Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of January 20th-26th, 2018. 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 in Baltimore on January 23rd, and on January 24th in Nuremberg, London, San Francisco, as well as a Virtual Homebrew Website Club. You can find photos and links to notes from the events in the newsletter. Homebrew Website Club will next meet in Baltimore on February 6th, and the next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club is February 7th. 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 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, Meet the TAG, a a Q&A panel session with the World Wide Web Consortium's Technical Architecture Group, will meet in London on February 1st. Register now at ti.to/w3c-tag/meet-the-tag-london And FOSDEM, the Free and Open Source Developers European Meeting, will take place on February 3rd and 4th in Brussels, Belgium. --- # Podcasts The GeekSpeak Podcast for 2018-01-19 includes an interview with Manton Reece, creator of micro.blog, discussing how the service works, the IndieWeb building blocks it is built on, and ways he is being thoughtful as he builds something new. --- 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. Paul Robert Lloyd, at paulrobertlloyd.com, published a post titled "Microblogging". In it, Lloyd details his experience using micro.blog as a Twitter replacement, as well as the steps he took to further own his content on a personal Jekyll-powered static site. Matt Matienzo, at matienzo.org, and Ryan Barrett, at snarfed.org posted photos from the most recent Homebrew Website Club San Francisco meetup. Specifically, the photos depict custom cupcakes celebrating 1 Million Webmentions sent in the wild. Artur Paikin, at arturpaikin.com, published a post titled "Me and Indie Web Camp Baltimore". In it, Paikin describes his personal history blogging and building websites from age 12, as well as his experiences during IndieWebCamp Baltimore, last weekend. Johannes Ernst published a post at GoDaddy.com titled "The IndieWeb outside of Facebook is full of opportunities". In it, Ernst encourages businesses to avoid spending all their time creating content for silos like Facebook and Twitter, and to embrace the independent web. The piece includes instructions on setting up a new site to use brid.gy for backfeeding comments and responses from those services to your site. Aaron Davis, at readwriterespond.com, published a post titled "A Kind of Emoji". In it, Davis describes a lexicon for emojis on his site as a way to visually indicate the content of different types of posts. He also notes some technical issues that he ran into along the way. Kevin Marks, at kevinmarks.com, published a post titled "Decaying Silos as dead malls". In it, he highlights a piece titled "Social Decay" by Andrei Lacatsu where social silos like Facebook and Twitter are rendered instead as decaying storefronts. Going further, Marks deconstructs and subverts the "link preview" functionality of several sites, with markup on his post that creates a different appearance for each service. --- 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 Dave Letorey, at letorey.co.uk. Dave describes himself mostly as "a curious Dancer who likes solving problems". A new user page was created for Chris Burnell, at chrisburnell.com. Chris is a Canadian UI developer living in London, who is passionate about CSS, best practices and web standards, performance, front-end architecture, and innovations on the web. 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 Several new pages were created to capture notes from the Saturday sessions and Sunday demos at IndieWebCamp Baltimore, including discussions of identity, WordPress, diagramming IndieWeb building blocks, engaging beginners, building a micropub server, and more. You can find links to notes and videos from the sessions at indieweb.org/2018/Baltimore/Sessions. # Services and Organizations The "Lanyrd" page has been updated with a note that the event silo appears to have shut down, as of some time in January 2018. While the site appears to be up as of this recording, it reportedly had downtime of over a week. The "videos about the indieweb" page was updated with a link to a video by Stacey DePolo titled "1 Million Webmention Party", a short glimpse into the cupcake- and Whopper hamburger-filled celebration that took place at Homebrew Website Club San Francisco last Wednesday. # IndieWeb Development A new page was created for "WordPress/usability", a collection of usability observations about IndieWeb functionality in WordPress, looking at the entire experience, not just individual plugins. If you use IndieWeb functionality in WordPress, this page could use your user experience insights! The "WordPress/Themes" page was updated with a link to a post by David Shanske, at david.shanske.com, titled "Converting WordPress Themes for Microformats 2 – Part 1". Although a couple of years old, the post serves as a great starting point for folks who would like to add microformats2 markup to existing WordPress themes. The "Jekyll" page was updated to note that the static site generator's default Minima theme now contains microformats2 markup to make machine-readable posts and feeds as of version 2.2.0. The "WebSub" and "ActivityPub" pages were updated to note that these two specifications are now W3C Recommendations. Congratulations to the folks in the Social Web Working Group for publishing these specs. --- 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.