Homebrew Website Club Seattle Notes

Tonight I went to my first Homebrew Website Club at the Wayward Coffeehouse, a real nice coffee shop. I got to meet Doug Beal who put the Seattle club together. It was mostly just the two of us, as well as Margo Vansynghel, a reporter who was interested in what we were up to and how it related to other tech stories about silos like Facebook.

Neither of us really had been to one of these events before, so we weren’t sure what to do. We mostly worked on our own sites, and helped explain some of the IndieWeb principles about things like data ownership and building tools for yourself. I think by the end of it she had sent her first Webmention, a standard I need to learn how to use soon for this site.

I continued working on the syndication system for this site I outlined in the last post. I’ve now got the DynamoDB set up working, so when I commit any post change to the website, it gets built and triggers a Lambda function to scan the entire site for changes, logging those into DynamoDB. This creates a stream of create/update/delete events that other Lambda functions can be triggered by. With tonight’s work, I hooked a new microservice up to that which publishes created posts (but not updated or deleted posts) to a Telegram channel. It works locally with hardcoded keys, so now I just need to make it work when deployed, which should be quick; I just need to figure out how to store credentials properly. Then I can start building out more syndication methods.

Toward the end, we answered some questions about IndieWeb, took our group photo, and went our separate ways. It was a great time, and hopefully we can start building out a proper Seattle club. If you’re interested in taking control of your online data, consider stopping by an event near you, or a virtual one online. They take place every two weeks; the next one will be on August 22.