IndieWebCamp Recap
It’s Sunday evening, and I’m back home from two very enjoyable days (and one night, too) at IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2019.
I met lots of friendly and interesting new people, had interesting discussion and conversations, learned new things and was also productive implementing new technologies on one of my projects.
Saturday
Day one of the camp was the “Discussions” day: after the introduction round, everyone gathered to suggest discussions on IndieWeb-related topics. I spent my time at “URLs: How?”, “Offline Strategies”, “Hosting, SSG vs CMS vs Custom”, “Travel Data & Posts” and “Safety”. I learned something new in every one of them and/or contributed, too.
“Hosting, SSG vs CMS vs Custom” was maybe the most immediately interesting to me, since I’m keen to move my blog, and so I suggested this session myself. I was interested in how other folks publish to, host and deploy their own site. Everyone in the room shared their setup, which was absolutely fantastic! Now, I need to take some time, take those notes and research how I want to continue publishing this blog.
Sunday
Sunday was Hacking Day.
That means, whatever you fancied to work on, you simply did – either on your own or with (the help of) others.
I myself added a Service Worker to my “Focal Length Equivalents” site and also made this a “Progressive Web App (PWA)”. A topic I wanted to start with for a long time and now I finally did.
I used Jeremy’s Minimal viable service worker script, and modified it a little to suit this page’s needs even better. Following Daniel’s suggestion, I deployed this via GitHub Pages; I needed to switch hosts, because I needed a (free) SSL certificate. Because serving your site over HTTPS is a prerequisite for using a service worker (and thus making the site available offline). Then I created a quick icon and followed the “Add to Home Screen” guide to turn the site into a PWA.
So, when you now go to https://danielpietzsch.github.io/fl/, it’ll be available offline (after that first visit of course), and you can also add it to your home screen on iOS or Android, and it’ll behave very similar to a native app.
The final step would be to actually use my custom subdomain again, which so far hasn’t worked, unfortunately.
At the end of the day, everyone demoed what they’ve worked on. I was super impressed by all the things that got done.
A big thanks to Marc, Tantek, Aaron, Jeremy and Joschi for making all this happen! This will not have been my last IndieWebCamp for sure!