Homebrew Website Club
Erin Jo Richey:I really like having my own website - you have access to analytics directly and who sees it
kate losse:I hear from a lot of the journalists I interview that seeing traffic on their own sites is really important
Kevin Marks:without your analytics you have to track google alerts - squarespace shows me my referrrals directly
I used to have google analytics on tumblr, but they removed a lot of the search terms unless you pay them
kate losse:when Google changed to https default for search the referer links went away - they show some of it to advertisers
Kevin Marks:analytics is what has fallen down since 5 years ago - people are slowly adding it back in
medium used to have a lot of information on referrers, and it went down over time
kate losse:some of the loss of referrer info is due to mobile apps not sending them
Ben Werdmüller:if you sign up for ads on twitter they will give you analytics, so they're using it as bait
it's nice to publish at places that pay you, but you don;t always know who has seen it
there is a weight to writing on your own space that has more permanence than posting on medium or facebook
there is something safer about putting writing on your own space first and then sharing it on silos
Tantek Çelik:you usually assign a license to silos to republish your work
Erin Jo Richey:the one I have seen is that deviant art has the right to reassign your work to someone else
Ryan Barrett:tos-dr.org shows the terms of service reduced to icons that explain what rights they are trying to claim from you
Erin Jo Richey:we have seen more of companies rebalancing their terms of service recently
Kevin Marks:I have done some usability testing where people read the terms of service as part of signing up and object
a lot of the founders had not read the ToS before the user experiment, and they then referred back to lawyers to fix
Tantek Çelik:there has been a backlash against facebook messenger asking for more permissions on mobile now
Andi Galpern:we have hugely upgraded irc logs by @aaronpk https://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2014-08-13 - faces, sans-serif not monospace and wiki edit faces
these are the nicest IRC logs on the web - I think they're even nicer than @slackhq
Tantek Çelik:can I suggest css fixes? @t @aaronpk posted a link to the github for changes https://github.com/aaronpk/indiewebcamp-irc-logs
Kevin Marks:I don't add google analytics to my site because I see slowdown on major sites
Tantek Çelik:I remember techcrunch taking 250MB of RAM to load as they kept adding more and more js
Ben Werdmüller:we used to use @techcrunch as a test page on mozilla for performance because they were such "button sluts" as @erinjo says
Ryan Barrett:analytics is one of the things that people have talked to us about for @withknown - understanding the audience for their own site
when you're getting webmentions via brid,gy and elsewhere to your @withknown site there is a huge analytics opportunity
it would be good for @indiewebcamp to know what pages people are coming into and finding out about us
Andi Galpern:there is a lot of information that matter more to corporations than individuals, but for writers and photographers too
Erin Jo Richey:being able to change how you present information, or look at youtube dropoff rates over time is really useful
Kara Murphy:we've talked a lot about data ownership as the first step, but understanding how people use it can be the second step
what people care about, what they find interesting can be part of this flow and connection to the web
Andi Galpern:you want to see where they are coming from too, so you can see what is effective over time
kate losse:I get the same thing for sponsors, they use tracking links to confirm that we sent the info
Andi Galpern:you already know some kind of information how people heard, but having that summarized matters
Tantek Çelik:there was a TED talk on knowing the data about your own body - and knowing it better than your doctors
Kara Murphy:Aaron has been tracking himself - see aaronparecki.com/metrics for what he has found
Tantek Çelik:I like this tool by visual.ly that will make a useful rendition of your google analytics data
Kyle Mahan:another general announcement over the last 2 weeks is that the w3c opened up the social web working group covering our topics
there are companies wanting to work on standards for this - if you're a w3c member join, or apply as an invited expert
the w3c working group is at w3.org/wiki/socialwg and I'm one of the chairs form #indieweb along with @evanpro
I have chosen to use purely IRC and wiki as the social web working group and ignoring the mailing list
Kara Murphy:aaron wrote about how to collect data easily: http://aaronparecki.com/articles/2012/10/28/1/low-friction-personal-data-collection
kate losse:I would like a great photo plugin for my personal site (which is on wordpress)
Kara Murphy:my next step is to syndicate out to silos - I would like to know how to do that more easily
Kyle Mahan:I need to find a good font for my logo too, so it works for cards too
Andi Galpern:do you have control of the HTML in Squarespace?
Ryan Barrett:you have some control in developer mode on squarespace but you have to use !important a lot
kate losse:does squarespace have space for people to comment?
Andi Galpern:I'm not a big pro-comments person because I'm female and they tend to be "you're a slut"
kate losse:I've heard that a lot from women writing in public - they don't find comments worth the pain
Kyle Mahan:I had a post on the New Yorker and they moderate their comments really well so it is less full of hate
I write things on my site that I don't want to take the trouble of pitching an editor about, which can take a month
Ryan Barrett:I undertook taking jquery out of my site so there are fewer things to download because I wasn't using it much
I've been using barnaby's script to only download what is needed for each page
Tantek Çelik:Nick put up a section called bcc on his site where any non-trivial mailing lists mails he sends he puts there too
this is up at bcc.npdoty.name to see his public emails
Ryan Barrett:public email list are basically just silos of another sort, so owning our own public posts see http://indiewebcamp.com/email_list
kate losse:another thing we have working in brid,gy is posting a comment on your own site and using webmention
Ryan Barrett:the drama on twitter is that guys can create accounts all day and post slurs at people; a domain might limit that
kate losse:seeing the reply chain like you do on twitter is not something we have working well on indieweb yet
Ben Werdmüller:twitter is now the easiest place on the web to go and harass people, because it is so easy to create an account
people are making ad hoc twitter tools that adjust who can reply to you when and give you more control
Kevin Marks:the nice thing about the indieweb is that everyone gets to make their own algorithm for spam control
harassment is something that we are going to have to deal with, and using your social graph is going to be key
Tantek Çelik:Twitter used to prioritize people you follow, now it prioritizes @-replies, gives trolls direct access to your phone
Ben Werdmüller:we have been talking about this in the channel and made indiewebcamp.com/block and indiewebcamp.com/mute
I got some mundane things working on my site that I documented on the PHP page
Tantek Çelik:the indieweb PHP webmention client uses deprecated php features so it throws massive errors
Ryan Barrett:I started POSSEing directly to facebook using brid.gy publish rather than going via twitter, and got more interaction
Ben Werdmüller:do everything manually until it hurts - then change it
Erin Jo Richey:we have themes now on known and I built a new one on my site werd.io
Kevin Marks:we keep hearing that nobody wants to have their own websites, but educators keep asking for it for their students
my son @andrewjohnmarks has an indieweb site now: http://www.andrewmarks.media/profile/andrewmarks
Andrew also made an indieweb comment on my site kevinmarks.com "nice website noob"