While at IndieWebCamp Austin, I sat down with some of the participants to ask: Why did you get involved with the IndieWeb? My name is Aaron Parecki and my website is aaronpk.com I've always been interested in the idea of having a website. I've had a website since 1999, and used it to collect things that I've done. But as blogging started happening I was posting elsewhere and then I wanted to roll that all into my own site. So now I have everything in one place. For a lot of folks in the community you're kind of an inspiration. You tend to have tried everything - at the very least. Could you tell us what is the most recent thing that you've done to your site? The most recent thing I've done to my site was today at IndieWebCamp Austin. That was some fun tweaks to my Payment page, which I thought were going to be really small and turned out to be a lot more work. As usually happens with hack day projects. I added support for the new payment request API, which is supported by, actually, most of the browsers now. And it's pretty neat! It works pretty well. It also includes Apple Pay support, so you can actually pay me via Apple Pay. It was pretty fun. I learned a lot. Great, well thank you very much! See you next month! [Both laugh] --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of December 16th through 22nd, 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. The next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club is December 27th, with Brighton and San Francisco confirmed so far, as well as two virtual homebrew website club meetups: one at Central European Time, and one 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 now open for the first IndieWebCamp Baltimore, scheduled to take place January 20th and 21st at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center in downtown Baltimore, Maryland. Learn more and register now at 2018.indieweb.org/baltimore 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. --- 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 Patrick Sletvold at patrick.multitek.no. Patrick is shares his experiences with technology on his blog at multitek.no, and has started Norwegian translations of several IndieWeb wiki pages, including Getting Started, discuss, contribute, and more. 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 "IndieWeb Awards", a proposal for the active IndieWeb community to annually bestow honors that highlight accomplishments across a variety of categories. Started by Chris Aldrich, the awards could be a fun way to celebrate individual and collective accomplishments for the past year. All community members are invited and encouraged to take a look. A new page was created for "poke". Alternately known as tap, nudge, yo, hi, hello, ping, wink, wave, and so on, it is a feature among some silos that allow users to attract one another's attention. Popularized by the original "Poke" feature on Facebook and the mobile app "Yo", this feature has been jokingly picked up by a few members of the community by using webmentions to send "poke" notifications between IndieWeb sites. The "Leaders" page was updated with a link to a post by Elena Kolevska at 24daysindecember.net titled "Kid Friendly PHP". In it, Kolevska gives guidelines for making events more friendly to parents of young children, including a kids corner, insurance, food, and daycare, if possible. This could be a useful resource for planning future IndieWebCamps. # IndieWeb Development The "static site" page was updated with a link to a project by Zach Leatherman on Github named "eleventy". Pitched as an alternative to Jekyll, eleventy is a static site generator written in JavaScript which transforms a directory of templates into HTML. The "comments" page was updated with links to two projects for hosting comments on static sites in the style of silos like Disqus. First, "commento" is a privacy-focused comment engine written in Go. You can learn more about it at commento.adtac.pw. Second is "schnack", a comment engine written in NodeJS which allows commenters to authenticate using Twitter or GitHub. Learn more at github.com/gka/schnack The "MongoDB" page was updated with links to multiple stories describing instances of data leaks and loss stemming from unsecured MongoDB databases, including personal information for every registered voter in the state of California. The page was also updated with links to resources on how to secure MongoDB instances. --- 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.