After more than a year of trying to be part of the IndieWeb and working on my website alone, I thought I should try to start a Homebrew Website Club in Goa. So, with the help of the usual WordPress Goa group (Siddharth and Abhishek), we decided to host the first such meetup at the GrandWorks office on the 24th of July.
We saw a mix of people of attending—from seasoned developers, to graphic designers, and to people just thinking of making their first website. Hampus, Mikhail, Siddharth, Abhishek, Wazid, Prateek, Nupura, Anika, Sameera, Salil, Shanon and Kimberly at the GrandWorks office for the Goa Homebrew Website Club #1 Hampus, Mikhail, Siddharth, Abhishek, Wazid, Prateek,
Nupura, Anika, Sameera, Salil, Shannon and Kimberly at the GrandWorks office
for the Goa Homebrew Website Club #1
Since this was the first such meetup I gave a quick introduction of the IndieWeb movement and technology, and encouraged everyone to join the wider community on the wiki and chat. After that, we went around the room introducing ourselves, talking about our websites and experiences in building them. Some of the topics we covered were:Differences in using WordPress, and services like Wix and Squarespace.Hitting certain limitations on Wix, and how in WordPress there is always a plugin for that.Cost (time and money) of hosting your own server vs the price of Squarespace.How one-click WordPress installs offered by hosting services aren’t really easy to use for beginners.Wix’s AI in design feature.How the Balance Project would like to run their own community website and not give all their data to Facebook.Finding an audience on one’s own blog vs on platforms like Medium and LinkedIn.
We didn’t have a lot of peer-to-peer time left after the discussions, but I was able to show a photographer how they could design their portfolio website using Gutenberg on WordPress.com.
There was quite some interest in a group like this, the technical folks wanted to dive deeper into Webmentions and Micropub, and others expressed a need for a place to ask their questions and get their doubts clarified. So, we’re thinking of hosting another one on the 21st of August. Join the WordPress Goa meetup group to get notified when we do.
Your h-entries should have, at minimum, the following properties:
e-content — the main content of the post
p-name — if your post is an article with a name, use this classname.
dt-published — the datetime the post was published at, in ISO8601 format, with a timezone
u-url — the canonical URL of the post, especially important on pages listing multiple posts
It’s a common convention for the published datetime to be a link to the post itself, but they can be separate if you want.
There should also be some way to discover the author of the post — either link to your homepage (which should have your h-card on it) from anywhere within the body of the page with rel=author, or optionally embed a p-author h-card in the h-entry.
The web is an expressive medium, and as such there are many other properties which you can add to your posts. Check out the h-entry documentation for a full list.
Want to be able to use h-entry data in your code? Check out the open-source implementations.