I had a bit of time this weekend to tinker with my site.

The biggest change is one that happens totally behind the scenes - I've added a step to the service that compiles and deploys my site to automatically send Webmentions from my posts to posts that I am responding to or mentioning. There are many folks with projects around this, but they tend to be a little more aggressive than I like in finding URLs to send mentions to. For example, they often want to send mentions to my homepage and avatar image for my own posts!

So, I have added a Webmention sender to my site that is triggered by new and updated pages and sends mentions to any URLs that I am specifically responding to or person tagging, along with any URLs mentioned in the actual content of the post.

Along with this, I now support person tags on regular entries like this one. I can add a tag like http://tantek.com to a post and it will tag them with proper markup and, if possible, show the name and photo from their homepage h-card.

Finally, I did a little cleanup in how I display reply contexts for other people's posts that have multiple images in them, like this one from Aaron Parecki.

It's nice to be able to sit down and knock off the little nagging TODOs here on the site. That said, I'm hoping to be able to make some big changes, soon! We'll see what my schedule allows.

Baltimore's first Homebrew Website Club of April met at the Digital Harbor Foundation Tech Center on April 10th

Here are some notes from the "broadcast" portion of the meetup:

martymcgui.re – Demoed an as-yet-unnamed (maybe: kapowski) "GIF Reaction" Micropub client. It's currently available on Glitch. It supports IndieAuth, searching for GIFs via the GIPHY API, then posting those as the "photo" property in a Micropub form-encoded request. It also supports in-reply-to functionality, putting the "reaction" into "GIF Reaction", though there's no UI for that, yet. He made an example reply post, but Jonathan's post doesn't seem to support photo replies. 🤔 Also fixed up some metacrap for his podcast site so sharing looks better on Facebook and Twitter.

rhearamakrishnan.com – Working on a redesign of her site. Making good use of view-source on sites that she likes for inspiration. Working on a mixed media art project with post cards that direct you to a website that contains coordinates to a geo cache containing an actual letter.

jonathanprozzi.net – Been doing lots of work stuff that overlaps with personal web interests. Working on his wedding page. It's now up on Netlify and uses their form collection for RSVPs.

Other discussion:

• The new Killer Queen 5 vs 5 arcade game recently installed in Baltimore at Holy Frijoles.
  
• Baltimore zine culture (apparently Atomic Books considers carrying local zines).
• Twine for creating interactive poetry and fiction. It outputs a bunch of HTML and CSS (and maybe JS) that can be hosted anywhere.
• The Netlify static site model of separating content management, storage, layout and rendering, and file hosting.
• The difficulty in evaluating "frameworks" like React and Vue based on their low-level merits. Looking at community and availability of higher-level components might help more.

Thanks to everybody who came out! We hope to see you all again at our next meeting!

I made an improvement to the preview functions of microsub server. Now I can query the homepage and it will find the different urls that are marked up. Then it will fetch the feeds and parse title and author information from them and show it in the preview window.

To the right you see the preview (and follow) popup of Together. It shows multiple feeds. That JF2 feed is not handled at all. The JSON feed works, but doesn't show an image.