One big HWC, for anyone in the Americas(or who is just available) who wants to dial in. What’s Homebrew Website Club?
Homebrew Website Club is a meetup for anyone interested in personal websites and a distributed web. Whether you’re a blogger, coder, designer, or just someone who wants to improve …
Made it to Homebrew Website Club after a long month of NaNoWriMo!
Shared that I finished my novel rewrite and got onto the topic of science fiction. Johannes gave The Ministry for the Future a bad review — too naively detached from reality, and somehow cheating to jump ahead to everyone getting along from… today. He’d been excited to read optimistic sci-fi, but the execution failed. We agreed that it’s frustrating that so much sci-fi now is dystopian, and doesn’t offer a hopeful path forward out of our quagmire. I’ve been feeling lately, as have several of my writing friends, that we want to write optimistic sci-fi — I wonder if we can break free of our dystopian imaginations. It’s easy to imagine the worst… can we imagine the harder solution, to get to the best? Heard some writers positing that dystopia somehow feels more believable, more real, and that we critique utopia more.
David reminded us about websites 😅 and shared the 2021 IndieWeb gift calendar as well as the 2022-01-01 “commitments” to ship something on your own website. I’m tempted to do something for both / either, but have been burned by overcommitting myself before and doing too many “challenges” in a row… but also, website stuff is fun… so maybe?
I’m planning to go to IndieWeb Create Day on Christmas Day, and haven’t decided yet whether I’ll work on something for myself or do some more work on the mushrooms 🍄
For IndieWeb gifts… I wrote up most of a post of how I’ve been trying to get Indigenous working as a Microsub server through my website. But, I can’t actually post it since my subscriptions won’t show up in the app 🙃 I’m not sure what the problem is… I suspect the Microsub endpoint isn’t working properly? The endpoint isn’t showing up in Indigenous even after refreshing… But, my subscriptions do show up in Monocle if I activate the Microsub server via Aperture 🤔 Micropub is working in Indigenous, but a different WordPress widget creates that endpoint. I’m probably missing something 🤷♀️
Maybe working some more on my IndieWeb homepage proposal would count as an IndieWeb gift? 🤔 Someone brought it up in the chat the other day which prompted Aaron to compile a bunch of how-to and improvement resources on the wiki, and made me itchy to work on it again. What’s holding me up is not knowing how to do formatting in Markup, which is a silly thing to put me off it. I also don’t know how to add images to the wiki lol. Reminder to self: ask in the chat for someone to point me to Markup / wiki formatting guidelines, and the wiki image etiquette.
I’ve also been thinking about a more dramatic proposal for the homepage, with much shorter and more pointed messaging (feeding off interest following the Facebook / Meta literally-destroying-society-for-money-also-making-teenager-girls-suicidal crap and Web3 crypto bullshit), that would take a lot of information off and move it to an “About” page. I’ve been pondering whether it would be off-brand to make something too slick-looking for the homepage because IndieWeb is not corporate. My personal inclination as a graphic designer is to make the homepage look more in line with modern sites and less wiki-y but maybe that’s the wrong approach. What I’d really like to do is mock up how I’d design the homepage to look if it wasn’t a wiki site, but I don’t want to bother if it’s not possible to make a wiki page look flash 🤷♀️ I’ll probably keep it on the back burner for now, I guess unless someone pokes me about it or I need a break from editing 😂
