Homebrew Website Club

Tantek Çelik:

welcome to Homebrew Website Club - we just finished Indiewebcamp NYC last weekend- we extended it from friday to sunday

David Shanske recorded al the sessions for us - that's GWG on irc

we had a number of folks that didn't have a website and were non-technical, all 4 were set up with a domain and site

we were told that we used so much jargon that it is like learning a foreign language, so we worked on that

@tommorris created a really simple beginning of my webpage on github: https://github.com/indieweb/blank-gh-site that people can fork

if you go to emmahodge.org you can see someone who used tom's template to get her own name as a domain

sometimes something really small that is less than a page of code can really help someone understand

Webmention being published as a w3c draft got a lot of attention on hacker news, which is the usual: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10943261

I had a problem with my iPod touch losing wifi, and the only answer was to wipe and reinstall, which would lose my data

github has been down all afternoon. Which is ironic as it is 2 days since Google Code shut down- they broke all URLs

note that while github.com was down, github.io static sites were still up

Indiewebcamp MIT is on Gregorian Pi day - March 14th - so sign up if you are nearby http://indiewebcamp.com/2016/MIT

Ben Werdmüller:

I'm ben though I look like evil tantek tonight - I run withknown.com which is an indieweb startup

I'd like to introduce you to Joshua - I built my own Siri

this uses a web API for speech to text - it puts it through some stanford NLP technology, and looks for signatures

Siri is a black box, Google Now is a black box, wouldn't it be fun if we could plug our own data into them

Joshua, is it safe to leave Mozilla? "yes, there isn't a Giants game on"

The same engine can be attached to slack or whatever, but this runs in a web browser, it's not in a device

if someone wants to write a better joke API for it, please do it

the technology exists to parse text from speech - we need a way to make it ours too

Scott Rosenberg:

what happens if you ask "what will the weather be tomorrow?"

Ben Werdmüller:

it gave me the weather for the server in Dallas - here's it from localhost

Kevin Marks:

you need to hook Joshua up to @aaronpk's Loqi

Ben Werdmüller:

yes, I really need to do that

I could make it post for me and tweet for me - or ask it "where should I be?"

#ThatTechGirl:

no-one wants to follow that

Kyle Mahan:

wow, it's not much javascript at all

Tantek Çelik:

I have had hashtags on my site for a while, but they only got linked on the POSSE copies to twitter and facebook

so now I markup hashtags with a category automatically on my site so when I POSSE to flickr they go through

I have been POSSEing manually to flickr with brid.gy - because I added this, flickr has my tags https://www.flickr.com/photos/tantek/24345146530/in/dateposted/

I took a photo at Indiewebcamp NYC - and tagged people. and brid.gy copied across the people who gave permission

Scott Rosenberg:

my site is http://www.wordyard.com which is a wordpress site

So @libertymadison, @kevinmarks and I were at Hacks Hackers Connect #HHConnect this weekend and I started a group

I was frustrated with having to cross-post links and posts from my wordpress to lots of other sites,

so I proposed a write once, post many places tool - and I understand that withknown.com does a lot of this

we brainstormed ideas on what would help with the problem of cross-posting longform content

Ben Werdmüller:

so this was Lean Product Canvas?

Scott Rosenberg:

I had all sorts of quibbles and arguments with the nomenclature - why would the advantage be unfair?

so the idea would be to create an ideal post with title, image content etc, and then see previews of it in each silo

so on twitter, if your summary is over 140 you would truncate it

Ben Werdmüller:

on twitter, you may need to publish it somewhere else first

Kevin Marks:

the challenge I see is the longer form posts that have substructure

#ThatTechGirl:

so we liked the idea of being able to make sense of the post and use AI to map it to what the platform wants

Scott Rosenberg:

I was trying to keep it minimal, so when I hear AI I am a bit wary

If we're doing the publish once, syndicate everywhere, I want the post to be in those places honoring their differences

it's still hard to do that

Ben Werdmüller:

the meme with, say, AMP is that the content comes to you - it gets imported by whichever system

you may have designed it for google search results, but @nuzzel sees the same thing

Kevin Marks:

vine needs 6 seconds, instagram 15 seconds, flickr 120 seconds - video is harder

#ThatTechGirl:

I have to do this very day when I ma making video

Scott Rosenberg:

this was heavily publisher and journalist oriented - a lot of people are doing this within their employers systems

part of being a journalist now is to crosspost your work to tumblr and twitter and so on

Ben Werdmüller:

the criticism I have always got is that people need to re-edit for different destinations

the trick is that people's definition of viable varies - what people expect for audiences is tricky

I'm stubborn and I think of overlapping audiences, but each site does have it's own style

Kevin Marks:

my take is that we can add substructure to posts that makes sense elsewhere

Ben Werdmüller:

all the joke APIs on the internet I could find are terrible dad jokes from the 1970s - I need a better one

the journey of the entrepreneur is often like Sideshow Bob and the rakes

Zeta with Zaku Head:

my domain is whatthefuck.computer which gets me more comment on the domain than the content

it also ends up as my indiewebcamp wiki username, which is a shame

my site is made from a bunch of emacs LISP that makes html pages

I built my own static site engine and started using indieweb stuff to get comments on my blog to automate with brid.gy

I connect the matrix chat system to the indieweb here http://whatthefuck.computer/blog/2015/12/19/matrix-and-indieweb/

matrix at matrix.org is a modern IRC, a json http API, but the rooms don't live in the same place

as long as someone is in the room on matrix it persists

Tantek Çelik:

the next Homebrew Website Club is February 10th - post your photos on your own site so we can reuse them