| personal-favourites | 807 words
TAGS: technical, security, Digital Security, neocities, IndieWeb, web development, small web, infrastructure
How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews, has no rate limits and will happily visit thousands of your pages--and anything they...
| technical-tutorials | 1,744 words
TAGS: eleventy, seo, accessibility, performance, web development, technical, tutorial
Yet another technical audit of brennan.day, this time using the Safi Studio Scanner, covering fixes for duplicate <h1> headings, meta descriptions, image dimensions, JSON-LD organization data, render-blocking scripts, and a switch from IndieAuth...
| 2,035 words
TAGS: personal essay, blogging, IndieWeb, digital garden, projects, self-reflection, small web, community
Taking stock of my digital garden before the first frost: an honest audit of everything I'm tending online, from Brennan.day and fanfiction.lol to my 565-day writing streak, plus the projects I've neglected, the intentional prunes I'm happy with...
| 804 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, Writing Process, creativity, AI, generative AI, Social Commentary
Taking the final line of Joseph Fasano's poem 'For a Student Who Used AI to Write a Paper' as a starting point, I argue that loving the verb of creation matters more than daydreaming the noun. There's a wide chasm between writing discipline and...
| 777 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, philosophy, ethics, privacy, writing, mortality
A meditation on the contradiction of writing publicly while wanting to remain unremarkable, drawing on Daoist uselessness, Epicurean lathe biōsas, state legibility, and Deleuzian imperceptibility--and why the only peaceful path is to keep writing...
| politics | 2,195 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, open source, fascism, technology
Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omarchy Foundation's $12 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized...
| politics | 2,599 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, open source, fascism, technology
Open source has become a safe harbor for far-right politics, from David Heinemeier Hansson's white-nationalist rhetoric and the Omacom Foundation's $21.7 million in patron funding to so-called apolitical projects that treat marginalized...
| indieweb | 4,760 words
TAGS: meme, IndieWeb, personal essay, web development, Q&A, small web
A hundred-question chain meme making the rounds about how and why we make websites. I answer my way through questions on workflow, editors, CSS confidence, webrings, Neocities and Nekoweb, domain names, accessibility, genAI ethics, Gruvbox, and...
| ai | 949 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, AI, generative AI, open source, Debian, web development, ethics, technology
Debian's recent vote to permit genAI contributions, alongside the questions raised by the IndieWeb is Punk manifesto, leads me to reflect on the harm-reduction case, the deskilling of creators, the NFT-like grift of genAI output, and the Potemkin...
| 740 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, blogging, IndieWeb, community, Technology, web development, mental health
Reflecting on the mental fatigue of posting every day during Blaugust, I share a few small things that cheered me up: a new keyword filter on Bubbles.town, Jan Miksovsky's Origami Projector, and the ongoing, hand-made goodness of the independent web.
| community | 1,878 words
TAGS: personal essay, blogging, IndieWeb, open source, digital humanities, academia, web development, writing, community
Announcing a new open-source, asynchronous Blogging Studies syllabus that blends writing craft and independent web publishing, built on Codeberg. I trace the decline of free MOOCs, outline my curriculum's anti-capitalist and community-driven...
| 874 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Technology, web development, mental health, homelab, Netlify
After exceeding my free Netlify bandwidth for the first time and wiring up a homelab to run this site, I reflect on how my life has narrowed around writing and code, the friendships that did not survive that focus, and the loneliness of a...
| politics | 1,371 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, hope, optimism, compassion, philosophy, community, constructive journalism
Reflecting on a reader's description of me as 'nice' and the responsibility of having an audience, I commit to becoming a 'toolshed of hope and stubborn optimism' in my writing. Drawing on solutions journalism, restorative narrative, and thinkers...
| indieweb | 1,365 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb, Social Commentary, blogging, community, aggregators
After several months of using Bubbles.town, I share my long-term review of the IndieWeb aggregator. The good: discovering diverse blogs across niche topics. The issues: glacial pace of content changes, popularity contest dynamics, categorization...
| writing-craft, history | 1,340 words
TAGS: personal essay, blogging, IndieWeb, history, Technology, Social Commentary
A four-century etymological journey from wooden ship logs and logboards to the modern web log, tracing how the word 'blog' emerged from centuries of record-keeping, computing, and online publishing. On Peter Merholz's coinage of 'blog,' Jorn...
| 1,056 words
TAGS: personal essay, Love, romance, nihilism, philosophy, Social Commentary, chosen family, mental health
Responding to anonymous blogger Unstory's claim that love is a fake story and does not exist, I argue that love is a real, measurable, and physical fact of human connection. On fMRI studies of spouses, Harvard's 87-year Study of Adult...
| french | 924 words
TAGS: personal essay, Language Learning, Linguistics, Social Commentary
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur les mots et expressions français qui n'ont pas de traduction directe vers l'anglais, comme déjà vu, jamais vu, presque vu, dépaysement, retrouvailles, l'esprit...
| indieweb | 1,499 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, platform dependencies, digital autonomy, genAI, criticism, community
Responding to Eetu and Pagecord creator Olly's reactions to my article on accessible IndieWeb approaches, I examine the tension between platform convenience and digital sovereignty. Using Olly's recent controversy as a case study, I discuss why...
| lyric-essays | 1,474 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb, blogging, writing, philosophy, community, purpose
Reflecting on three weeks of consecutive writing for Blaugust, I explore the tension between writing by accident versus on purpose. Through correspondence with Unstory and the IndieWeb carnival theme of purpose, I contemplate the accidental...
| 1,087 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, mental health, community, empathy, psychology
Drawing on my decade of experience as a 7cups Listener and research on emotional sharing, I argue in defense of vent posting. Venting is a natural human need for connection and validation, not a character flaw. Community support and empathy are...