Yesterday (Sep 27th) happened the first Homebrew Website Club Curitiba meeting, an event organized by me and Rodrigo Ghedin to create a space where people can meet and exchange ideas about how to create, improve and maintain a personal website. The Homebrew Website Club is a world-wide network of events for everyone that wants to own their own online identities and content, which is something we deeply believe. Below I wrote some quick notes to this meetup.
The venue and organization details
We choose to do the event in a coffee shop called Temporal Cafés Especiais because it had a dedicated place that we could use for the event, with up to 8 people, and it was close to where we live. We meet in a Saturday morning, from 10 to 12am, so we wouldn’t compete with other events during the week and would also have time to do other activities in the weekend. Once we arrive we went to the second floor and each one ordered something to eat and drink (everything done in a quick and easy system accessed via a QR code, with table delivery) and started chatting.
We on purpose did not set an agenda, to go with the flow. Besides us two, someone that I’ve met online show up and since he didn’t bring his laptop, we spend most o the time talking.
To promote the event, I create a quick invitation image, that we shared in our social media and some other online places that we participate.
Some of the things that we’re shared
I put together a list of some of the things that we talked about:
- You can paste markdown directly in the WordPress Block Editor, and it will convert it automatically. This is what I use, I write most of my posts in Joplin to help me to keep focused on the content and just copy/paste the result.
- Owning your own content: I have a backup of my LinkedIn profile (CV and Recommendations) in my about page, so I don’t lose this information.
- Kanso as a good WordPres theme for someone that just wants to have a blog
- datasette as a tool for journalists to explore data
- Interfaces for using LLMs: Duck.ai, Open WebUI and Lobe Chat
- OpenRouter as a solution to access multiple LLMs paying a simple subscription
- Good WordPress newsletters: Within WordPress and WP Builds This Week in WordPress
- Interesting WordPress plugins:
- Post Calendar by Gelform manage editorial calendar
- Scroll to Top block
- HTTP Requests Manager to manage requests and block the one that are slow
- Umami for website analytics
- Comment Blocklist for WordPress as a lightweight anti-spam
- Essay: The Slow Web, from Jack Cheng
- Telex to create WordPress blocks
- Cloudways as a good price to value to host multiple websites
- Jellyfin as an open source alternative to Plex
- WordLand as an external content editor for WordPress and a recent interview with Dave Winer about the project
- Tutorials about creating a dark and light mode on WordPress: Mastering light and dark mode styling in block themes and Building a light/dark toggle with the Interactivity API
Next meeting
We’ve already set a date for the next event: October 25. This way we have more time to promote the event, and we’re thinking if we should create a website or something else to help with the promotion.
For the agenda, some ideas are to define a timebox to:
- Write a post
- Work on improving or doing something that we’re postponing
Since the beginning, our expectation was that this event was a moment where we could share experiences and work on our personal websites, no matter if it were just the two of us or more people. So for us, the first meetup was a success, and we are already waiting for the second one. If you’re from Curitiba, or know someone that lives there, you’re welcome to join us there!
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