Homebrewing - First Drop

After the doors closed on the second day of July’s Indie Web Camp there was an immediate pang of sadness that I’d have to wait a whole year to be amongst such inspiring and active company.

To my delight Jeremy and Charlotte announced the Brighton Homebrew Website Club: a regular meetup for those with Indie pursuits to grab an hour of writing, coding, discussion. With no formal agenda set, it’s up to attendees make it their own.

Doing rounds

Similar to the first day of Indie Web Camp, the night was kicked off with the 15 attendees introducing themselves, demoing their website and explaining what they wanted out of the evening.

There were lots of familiar faces from IWC, some of whom had been busy continuing what they had started last month.

Chugging away

With the intros done and the obligatory POSSE’d group photo, we got down to making the most of the venue, company and opportunity to focus on a particular goal. For me it’s this latter point that I hope to capitalise on the most.

There were a few goals I set myself at IWC that were still left to accomplish:

• Webmensions - a simple way to notify any URL when you link to it on your site
• POSSE - Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere

In ready for POSSEing links, thoughts or notes and other types of content I needed to add these pages to my site. This seemed a perfect candidate for the night’s work.

Bottlenecks

URL design was the first thing I wanted to get right for these pages. My site’s url utilises the tld .is in the design e.g. benjamin.parry.is/writing/…. After a while it was clear that this needed a little more though before committing to a design.

I was determined to come out of the session at least one thing done, so I started the draft of this post. After a few edits I went to spin-up the Jekyll site locally. Unfortunately the computer I was using didn’t have the required gems installed and knowing that I wanted to clean up the source code for the site I decided to park any other changes of the moment.

Time please!

By the time I’d committed the draft of this post, Jeremy stood up to let us know the session was at an end.

I was a little surprised how quickly the evening had gone but had given me food for thought of how I might make it work for me.

If the club remains an hour, I think I’ll approach things a little differently:

• Use the two weeks between to actively work on the goals I want to achieve to a point where I need some help
• Publish an pre-HWB article with:
  • What I’ll be working on
  • What I need help with
  • What I can help others with
• Getting involved with the Homebrew Website Club Meetup site

Kicking out

After saying goodbyes I headed off home, filled with the same giddiness felt after leaving IWC. Faith in the web community restored. Gasping for a drink.