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 Manton Reece. My website is manton.org. I've been blogging for a long time and it's kind of always been on my radar as I've been building micro.blog. I've been more interested in being involved in the IndieWeb and the community and it just aligns with all the things that I care about. Owning your own content, posting to your own site, having kind of a record of what you've been doing, your thoughts, essays, even short posts. And lately, especially in the last couple of years, I've been kind of disillusioned with the direction of some of the big social networks like Twitter and Facebook so posting to my own site is just a natural fit. What's one thing that you've done recently for your own personal site? I haven't done a lot of changes recently in terms of how the site works. It's more of my approach to the site. So, for example, I recently stopped posting to Instagram and I only put my photos on my own website, and then they get cross-posted automatically to Twitter and-. Having the mindset of posting to my blog first and making that easy, that's kind of been a change over the last couple of years. Well thank you so much. Thank you very much. --- Hello and welcome to This Week in the IndieWeb, audio edition, for the week of December 9th through 15th, 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 December 12th in Baltimore, on the 13th in Nuremburg, Brighton, London, Austin, and Los Angeles, and on the 14th in Berlin. There were also two Virtual Homebrew Website Clubs on December 13th, one at Central European Time and one for the Americas. You can find photos and links to notes from the meetups in this week's newsletter. The next regularly scheduled Homebrew Website Club is December 27th, with Brighton 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 IndieWebCamp Austin took place on December 9th and 10th at the Capital Factory in Austin, Texas. Saturday discussion topics included WordPress and static site quick starts, payments and pledges, the micropub lifecycle, decentralized aggregation and serendipity, and more. You can find photos, videos, and links to notes from the sessions and demos at indieweb.org/2017/Austin. 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 in IndieWeb-related events, FOSDEM 2018 will be taking place on February 3rd and 4th in Brussels, Belgium. FOSDEM is a free event for software developers to meet, share ideas, and collaborate on free and open source projects. Learn more at fosdem.org/2018 --- # Podcasts Aaron Parecki posted a new episode of his microcast, Percolator. In "Episode 16: IndieWebCamp Austin!" Aaron discusses his experience at the recent IndieWebCamp, the improvements he made to the payments page on his site, and some thoughts about payments and patronage on the IndieWeb in general. --- 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 svenknebel.de, shared a link to a talk by Brianna Privett, available at wordpress.tv, titled "The Story of Your Life: Using WordPress as Your Memory Warehouse." In it, Privett discusses the evolution of her personal website and how she has evolved it to become a resource for preserving her own history, as well as that of her family. Tom MacWright, at macwrite.org, published a post titled "Owning my reading log". In it the author discusses a growing discomfort that storing his personal book reading and rating habits in Goodreads feels like doing unpaid labor for Amazon. He describes the way he recently exported his Goodreads data for use with a Jekyll static site. Eddie Hinkle, at eddiehinkle.com,published a post titled "Owning my Reading and 100 Days of Reading Chapters". In it he describes a 100 day experiment to read a book chapter each day and manually post about it on his site. The goal? To determine what features he needs on his site in order replace his use of Goodread. Hinkle also published a post titled "Further thoughts on the future of owning my reading", in which he lists about a dozen reading-treacking features that he has identified thus far. Additionally, Hinkle published a post titled "Making RSVP posts less painful", where he announces that his site now supports easier creation of RSVPs on his site using the micropub client Quill. Chris Aldrich, at boffosocko.com, published a post titled "Threaded Replies and Comments with Webmentions in WordPress". In it, Aldrich lays out some of the benefits of webmentions for social interactions, the overall ecosystem of WordPress plugins that enables them to work, and an experimental plugin called WordPress Webmentions for Comments, which enables authors to more easily create reply posts that appear inline as discussion on their site. Aaron Parecki, at aaronparecki.com, published a post titled "Payment Requests using Stripe and Apple Pay". In it Parecki demonstrates, through screenshots, support for taking payments via the W3C Payments Request API and Apple Pay. The post also includes links to several resources for those that might want to make their own implementation. Manton Reece, at manton.org, published a post titled "IndieWebCamp Austin wrap-up". In it Reece recounts his experience organizing his first IndieWebCamp, his