events/2025-02-04-writing
Online Homebrew Website Club - Writing Edition was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-02-04.
- Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-02-04-writting
IndieWebCamp Writing Homebrew Website Club
February 4, 2025
Participants
Sara JakΕ‘a - https://sarajaksa.eu
capjamesg - https://jamesg.blog- Template:VinceAggrippino
zacharykaiwrites - https://zacharykai.netJoe Crawford
jo -https://dead.garden
Mike Kupietz
mandaris- Sophia
Fractalkitty - pcarrier
Introductions
- Who you are, your writting projects and what you want to talk about
Vince
- Want to write more content online
- Tent to tilt to technical content
- Go a bit less deep into specification, more for general audience
James
- Enjoys writting
- Getting out of the confort zone as a writting
- What different thing for the future
Joe
- Blogs
- Comics - (semi)-authobiographical
- More light weigth lines
Zachary
- Primarily Sci-fi, wrote also poetry and fanfiction
- Working on sci-series, short story collection
Sara
- Writes fan-fiction
- Cross-posts to AO3
- Going through drafts; trying to reduce number of drafts.
- Started an original short story / novella this week.
Michael - Compolser writting - Essays, think pieces,... - Interested in how people approch it, other people's perspective
Topics
- Q: Setting Goals For One's Self / The Motive For Writing**
How do you write for a wider audience?
- Writing about non-technical topics
- Liking the idea of creating content, but not writing just to "put out more content"
- Wants to expand on the things I can create that might appeal to people
- Being more visible, approachable, building social skills, being more involved in the tech community.
- Not more of this: https://aggrippino.com/2025/02/the-menu-element/
- Writing HOWTOs involves having a clear brief; long-form personal writing has more freedom.
- Balancing the technical and the personal: can you add your own commentary? Experience?
- Finding how and where to relate to others through writing
- Writing is always conversation, regardless of how many or how few are involved
- Can you write an article from a different perspective?
- Writing for a different audience; for technical writing, write for someone who doesn't know how to code / have background in a given area.
- "Naming your invisible audiences to free yourself from unspoken obligations" by Maggie Appleton https://maggieappleton.com/assumed-audience/"
- Always useful to get readers who have different backgrounds / perspectives.
- Writing as learning different perspectives: find people to read your work before you put it in the world
- A writing group, a friend, family member, etc
- Tracy Durnell offered editing for blog posts: https://tracydurnell.com/2024/12/01/gift-to-the-indie-web-i-will-edit-your-blog-post/ Perhaps others could do the same? Or swap posts?
Random James note: Writing as play.
- Technical writing challenge that Joe has done before as part of a class: Write instructions for sitting on a chair.
- The aim of technical writing is to include every possible instructions the reader might need: assume nothing
- Google appears to have documentation for a course on technical writing. Here's a section on audience: https://developers.google.com/tech-writing/one/audience
Roblox Game Design As Programming?
- Is Making a Roblox Game Considered Programming? (~ 320 words)
How Do You Think About Audience?
- Posting on different platforms for different audiences (doesn't fit on your blog, it may fit elsewhere like Codepen).
- Posting to the void.
- The surprise of having someone reach out after enjoying an old blog post you wrote.
- Writing something that I like; writing what we want to read.
- Not thinking too much about audience.
- Ties into the question of "what are you writing for?"
- Write to learn; you can try to publish (indie, traditional, share in communities).
- Submitting work to anthologies to learn, to discover like-hearted folks, community
- Find people in communities of people who you want to reach (is it local? is it interest-based?) (Example: https://dimestories.org/, a writing community in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
- Local scenes: poetry, writing groups, workshops, bookstores, libraries, etc
- Find people in communities of people who you want to reach (is it local? is it interest-based?) (Example: https://dimestories.org/, a writing community in Albuquerque, New Mexico, United States
How Do You Go About Co-Writing / Writing In A Group?
- Guest-star in others' blogs through doing artwork / graphics; a fun thing to do.
- "How can I contribute?" when writing with someone else.
- Compilation zines or collaborative fanzines (Tumblr is a great source for this)
- Collaboratiive creativity is a little fraught because it's like any relationship: all the good and the bad
- Key is to start with a positive feeling / a goal in mind; mutual interest.
- Collaboritive comics: adapting written works to the visual format
- What does it mean to collaborate on a work?
- Collaborative creation ideas:
- Running surveys/asking a question and collecting the responses
- Tagging people in 'challenges' or topics you write about
- Passing ideas back and forth across an idea of common interest
- https://blog.avas.space/your-internet/ -- an informal invitation to collaborate
- Ellipho: haikus, comic, words, writing, etc
- IndieWeb Carnivals: IndieWeb_Carnival
- This month: https://artlung.com/affirmations-ic/ (February "Affirmations")
- Also worth looking at January 2025's Carnival https://vhbelvadi.com/indieweb-carnival-roundup-2025
- Carnivals invite creativity, collaboration, help people build confidence (seeing others write), low barrier to entry.
- List of carnivals: blog_carnival
- You can start your own carnival/community event! If something doesn't exist, create it for yourself
- Examples: https://mathober.com and https://www.creativemornings.com/
- Sometimes people don't join your thing, but that's okay! You can try again with a new idea, or keep persisting. You never know where things will leave.
- There are so many communities for all sorts of collaborative making: find your people!
- "ripples" from writing
- Collaborative making is the perfect way to grow your confidence and people skills
Is there a convention for collaborating?
- Email signatures to facilitate contribution to things
- Is there a slash page convention for this?
- /make-together
- /create-together
- /worktogetherwithme
- /work-together
- /collaborations
- /create
- /collaborative-cohesion
- What portmanteaus could we use?
- /collabivity
- What portmanteaus could we use?
- Related
- Directory: https://aboutideasnow.com/
- /trades page: https://everest-pipkin.com/#about/trades.html
Other Notes
People on this call may like/things mentioned:
- Naive Weekly: https://www.naiveweekly.com/
- https://goodinternetmagazine.com/ (planned magazine about personal sites)
- https://inktober.com/
- https://onemillioncheckboxes.com/
- https://32bit.cafe/
- https://mathober.com/
- https://internetphonebook.net/
- https://slashpages.net/
- https://kinopio.club
- (Sophia wrote technical documentation using this tool; a more visual way of writing documentation.)
- Sophia's Project: https://porthales.art/
- Big mood allow everyone in Salem to be able to write
- * Bio;https://kinopio.club/ is a tool for creating ad hoc stories, documentation, idea boards, mood boards
- English Loan Words in the Malay Print Media and Their Implications for English Vocabulary Acquisition : https://researchspace.auckland.ac.nz/items/5cc5d105-a410-4c39-95d8-ed0a0ddfc25a
- When you publish things, you don't have to share it with everyone!
- Fun RSS ideas?
- Related: "RSS Club" https://daverupert.com/rss-club/
- experimental journal (needs rss): https://www.streamof.me/
Doing things in the void is a good area to experiment.
- Austin Kleon's quote: "Enjoy your obscurity while it lasts."
- Nolen Royalty of 1,000,000 Checkboxes mentions his unsuccessfurl projects in addition to the successful ones https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j2elKdupD6c
hats: https://www.wyrmbean.com/ and post about the algorithm: https://www.fractalkitty.com/w/
Idea of writing a book together on the web
- IndieWeb Carnival but the topics are prompt for you to write a story about
- Software To Use: https://once.com/writebook
- James is happy to host this software if we do a community thing!
James meta note: This Etherpad is collaborative writing!
- zacharykaiwrites Seems like it to me!
- James is happy to co-write with people on this call!
- Vince mentioned collaborating on something where he could do the more technical details and someone else could cover the narrative
- Collaborating on technical things: reading the voice of someone who has made something is interesting.
- "People like stories"
- Note to Sophia from zacharykaiwrites: create a list of all your domains! I'd love to see them!
- Community haiku on https://kinopio.club
- Guestbooks could be related? Community participation; collective result.
- More tooling around community tools for making.
- Is there a list of creative collaborative things the internet has made?
- Let's reclaim words back that have been used inappropriately, like collab.
- "Cognitive cohesion"
- Internet Linguistics: https://gretchenmcculloch.com/book/
- Lewis Davis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis_Thomas (dung beetle essay?)
- zacharykaiwrites - Please make this!
- Neologisims: make up your own words if you can't find the right one!
- "What is the right word, and make it up?"
- https://www.noperun.com (Sophia's project) - the word for a streak of saying nope
- Random James thought: "how do specific words make us feel?"
- "Just make the thing"
- Wonder / awe as being self-fulfilling
- It can be hard for some words to translate in their exact meaning to a different language
- Scalzi had a recent post about translating a particular idiom as part of a title from English to Hungarian
- highly inspirational as to how much translation and internationalization can be specific
- Haiku formed by combining other haikus
- Words feel different when you lose context, in both good and bad ways
- Blogs as a way to save languages / words
- Using mostly unknown words on your blog as a way to give them new life
- The personal significance of sharing language and maintaining them
- Blog post idea for James: documenting Scottish words that are falling out of use
- Writing challenge for anyone interested: write about a word or words that you use but may not be widely known.
- Kupietz's intro letter, background & what I'm looking for: https://drive.google.com/file/d/10ycVgHK72AXET8vEtGVbfKTFtdj7oYTO/view
- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h-mi0r0LpXo
- Random note: There is a funny episode of Frasier where Frasier needs to come up with a jingle for his radio show and goes overboard.
- https://sunsetpiano.com/<- guy who leaves public pianos around San Francisco