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A Beginner's Guide to the IndieWeb for Writers Who Don't Code (But Maybe Want to a Little)

| 2,286 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb, writing, community, blogging, Digital Culture

You don't need to be a developer to own your corner of the internet. A guide for writers, poets, and creators who want to escape algorithmic feeds and reclaim their digital presence. No computer science degree required.

Announcing Fireweed Writing School

| 1,866 words
TAGS: personal essay, creativity, writing, community, education

A manifesto on learning to persist in your writing and to write anywhere. I'm finally pursuing my dream of being a writing instructor by starting a new, low-cost online class for those ready.

The Final Coding Bootcamp: A Eulogy for Lighthouse Labs

| personal-favourites | 2,342 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, politics, Digital Culture

What is the future of coding bootcamps? Is there a future? And, more importantly, what is the future of junior developers in an industry with an effortless AI bubble?

More Than One Way: On Ritual, Morality, and the Darkness Beyond Knowing

| religion | 4,112 words
TAGS: philosophy, Anthropology, spirituality, Cultural Criticism

What is the meaning of life? Is there more than one correct answer? I've decided to take a rather long-winded exploration of how different cultures approach the sacred, the dead, and the transcendent, suggesting that multiple paths can lead to...

Creating an Alphabetical Tag Page feat. Nunjucks Pitfalls

| technical-tutorials | 752 words
TAGS: Web Development, eleventy, Nunjucks, technical

I transformed a messy tag list into an organized alphabetical sections, and there were a surprising amount of gotchas I encountered along the way.

twtxt: Simple, Decentralized Microblogging with status.lol

| technical-tutorials | 604 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, Microblogging, decentralization, technical

I set up a sync between my status.lol updates and a twtxt feed, creating a bridge between IndieWeb tools and classic decentralized microblogging.

How You Can Support Indie Creators--and You Need To

| community | 1,295 words
TAGS: Creator Economy, Digital Culture, community, Cultural Criticism, IndieWeb

Beyond tipping culture, there are meaningful ways to support independent creators that don't involve money. Here are eight of the best.

The Pandemic Never Ended. We Only Pretend it Did

| personal-favourites, science | 2,384 words
TAGS: Chronic Illness, Medical Ethics, covid, Cultural Criticism, politics

Six years into COVID-19, the world has moved on while the virus continues to disable millions. An examination of the ongoing pandemic, long COVID, and our collective failure to prevent a mass disabling event.

Computing for the Apocalypse

| indieweb | 2,183 words
TAGS: docker, homesteading, technical

Building digital resilience through self-hosted infrastructure and permacomputing principles in an uncertain world. Using Docker, Caddy, and open-source tools for digital resilience and independence.

REVIEW: Light Joy Writing, On Elizabeth Gilbert's Big Magic

| culture | 829 words
TAGS: personal essay, review, creativity, philosophy

A delightful surprise from an author I initially dismissed. Gilbert's Big Magic explores creativity as sacred play, rejecting the tortured artist myth for a lighter, more joyful approach to creative work.

What I Have Learned Being on the IndieWeb for a Month

| indieweb | 885 words
TAGS: personal essay, community, Digital Culture, IndieWeb, technical

A month of building, connecting, and discovering the independent web. Small technical joys that turned solitude into dialogue. Treat the Internet like a personal playground and lab!

Posting to Your Static Site with Quill and Micropub

| technical-tutorials | 865 words
TAGS: eleventy, IndieWeb, netlify, technical, tutorial

Learn how to implement a Micropub endpoint for your static site, allowing you to post content from external clients like Quill while maintaining JAMstack architecture.

Respecting the No-JS Choice: Making Your Site Work for Everyone

| technical-tutorials | 1,055 words
TAGS: css, eleventy, javascript, technical, accessibility

A journey into making a website gracefully degrade for users without JavaScript, including the CSS-based .no-js approach, testing with Lynx, and creating an informative experience for all users.

Greenland Belongs to the Inuit

| indigenous, politics | 1,395 words
TAGS: Indigenous Writing, personal essay, politics, Cultural Criticism

The Greenland debate keeps asking whether the U.S. could take it, or whether Denmark should keep it. The missing question is: What do the Greenlanders want? They've already answered: 'We don't want to be Americans. We don't want to be Danes. We...

From 65 to 83: Attempts at Performance Optimization

| technical-tutorials | 1,792 words
TAGS: css, eleventy, javascript, technical

A humble look into the performance optimizations boosting my Lighthouse score from 65 to 83, including critical CSS, layout shift fixes, and image optimization while maintaining the site's design and user experience

Extending the Post Graph Plugin: Adding Clickable Links and Tooltips

| technical-tutorials | 694 words
TAGS: eleventy, javascript, technical

A technical walkthrough of how I extended the eleventy-plugin-post-graph to add clickable links and hover tooltips showing article titles

Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide

| indieweb | 2,043 words
TAGS: blogging, directories, IndieWeb, publishing, technical

A guide to tools and resources for joining the independent web movement. Discover blogging platforms like Pika, search engines that prioritize small sites, directories for finding like-minded creators, and more.

Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site

| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,726 words
TAGS: eleventy, IndieWeb, javascript, netlify, technical, tutorial

A journey through authentication, CORS issues, and the joy of owning your comments! Learn how to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions, storing the comments in your git repository.

REVIEW: How do we reckon? On Yiyun Li's 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'

| culture | 845 words
TAGS: Mental Health, Cultural Criticism, personal essay, philosophy, review, suicide

CONTENT WARNING: Suicide | A matter-of-fact memoir about the endurance of loss, where Li considers grief to be regarded as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount felt when both of your only children choose death instead of...

How Can We Use the Internet for Good?

| politics | 2,270 words
TAGS: creativity, IndieWeb, philosophy, politics

A manifesto on what we do when the world is on fire: Daywriting. The deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance.

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