recollections from the days, and details on the project he finished during the Sunday hack day. He hopes to attend more IndieWebCamps in the future, and to organize another in Austin next year. --- And now, a selection of this week's updates from the IndieWeb wiki at indieweb.org. # Community and Concepts The "2017-12-indieweb-challenge" to collectively ship something IndieWeb-related every day of December continues. There were a couple of days with no updates, this week, so if you published something IndieWeb-related, be sure to add it to the page! A new page was created for "IndieWeb Book Club", which is either a group of people interested in creating book club funtionality on their personal web sites, or a group of IndieWeb community members reading books together and discussing them. The page includes some brainstorming ideas for collecting and creating recommendations from the "read" posts on IndieWeb community sites. Work continues on a series of getting-started tutorials for setting up a personal IndieWeb site using the WordPress or Known CMSes. This week saw progress on setting up an instance of Known using virtual servers on Amazon's EC2 service. Several improvements were made to the planning pages related to IndieWebCamp Baltimore in an effort to reduce duplication and make important information easier for participants to find. The hope is that these pages can serve as a template for organizers of future IndieWebCamps. The "elsewhere" page was updated with more details about this common IndieWeb building block, which is often used on homepages for linking to identities on other sites, and is often used on post pages for linking to syndicated copies on other sites. The "review" page was updated with more details about this common type of post which contains an evaluation of a product or service, usually with a written description and possibly a numerical scale. The page includes links to example user interface workflows for creating reviews on Amazon and AirBnB. # Services and Organizations The "Patreon" page was updated to note that, following considerable outcry from creators and supports who use the service, Patreon will not be rolling out the proposed fee changes that would have resulted in pushing payment processing fees onto supporters while increasing the number of individual charges, resulting in even higher fees. The "site-deaths" page was updated to note the final shutdown of Microsoft's CodePlex, a collaborative code repository site. The site went read-only in November, and instructions are available for users to export their data. Additionally, it was announced that Storify, a site for aggregating short posts from social silos like Twitter, will be shutting down in May of 2018. As of December 12th, Storify is no longer accepting new users, and instructions have been posted on how existing users can export their data. The "Posts about the IndieWeb" page was updated with a link to a post by Nicolas Hoizey at nicolashoizey.com titled "Medium is only an edge server of your POSSE CDN, your own blog is the origin". In it, Hoizey discusses some of the benefits and drawbacks to a platform like Medium, and encourages people to follow the IndieWeb principle of publishing first to their own site, on their own domain, before syndicating that post to a silo like Medium. # IndieWeb Development A new page was created for "Payment Request API", a W3C specification for collecting payment information via the browser, to help streamline the payment process on a web page. The page includes links to developer documentation, as well as a working IndieWeb example from Aaron Parecki. The "read" page was updated with a link to a post by Chris Aldrich at boffosocko.com titled "An update to read posts for physical books". In it, Aldrich describes how he is expanding the markup he uses for posts about reading physical books to include a more full citation for the book. The "WordPress/Development" page has been updated with details about an upcoming virtual event for IndieWeb WordPress developers. On January 8th, 2018 at 8pm GMT, join the #indieweb-wordpress channel on IRC or the #wordpress room on the IndieWeb Slack, to discuss ways to improve the display and parsing of microformats2 HTML on WordPress sites. the "watch" page was updated with a link to a project by Grant Richmond called "trakt-to-micropub". Available on GitHub, this script imports watched movies and shows from the trakt.tv watch-tracking silo and posts them to your own site via micropub. The "Posting from mobile devices" page was updated with a link to "HTTP Request Shortcuts", an app available for Android devices in the Google Play store which allows users to create shortcuts and share targets to custom URLs and includes support for custom form fields. The "Do Not Track" page was updated with a link to a new Do Not Track Implementation Guide, published by the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Available on GitHub, the guide provides technical details for developers that want to build sites which respect user privacy, particularly when they have enabled the "Do Not Track" feature in their browser. --- 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.