Front End Study Hall #037 was an IndieWeb meetup on Zoom held on 2025-09-30.

• Archived from: https://etherpad.indieweb.org/2025-09-30-front-end-study-hall

Front End Study Hall #037

September 30, 2025

Participants

• Joe Crawford
• gRegor Morrill
• Marty McGuire
• capjamesg
• Tantek Çelik
• Thomas Vander Wal
• Jeremy Cherfas https://jeremycherfas.net...
• benji
• Kevin Marks
• Eric M

Notes

• Happy Tuesday!
• Joe's Zoom Background Dreamweaver MX from 2005
• WYSIWYG was once a holy grail
  • aside: or was it a reaction to the unfulfilled promise of a read write web? -t
• Front_End_Study_Hall
• Why is it so difficult to build a website on my phone?
  • Smart phone was designed to be an entertainment device
    • But I want my phone to be delightful :(
  • Smart phone screen is very small
    • How much are you willing to carry with you on a phone? Decent input device?
    • What would it look like to have an audio input device? (speak and your phone starts to build the web page)
  • Better input device? Very good camera? Creative work with a camera! (TikTok! Reels! Video!)
  • On iOS:Notes app surprisingly good (many folks use Notes app into their phone) - good enough
  • What if the Notes/Photos app had a checkbox you could check to put a note or photo on your website?
    • somewhere someone had built an iCloud "sync" client that you gave access to your Notes and then it auto-posted (or synced) the ones you selected to a website
  • It would be cool if you could customise your keyboard to make < and > more prominent.
  • there are iPhone apps that have given extended keyboard needs and added them in the UI above the keyboard for easy use
    • Runestone is one of the apps for iOS with coding related keys in prominant view. I've used it to post HTML marked-up entries to my site
  • There are quite a few custom keyboards available to select that are focussed on different needs

• • How come people don't make websites with phone?
  • Is there a difference between making a website and making content for the web?
  • Templating systems come up (social media is the recipient!)

• "i want my endpoint to be my blog" (but social media has made the default a silo that someone else owns)

• Downpour.games (clean interface for creating hypercard-like games)
  • https://downpour.games/

• micropub and shortcuts can be used to post to a web page
  • markdown coding apps (Runestone) - copy and paste into my site
  • better mobile apps - built for running locally
• Pythonista was made by same developer
• Limitations exist for running code you are writing

• Marty did a talk at IndieWeb Summir 2019 - "Posting from my Phone"
  • used micropub, shortcuts
  • shortcut permission model, walled gardens
  • Quill editor
  • omnibear browser extension for Micropub, also a non-trivial amount of maintenance debt with browser changes
  • https://sparkles.sploot.com is a PWA

• (evil solution) Log in Replit and get it to do it
  • Accidentially deleted production database

• James experience writing HTML on his phone, if tooling were better would
  • VSCode in the browser - real time editing group editing
  • https://vscode.dev - relatively poor on a phone as all the VS Code chrome takes up the whole screen

• TIL: https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/skewampus
  • apparently cattywampus means orthogonal https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cattywampus#English

• Eric M is organizing a group (Brian Kardell) working title "The Story of..."
  • The story of :has(), shadow-dom
  • Organizing a podcast
  • Suggestions:
    • iframe
    • 40px list indentation
    • class attribute
    • why is deprecated?
  • vs why is one semantic?
  • story of selectors?
  • secret incantation of mobile port?
  • the CSS reference pixel
  • named colors?
  • Mark Pilgrim history of the mailing list