Aaron Parecki

Meetable is the software that runs events.indieweb.org and a couple other event sites that I host. Over the last couple months, we've had to cancel a bunch of IndieWeb events or convert them to virtual events, and I've been watching for patterns to see if there was anything the software could do to facilitate this.

Well, it's Spring, and we're all stuck inside! 😃 So why not use this time to do a little Spring cleaning and declutter your digital life. We all have things we know we should do that we keep putting off. Here are a few things you can do to tidy things up and improve your online security in a time when most of us are interacting only online.

Lots of people are suddenly finding themselves working from home, and need to join video conferences from their living room or home office. Here are several tips to improve your virtual meetings and presentations on a budget! I'll start with some things you can do for free to improve your Zoom meetings. If you're recording virtual conference talks from home, or hosting live webinars, you'll definitely want to upgrade to a nicer camera, so take a look at my recommendations for the best video kits under $500 and under $1000!

I've been working towards making Meetable more useful to others by making it easier to configure and deploy. I took a few shortcuts during the initial development that let me finish it faster, primarily by offloading authentication and image resizing to external services. While that's great for me, it means it requires setting up two additional projects if someone else wanted to get it running.

It's been a few weeks since I launched the new events site for IndieWeb events! In that time, the community has already hosted 7 events, and scheduled 15 more! I've continued to push a few minor changes to the site since the launch, primarily around discovery of events with tags.

I'm super happy to announce the launch of a new website for IndieWeb events at events.indieweb.org!

Trying to understand OAuth often feels like being trapped inside a maze of specs, trying to find your way out, before you can finally do what you actually set out to do: build your application.

Now is your chance to join and ask me your OAuth questions!

I realized I have been avoiding leaving tips in Foursquare because I didn't have a good way to post them from my website. So today I added the ability to syndicate my posts as Foursquare tips.

At IndieWebCamp Amsterdam I finally implemented unlisted posts for my website! This has been on my list for a while, and is a prerequisite for being able to do fancier things like posting full photo albums to my site, so I decided to take the plunge and finally get this done.

The new draft spec at OAuth.xyz outlines a potential way to completely re-think OAuth from the ground up.

tl;dr This is a good move for users in the iOS ecosystem, and is primarily designed as an alternative for apps that currently use "Sign in with [Facebook/Twitter/Google]" to avoid leaking sensitive user info.

So you just published your conference talk videos on YouTube, and you want to add captions. YouTube will use speech to text and try to add their own captions for you, but it's pretty hit or miss, especially for technical talks where there's a lot of proper nouns or jargon in the talk. The good news is there's a much better solution, and one that provides benefits to your in-person audience as well!

I've been helping Donut.js record their meetup talks for about 3 years now. It's been a fun way to experiment with various video recording setups, and the talks are always great so it's nice to have those recorded.

Last year, I posted a JavaScript snippet that I've started using in all my projects that have an IndieAuth login form, which will automatically add the http scheme if you type a plain domain. This is particularly a problem because the iOS keyboard doesn't include the : character in URL mode.

My previous avatar was almost 3 years old, and I was getting tired of it. I decided to replace my avatar on my website for my IndieWebCamp Austin hack day project. But if you know me, you know I can't do anything the easy way. For my hack day project I made the avatar on each post in my website change depending on the emoji I use in the post!

It's already been a year since IndieAuth was published as a W3C Note! A lot has happened in that time! There's been several new plugins and services launch support for IndieAuth, and it's even made appearances at several events around the world!