Thursday, 13th August 2015Dropping in on the Brighton Homebrew Website Club

Last night I attended the first meetup of the Brighton outpost of the Homebrew Website Club - I had planned on staying in and blogging about my recent Hungarian adventures at Drupalaton but very glad I popped my trusty Respect Your Freedoms-certified Libreboot X200 laptop into my lovely new Drupalaton tote bag & made the short but always eventful trip across the Laine/Lanes border from purkisshq to 68 Middle Street and made progress on upgrading my website to Drupal 8, here's why:

• focused time meant I actually did what always seems to get put back in the queue, and owning my own data and code is important to me in the long term
• time-boxing an hour meant I had no choice other than to prioritise, for me that was fixing an issue I had with getting DrupalVM running.
• collaboration apart from attending the business day at our DrupalCamp Brighton event I haven't been to 68 Middle Street much since I wrote a blog post about Atomised Web Design where I kinda rip into one of the space's founders & organiser of the Brighton Homebrew Website Club Jeremy Keith (@adactio). Four-or-so years on, and thanks in big part to the stern work of MortenDK, Drupal 8 is a whole load better so I don't feel so bad for my not-so-humbledness of old, plus I couldn't miss an event on a topic I'm so passionate about - Freedom!

Show & Tell

Not realising the openness of the space I may have been my usual loud self when chatting to a fellow fashionably late attendee as we walked around the corner of a bar to the main venue space where there were lots of people sitting round tables with one up showing what they'd been working on. There was a wide range of people and interests, with most discussions being around what software and services people were using to control their internet communications.

It came to my turn - I didn't want to even attempt to connect my laptop up to the projector as I didn't really have that much to show so just waved my latest blog post about What is Drupal? around on the laptop and explained that ever since I attended Léonie Watson's DrupalCamp Bristol Keynote: The metamorphosis of accessibility I have been deeply affected by how far behind we still are in terms of providing any sort of acceptable web experience for everyone, and as I started blogging again I wanted to make sure my creative efforts would be accessible and enjoyable. I wrote a description of the photo in my blog post but noticed the correct tags weren't there for accessibility - WAI-ARIA, ARIA Live Announcements API and TabManager are built-in to Drupal 8.

Other people were using a wide range of tools and languages to build their sites, it will be interesting to see how they achieve some of the things I'm going to be doing with developing purkiss.com over the next few months to explain more about what I do, in terms of delivering Drupal projects by working with the community as well as other parts of how I approach my life experience.

Hack

Once updates were all done it was time to get down to business. Fellow Drupaler & DrupalCamp Bristol organiser Oliver Davies had mentioned the other day that I just needed to change nfs to rsync in the settings.yml file and that worked. I should've seen that but wasn't thinking - NFS is Windows, I'm using Linux ;) So by changing just one setting I had a whole virtual machine with a fresh, working install of Drupal 8 up and running on my 7-year old technology but freedom-respecting laptop - so much for Drupal 8 is complicated enterprise-only!

Next was reading up on a production-ready version of the virtual machine which I could host on DigitalOcean. Once I learn more about the sysadmin side of things and feel more confident, I'd prefer to host it from home as there don't seem to be any suitable distributed options I know about / could use which fully respect mine (or yours) freedoms - surely there's business to be made there?! I'm also looking at a more home-grown solution from the UK - VLAD, but for the moment I'm going with what I know is working for me and once I'm a little more confident and can inspect a working system I'll see where I can go from there.

I'd just started to get into the production-ready issue when the preverbial bell rang and we were out of time! I made my way up to the Brighton Farm weekly new media freelancers meetup where, amongst many other interesting conversations, I discovered the Cubieboard, which according to the FSF is all good for Freedom apart from the WiFi controller, but as I don't plan on hosting wirelessly this sounds like a good option to investigate for self-hosting.

I'm looking forward to the next Homebrew Website Club meeting in a couple of weeks, certainly managed to achieve movement and am looking forward to getting off the Drupal 7 island into the wide open waters of Drupal 8!

tags: Homebrew Website ClubDrupal 8Drupal PlanetPlanet Drupalbrighton