I did make it to the Indiewebcamp/Homebrew meeting this evening after all, in Portland this time, since I happened to be passing through.

I was able to show off some of the work I've been doing on embedding data-driven graphs/charts in the Web versions of in-progress academic writing: d3.js generating SVG tables in the browser, but also saving SVG/PDF versions which are used as figures in the LaTeX/PDF version (which I still need for sharing the document in print and with most academics). I need to write a brief blog post describing my process for doing this, even though it's not finished. In fact, that's a theme; we all need to be publishing code and writing blog posts, especially for inchoate work.

Also, I've been thinking about pseudonymity in the context of personal websites. Is there anything we need to do to make it possible to maintain different identities / domain names without creating links between them? Also, it may be a real privacy advantage to split the reading and writing on the Web: if you don't have to create a separate list of friends/follows in each site with each pseudonym, then you can't as easily be re-identified by having the same friends. But I want to think carefully about the use case, because while I've become very comfortable with a domain name based on my real name and linking my professional, academic and personal web presences, I find that a lot of my friends are using pseudonyms, or intentionally subdividing

Finally, I learned about some cool projects.

  • Indiewebcamp IRC logs become more and more featureful, including an interactive chat client in the logs page itself
  • Google Web Starter Kit provides boilerplate and a basic build/task system for building static web sites
  • Gulp and Harp are two (more) JavaScript-based tools for preparing/processing/hosting static web sites

All in all, good fun. And then I went to the Powell's bookstore dedicated just to technical and scientific books, saw an old NeXT cube and bought an old book on software patterns.

Thanks for hosting us, @aaronpk!
— Nick