Starting an IndieWeb Homebrew Website Club

Starting things is fun. Narrating things as you go is… funner.

Just about a month ago I joined the IndieWeb chat via Slack, which is connected to IRC and a web chat as well. I haven’t actually participated, but I’ve been getting the feel of conversations and checking out a bunch of the material that has been posted by others.

Over the last couple weeks I’ve been giving a lot of thought to what a local Homebrew Website Club would look like.

Note: One eternal annoyance for an introvert is finding yourself in the position to start cool new things, but then having to actually plan those things for a bunch of other people to show up.

Tonight I brought the idea of the club up to our local WordPress meetup and everybody was pretty positive about it. So now I need to take the next step and get “official”. I’m currently going through the list of planning questions to see if there’s anything I need to think of before just scheduling it.

So far this seems pretty straight forward. The general date used by most is every other Wednesday after work: something like 6pm local time. Nothing needed other than some wiki editing to show up on the Indie Web site. And then of course, finding a way to tell local people about it.

I’m going to shoot for January 15 as the first Homebrew Website Club in Pullman and go from there.

According to the “How to add an event” documentation, I first need to edit the overall Events page.

But! I need to login first. This redirects me to indielogin.com and asks for my URL to sign in. On first try, I get a message that says “We couldn’t find any way to authenticate you using your website.” So I look at the IndieLogin setup instructions.

I’m going to choose to authenticate by email, because I “own” that one the most. That said, it does look like a better future option would be to support IndieAuth on my site. After adding my email address to my home page, authentication was successful and I now exist as User:Jeremyfelt.com in the Indie Web ecosystem. I’ll come back to that later.

I edited the main Events page and “Pullman, Washington” is now listed next to San Diego. I then edited the January 15, 2020 events page and copied the existing San Diego information into a new blurb with the Pullman information and I think that means I’m good to go.

The part I got hung up on the most here was actually adding my name in the RSVP. The code seemed to suggest that adding {{Jeremyfelt.com}} would work, but it kept showing me “Template:Jeremyfelt.com” instead. I then poked around and saw that others had redirects setup, so I created a page titled “jeremyfelt” and added a wiki redirect to my user page and changed the code to {{jeremyfelt}}, but it then said “Template:jeremyfelt” and I knew I was going nowhere. Finally, I updated it with standard URL syntax: [[jeremyfelt|Jeremy Felt]] and my name appeared as expected. No cool picture next to it or anything, but I’ll figure that at some point. This is all wiki stuff I probably used to know but have completely forgotten.

For now, the first Pullman Homebrew Website Club has been scheduled! I’ll figure out how to get people to attend next. 😎

Oh! And how to reply to Chris’s comments with proper web mentions! 😬😂