Homebrew Website Club Meetup Pasadena/Los Angeles Notes from 8-24-16

Last night, shy a few regulars at the tail end of a slow August and almost on the eve of IndieWebCamp NY2, Angelo Gladding and I continued our biweekly Homebrew Website Club meetings.

We met at Charlie’s Coffee House, 266 Monterey Road, South Pasadena, CA, where we stayed until closing at 8:00. Deciding that we hadn’t had enough, we moved the party (South Pasadena rolls up their sidewalks early) over to the local Starbucks, 454 Fair Oaks Ave, South Pasadena, CA where we stayed until they closed at 11:00pm.

Quiet Writing Hour

Angelo manned the fort alone with aplomb while building intently. If I’m not mistaken, he did use my h-card to track down my phone number to see what was holding me up, so as they say in IRC: h-card++!

Introductions and Demonstrations

Participants included:

Chris Aldrich

Angelo Gladding

Needing no introductions this week, Angelo launched us off with a relatively thorough demo of his Canopy platform which he’s built from the ground up in python! Starting from an empty folder on a host with a domain name, he downloaded and installed his code directly from Github and spun up a completely new version of his site in under 2 minutes. In under 20 minutes of some simple additional downloads and configuration of a few files, he also had locations, events, people and about modules up and running. Despite the currently facile appearance of his website, there’s really a lot of untapped power in what he’s built so far. It’s all available on Github for those interested in playing around; I’m sure he’d appreciate pull requests.

Along the way, I briefly demoed some of the functionality of Kevin Marks’ deceptively powerful Noterlive web app for not only live tweeting, but also owning those tweets on one’s own site in a simple way after the fact (while also automatically including proper markup and microformats)! I also ran through some of the overall functionality of my Known install with a large number of additional plugins to compare and contrast UX/UI with respect to Canopy.

We also discussed a bit of Angelo’s recent Indieweb Graph network crawling project, and I took the opportunity to fix a bit of the representative h-card on my site. (Angelo, does a new crawl appear properly on lahacker.net now?)

Before leaving Charlie’s we did manage to remember to take a group photo this time around. Not having spent enough time chatting over the past few weeks, we decamped to a local Starbucks and continued our conversation along with some addition brief demos and discussion of other itches for future building.

We also spent a few minutes discussing the upcoming IndieWebCamp LA logistics for November as well as outreach to the broader Los Angeles area dev communities. If you’re interested in attending, please RSVP. If you’d like to volunteer or help sponsor the camp, please don’t hesitate to contact either of us. I’m personally hoping to attend DrupalCamp LA this weekend while wearing a stylish IndieWebCamp t-shirt that’s already on its way to me.

IndieWebCamp T-shirt

Next Meeting

In keeping with the schedule of the broader Homebrew movement, so we’re already committed to our next meeting on September 7. It’s tentatively at the same location unless a more suitable one comes along prior to then. Details will be posted to the wiki in the next few days.

Thanks for coming everyone! We’ll see you next time.

Live Tweets Archive

Though not as great as the notes that Kevin Marks manages to put together, we did manage to make good use of noterlive for a few supplementary thoughts:

Chris Aldrich :

On my way to Homebrew Website Club Los Angeles in moments. #

Angelo Gladding :

I’ve torn some things down, but slowly rebuilding. I’m just minutes away from rel-me to be able to log into wiki #

ChrisAldrich :

Explaining briefly how @kevinmarks‘ noterlive.com works for live tweeting events… #

Angelo Gladding :

My github was receiving some autodumps from a short-lived indieweb experiment. #

is describing his canopy system used to build his site #

Canopy builds in a minute and 52 secs… inside are folders roots and trunk w/ internals #

Describing how he builds in locations to Canopy #

Apparently @t has a broken certificate for https, so my parser gracefully falls back to http instead. #