Homebrew Website Club — Los Angeles

In an effort to provide easier commuting access for a broader cross-section of Homebrew members we met last night at Yahoo’s Yahoo’s primary offices at 11995 W. Bluff Creek Drive, Playa Vista, CA 90094. We hope to alternate meetings of the Homebrew Website Club between the East and West sides of Los Angeles as we go forward. If anyone has additional potential meeting locations, we’re always open to suggestions as well as assistance.

We had our largest RSVP list to date, though some had last minute issues pop up and one sadly had trouble finding the location (likely due to a Google map glitch).

Angelo and Chris met before the quiet writing hour to discuss some general planning for future meetings as well as the upcoming IndieWebCamp in LA in November. Details and help for arrangements for out of town attendees should be posted shortly.

Notes from the “broadcast” portion of the meetup

Chris Aldrich (co-organizer)

• Still working on a workflow for owning all of his reading related data, particularly with respect to POSSE to GoodReads.com
• Registered for the upcoming Dodging the Memory Hole 2016: Saving Online News on October 13/14 at UCLA which has the flavor of IndieWeb as well as the Decentralized Web movements.

Angelo Gladding (co-organizer)

• Work is proceeding nicely on the overall build of Canopy
• Discussed an issue with expanding data for social network in relation to events and potentially expanding contacts based on event attendees

Srikanth Bangalore (our host at Yahoo!)

• Discussed some of his background in coding and work with Drupal and WordPress.
• His personal site is https://srib.us/

Notes from the “working” portion of the meetup

We sketched out a way to help Srikanth IndieWeb-ify not only his own site, but to potentially help do so for Katie Couric’s Yahoo! based news site along with the pros/cons of workflows for journalists in general. We also considered some potential pathways for potentially bolting on webmentions for websites (like Tumblr/WordPress) which utilize Disqus for their commenting system. We worked through the details of webmentions and a bit of micropub for his benefit.

Srikanth discussed some of the history and philosophy behind why Tumblr didn’t have a more “traditional” native commenting system. The point was generally to socially discourage negativity, spamming, and abuse by forcing people to post their comments front and center on their own site (and not just in the “comments” of the receiving site) thereby making the negativity be front and center and redound to their own reputation rather than just the receiving page of the target. Most social media related sites hide (or make hard to search/find) the abusive nature of most users, while allowing them to appear better/nicer on their easier-to-find public facing persona.

Before closing out the meeting officially, we stopped by the front lobby where two wonderful and personable security guards (one a budding photographer) not only helped us with a group photo, but managed to help us escape the parking lot!

I think it’s agreed we all had a great time and look forward to more progress on projects, more good discussion, and more interested folks at the next meeting. Srikanth was so amazed at some of the concepts, it’s possible that all of Yahoo! may be IndieWeb-ified by the end of the week. 🙂

We hope you’ll join us next month on 10/05! (Details forthcoming…)

Live Tweets Archive

Ever with grand aspirations to do as good a job as the illustrious Kevin Marks, we tried some livetweeting with Noterlive. Alas the discussion quickly became so consuming that the effort was abandoned in lieu of both passion and fun. Hopefully some of the salient points were captured above in better form anyway.

(This CMS comment may have been the biggest laugh of the night, though the tone captured here (and the lack of context), doesn’t do the comment any justice at all.)