org/2017/Austin. 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 Henrik Carlsson, at henrikcarlsson.se, published an audio post titled “On inline comments and indieweb CMSes”. In it, he describes a change to his Wordpress theme so that his microblogging feed displays comments inline with his posts, giving the appearance of a conversation rather than small posts being published into the void. Jeremy Cherfas shared two posts from Aaron Parecki’s “Percolator” microcast. In episode 3, “Following”, Parecki discusses some challenges with, and approaches to, making it as easy to follow an IndieWeb site as it is to follow someone on a silo like Twitter. In episode 8, “Back from the Woods”, Parecki reflects on ways he tries to be intentional about how he tries to read things online, and the importance of being in control of what we see rather than allowing algorithms to dump all types of posts into one timeline. --- 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. Calum Ryan, at calumryan.com, shared a link to the slides from his recent "Introducing the IndieWeb Movement" session at Mozilla's MozFest 2017. In it, Ryan gives a brief history of the web, the rise of silos and the need for the IndieWeb, as well as some IndieWeb building blocks and how to get involved in the community. Mark Hendrikson, at markmhendrickson.com, published a post titled "Publishing to my website instantly with Dropbox". In it, Hendrikson discusses his history with managing and organizing files into folders, and his new website, which combines Dropbox syncing with a new flat-file publishing system he is developing, called Neotoma. Malcolm Blaney, at unicyclic.com, published a post titled "Quote Tweet Microcast". In it, Blaney experiments with video microcasting by posting a short video demonstrating a new feature in his Dobrado CMS that allows converting a retweet into a quote tweet in a way that acts similar to the Twitter UI. Peter Molnar, at petermolnar.net, published a post titled "Content, bloat, privacy, archives". In it, Molnar details some of the challenges he encountered when attempting to centralize all of his online writing and other activity onto his own wesbite. Specifically, he questions the efficacy of posting everything he does to his website, and describes his decision to move some posts such as bookmarks into private storage, to re-think the meanings behind reactions such as "likes", and to delete some posts entirely. Dr. Amy Guy, at rhiaro.co.uk, published her completed thesis "The Presentation of Self on a Decentralised Web", on Github Pages. Available at rhiaro.github.com/thesis, the document, quote, "examines the many factors at play when we present ourselves through Web technologies". --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. # New Community Members A new user page was created for jacky alciné at jacky.wtf. Jacky is a software developer that focuses on the ease of access of user security on the Web as well as digital literacy for silicon based consumer networked electronics. His mission is, quote, "to carry out the objective of my ancestors and elders: to focus on the liberation of my people and the restoration of the legacy of the descendants of the Afrikan Diaspora." A new user page was created for Dan Q, at danq.me. In his words, quote "When he's not fantasising about having more time to do IndieWeb stuff, he looks after the websites of the libraries of the University of Oxford and runs the volunteer development team at a non-profit that provides software to charities." 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 A new page was created for "2017-review", a list of IndieWeb community events, accomplishments, and news for all of 2017. The page is just getting started, so be sure to check it out and add yourself! A new page was created for "ask me anything", a public-facing page inviting people to ask questions they'd like the originator to answer. Popularized by the "AMA" community features on Reddit, as well as services such as Quora and ASK.fm, IndieWeb community member Chris Aldrich appears to be the first to have added such a feature to his personal site. A new page was created for “Pronoun Island”, a site which lists personal pronouns with usage examples. Available at pronoun.is, linking to the examples on the site can be a quick way of adding personal pronouns to your site. A new page was created for “badge”. Also known as an “achievement”, badges are a visual indicator of completing specific tasks within a system. While most commonly seen on silos as a form of engagement, some IndieWeb examples include micro.blog and the personal website of Mike Merril, at kmikeym.com. The “microcast” page was updated with a list of several short-form podcasts which frequently cover the IndieWeb. Examples include Aaron Parecki’s Percolator, Manton Reece’s Timetable, and many more. The “Posts about the IndieWeb” page was updated with a link to a post by Aaron Davis at readwriterespond.com titled “My #IndieWeb Reflections”. In it, Davis describes his history with tools like Known and Wordpress, as well as some of his hopes and concerns for the future. # Services and Organizations A new page was created for "pay for reach" a business practice by Facebook, Twitter, and other social media silos, whereby publishers are asked to pay in order to have their posts shown to users on the site. The page includes some ironic examples from Facebook and Twitter encouraging users to pay to boost a post containing a comic strip complaining about this exact practice. The “site-deaths” page has been updated with a link to a notice that “Popup Archive” and “Audiosear.ch”, a service for transcribing audio and searching those transcripts, will be shutting down on November 28th. The post includes instructions for users to export their content. Similarly, the “Gratipay” page was updated with a link to an announcement that the payment silo, formerly known as Gittip, will be shutting down at the end of the year. The “Accelerated Mobile Pages” page was updated with a link to a post by Ethan Marcotte at ethanmarcotte.com entitled “Seven into seven”. In it, Marcotte encourages users and developers, when evaluating systems like Google’s AMP, to look beyond the supposed benefits and risks and ask who takes on the risk and who accrues the benefits. The “longevity” page was updated with a link to a post by Andre Staltz, at staltz.com, titled “The Web Began Dying in 2014, Here’s How”. In it, Staltz tracks the rise of Google, Facebook, and Amazon in the realms of web traffic, advertising, and surveillance devices in our homes and pockets. He posits a gloomy future where nearly all aspects of our digital lives are in the hands of these three companies. # IndieWeb Development The “tools” page was updated with a link to “Token Provider”, a tool by Martijn Van der Ven that allows developers to test their micropub server implementations against real micropub clients by using a pre-shared token, rather than a full IndieAuth login flow. --- 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.