| 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...
| 1,102 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 | 1,520 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...
| technical-tutorials, science | 3,370 words
TAGS: digital humanities, IndieWeb, open access, academia, eleventy, metadata, citation, tutorial
I've been weighing grad school against continuing my own open-access publication, so I wrote a guide to becoming a 'Rogue Scholar' using ORCID, citation metadata, issue numbers, print CSS, and Wayback Machine archiving to try to make my static...
| indigenous | 1,076 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Métis, humor, satire, IndieWeb
I've been satirized by circlejerk.blog, and I reflect on the history of online circlejerking, Indigenous trickster traditions like Coyote and Chi-Jean, and the concept of survivance. A call for more humour and satire in online spaces, and how...
| indieweb, personal-favourites | 4,347 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, manifesto, web history, web development, philosophy, digital sovereignty
I'm reclaiming the title of 'webmaster' as the multidisciplinary creator who designs, develops, writes, and advocates for their own corner of the web and will save the world. Tracing the history from 1993 to the present, I argue that anyone can...
| technical-tutorials | 2,415 words
TAGS: eleventy, netlify, security, accessibility, performance, seo, web development, technical, tutorial
I ran brennan.day against The Website Specification's 140-item checklist covering foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. Notes on a broken web manifest I'd never noticed, why I don't have cookie consent...
| science | 1,296 words
TAGS: personal essay, mental health, psychology, trauma, escapism, imagination, coping mechanisms
A personal tale living with maladaptive daydreaming--intense, immersive daydreams that replace rather than accompany real life. On Eli Somer's research, the difference between paracosms and maladaptive daydreaming, trauma connections, and how...
| religion | 1,065 words
TAGS: personal essay, Religious Studies, history, anthropology, Ancient Egypt, mythology, philosophy
On Friedrich Max Müller's theory of naturism and how early religion began with humanity's direct sensory perception of natural forces. From the terrifying awe of lightning and thunder to Ancient Egypt's animal deities that protected against...
| 1,771 words
TAGS: personal essay, philosophy, happiness, determinism, IndieWeb, Social Commentary
On the 50/10/40 split of happiness research, the Declaration of Independence's 'pursuit of happiness,' and an exchange with anonymous blogger Unstory about free will, determinism, and whether we can choose joy. A diptych of opposing worldviews...