Indie Web Camp Brighton 2015

Indie Web Camp Brighton 2015 is a wrap, and what a fun weekend it turned out to be.

I was really pleased with the turnout; not just the number of people who came along—many of them from very far afield—but also the range of skill levels and backgrounds represented. What a lovely bunch!

Indie Web Camp Brighton group photo

We kicked off the first day with a show’n’tell: people demoed their sites, showed their posting interfaces, and talked about what they’d like to improve. That sparked plenty of ideas for the afternoon discussions. But in between we had a nice long lunch break—it was a lovely sunny day in Brighton so we took full advantage of the sun, the street food, and the ice cream.

We wrapped up the first day around 5pm and I immediately dashed off to start loading in and sound checking for a Salter Cane gig that evening. That turned out to be a lot of fun—the audience were great—but I was completely knackered by the end of the day.

The weather on Sunday was far gloomier, but that was okay—we spent the whole day indoors anyway, coding and hacking away at stuff. Quite a few people were adding h-entry and h-card to their sites so I helped them out whenever I could. Meanwhile I was working on trying to get an SMS interface to my site working using the Twilio API.

The actual coding part went pretty quickly, but then I hit a wall. Whenever Twilio tried to reach a URL on my site, it would time out with a 504 error. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. On a hunch, I tried sending it to a subdomain that wasn’t being served over HTTPS. That worked fine. Now, I can’t imagine that Twilio is actually unable to work with secure endpoints, so it must be something to do with the way that I’ve enabled HTTPS on my domain. Anyway, the HTTP subdomain solution worked, and eleven minutes before demo time I finally had something to show.

We finished the day and the event with the quickfire demos. As always, there was some really impressive stuff—it’s quite amazing how much can get done in such a short space of time. Then we tidied up and headed across the street to the pub for a well-deserved pint.

All in all, a great weekend.

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Responses

davidpea.ch

 Hi Jeremy. I’ve been wanting to do this on my own site but I’m currently running in circles within the Twilio docs. Do you have a link to a doc page that you used? Cheers!

# Thursday, September 17th, 2015 at 5:30pm

Previously on this day

6 years ago I wrote A Gov Supreme

A big, big gov.

8 years ago I wrote OurSpace

Our collective creativity, no matter how ugly, is worth preserving.

13 years ago I wrote I’d like to buy the world an iPod

Noise annoys

15 years ago I wrote Embrace and extend

Dave Hyatt has been blogging about the way that Dashboard will require some new HTML elements.

16 years ago I wrote Wish you were here

Over the last few days, England has been enjoying something of a heatwave, a beautiful heatwave.

16 years ago I wrote Real Life

I’ve been honing my Quake playing skills lately, but Gamespot have a review of what sounds like a "must have" for fans of first-person, multiplayer adventures. It’s called Real Life: