After more than a year of trying to be part of the IndieWeb and working on my website alone, I thought I should try to start a Homebrew Website Club in Goa. So, with the help of the usual WordPress Goa group (Siddharth and Abhishek), we decided to host the first such meetup at the GrandWorks office on the 24th of July.

We saw a mix of people of attending—from seasoned developers, to graphic designers, and to people just thinking of making their first website.

Since this was the first such meetup I gave a quick introduction of the IndieWeb movement and technology, and encouraged everyone to join the wider community on the wiki and chat. After that, we went around the room introducing ourselves, talking about our websites and experiences in building them. Some of the topics we covered were:

• Differences in using WordPress, and services like Wix and Squarespace.
• Hitting certain limitations on Wix, and how in WordPress there is always a plugin for that.
• Cost (time and money) of hosting your own server vs the price of Squarespace.
• How one-click WordPress installs offered by hosting services aren’t really easy to use for beginners.
• Wix’s AI in design feature.
• How the Balance Project would like to run their own community website and not give all their data to Facebook.
• Finding an audience on one’s own blog vs on platforms like Medium and LinkedIn.

We didn’t have a lot of peer-to-peer time left after the discussions, but I was able to show a photographer how they could design their portfolio website using Gutenberg on WordPress.com.

There was quite some interest in a group like this, the technical folks wanted to dive deeper into Webmentions and Micropub, and others expressed a need for a place to ask their questions and get their doubts clarified. So, we’re thinking of hosting another one on the 21st of August. Join the WordPress Goa meetup group to get notified when we do.