Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of July 14th - 20th, 2018. https://indieweb.org/this-week/2018-07-20.html 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. Join us this Wednesday, July 25th, for another Homebrew Website Club. Nürnberg, London, Baltimore, and San Francisco have confirmed meetups so far. And, if you're in Seattle, join IndieWeb community member Doug Beal in restarting Homebrew Website Club Seattle, which is also scheduled to meet on July 25th. 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 Oxford 2018, announced this week, will take place on September 22nd and 23rd in Oxford, England. Learn more and help with organizing at indieweb.org/2018/Oxford. The third IndieWebCamp Nuremberg will take place on October 20th and 21st, 2018, as part of Nuremberg Web Week. Volunteers can help with organizing at indieweb.org/2018/Nuremberg. And save the date for IndieWebCamp Berlin, which will be held on November 3rd and 4th. You can learn more and lend a hand organizing at indieweb.org/2018/Berlin. 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 18 of the Micro Monday podcast, host Jean MacDonald interviews Eddie Hinkle about his relationship to the micro.blog and IndieWeb communities, his indie reader and posting app for iOS Indigenous, preparing to be a new father, and more. In episode 8 of "An IndieWeb Podcast" hosts Chris Aldrich and David Shanske catch up after the 2018 IndieWeb Summit. They discuss topics including spam prevention with the Vouch protocol, updates on WordPress and IndieWeb, new developments for Indie Readers, the return of webrings, and recent posts by Aaron Parecki on webmentions and IndieAuth. --- 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. Eddie Hinkle, at eddiehinkle.com, posted "My IndieWeb story, Part 1: Jumping in the Deep End". In it, Eddie recounts how he created his current website, built on the static site generator Jekyll, several years after first learning about the IndieWeb. As he has added features and posts, now over 10,000, he finds that Jekyll can no longer keep up. In a future post, Eddie will talk about the next steps for his website. Chris Aldrich, at boffosocko.com, published a piece at alistapart.com titled "Webmentions: Enabling Better Communication on the Internet". In it, Chris describes the plumbing behind this key IndieWeb building block, which enable a post on the web to be notified when other posts link to it. He gives some examples of the kinds of rich site-to-site responses enabled by Webmentions, and calls on developers to add Webmention support to their services. Ryan Barrett, at snarfed.org, published "Introducing Baffle". In it, he publicly announces a new bridge service which allows new Microsub-based feed reader clients to work with the long-running Newsblur feed service, via the service's API. Currently, Baffle allows read-only access of channels and timelines, but support may be coming for new features like channel management, and support for similar feed-reading services like Feedly. You can try Baffle now at baffle.tech. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from indieweb.org. # New Community Members Eric Woodward joins us from itsericwoodward.com. Eric is a geek, coder, gamer, tinkerer, husband, father, server admin, web developer, and American cyborg, though not necessarily in that order. Tom Gardiner joins us from tomgardiner.me. Tom is a software developer by day, asleep by night. Tom is also an aspiring chiptune musician. Tim Swast joins us from timswast.com. Tim is a husband, artist, programmer, and technical writer. He works for Google Cloud as Software Friendliness Engineer in Seattle. 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 Laura Kalbag, at laurakalbag.com, posted "Beyond my means". In it, she discusses the many ways that IndieWeb practices around owning and controlling one's content online can be beyond the means of people who want to do it. She details several kinds of cost that can put the practices out of reach, including financial, time, technical ability, confidence, and accessibility. Don Norman, writing for Fast Company, published "Why bad technology dominates our lives". In it, Norman posits that society has incorporated a tech-centric view of the world, where humans are expected to conform to technology, rather than the other way around. He says, quote "We have turned the positive trait of curiosity into two negative ones. One is that of distraction, leading to accidents; the other is that of following the trails on enticement leading to addiction." # Services and Organizations Taylor Lorenz, at The Atlantic, published "Why Some of Instagram's Biggest Memers Are Locking Their Accounts". In it, Lorenz describes how and why the managers of some popular Instagram channels are driving up follower numbers by setting their accounts to private. Olivia Solon, at The Guardian, published "'Data is a fingerprint': why you aren't as anonymous as you think online". In it, the author details several instances when services released so-called "anonymised" data sets for research purposes, with personal markers like names removed. In each case, researchers were able to identify individuals from their data with very little effort. Neil Williams, writing for the UK's Government Digital Service blog, posted "Why GOV.UK content should be published in HTML and not PDF". In it, the author details the many ways that online HTML documents can improve readability, accessibility, and keeping documents up to date when compared against PDF documents containing the same information. Read-it-later app and service Instapaper announced that it is buying itself back from visual bookmarking silo Pinterest. Lead developer Marco Arment sold Instapaper to Betaworks in 2013, which was purchased by Pinterest two years later. The new owners, newly formed "Instant Paper, Inc.", say that users of Instapaper should see few changes in the near future. # IndieWeb Development A couple of articles about design were shared around the community this week. In "Why tech's favorite color is making us all miserable", Amber Case shares research into the impact of bright blue displays on mood and sleep, especially at night. And David Copeland, at brutalist-web.design, calls for web designers to focus on content, and use HTML elements as they were intended, to keep their sites accessible and usable across the widest range of devices and users. Other new terms on indieweb.org this week include: Sonic, Emojli, who is, latergram, issues link, Kumu, live tweeting, rel, and Thimble. Check the newsletter for links 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.