| 1,134 words
TAGS: personal essay, writing, creativity, blogging, IndieWeb, poetry
Completing #100DaysToOffload twice in under two years, and somewhere along the way the wet clay hardened at the edges. Invisible ruts form inside the habits you love, and there's a difference between a window and a mirror in writing. The hermit...
| 0 words
TAGS: interview, IndieWeb, podcast, writing
I was a guest on Episode 8 of Wonders of Web Weaving with James G. We talk about writing routines, building community in the indie web, 'start here' pages, Maple Syrup Heists, and more!
| personal-favourites | 1,779 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, love, relationships, loneliness, feminism, philosophy
86% of American adults aged 18-24 are currently unpartnered; 78% of dating app users feel exhausted by online dating. How are people supposed to fall in love while the Doomsday Clock ticks at 85 seconds to midnight? On the yearning microgenre...
| 1,387 words
TAGS: personal essay, Social Commentary, Digital Culture, psychology, blogging, community
Vagueblogging and subtweeting are the most toxic modes of online communication, yet research shows people prefer them to direct confrontation anyway. On the psychology of strategic ambiguity, insecure attachment, context collapse, and the online...
| history | 1,850 words
TAGS: personal essay, IndieWeb Carnival, agriculture, history, anthropology, philosophy, Daniel Quinn, civilization
A mind-shattering concept from a first-year university class that upended how I think about humanity. Daniel Quinn's Ishmael trilogy argues that totalitarian agriculture is why civilization is in peril. On the Law of Limited Competition, the Food...
| french | 1,147 words
TAGS: personal essay, Language Learning, Linguistics, Métis, History, Social Commentary
Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur les différences entre le français québécois et le français européen, l'histoire linguistique du Québec depuis 1763, les sacres québécois comme acte de rébellion...
| writing-craft, technical-tutorials | 1,123 words
TAGS: git, technical, writing, IndieWeb, personal site, web development
I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 1,597 words
TAGS: philosophy, death, Stoicism, linguistics, personal essay
I've been sitting with a single word change. 'Will' versus 'must' in the Latin phrase Memento Mori, and it's shifted everything for me. A meditation on mortality as obligation rather than fate, and what it means to truly reckon with the fact that...
| politics | 1,637 words
TAGS: veganism, animal rights, ethics, environment, cognitive dissonance, personal essay
Brace yourself. I'm writing this to people who care about the world's suffering and love animals, but haven't yet extended that same compassion to the animals on their plate. Any environmental argument you can make against generative AI you can...
| writing-craft, history | 3,088 words
TAGS: writing, literary history, productivity, research, personal essay
I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors racing through 10,000 words daily. What does...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,885 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, technical, Eleventy, webmentions, microformats
A tutorial and walkthrough of how I implemented webmentions on my site, from setup to display, including webmention.io integration, Eleventy filters, CSS styling, and Bridgy for sending.
| indieweb | 1,552 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, self-hosting, infrastructure, ethics, privacy, technical, homelab, Docker
I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such...
| personal-favourites, writing-craft | 1,635 words
TAGS: writing, blogging, community, creative nonfiction, personal essay
Writing publicly and frequently for the past seven months has saved my life. Six ways consistent public writing transformed me: cultivating curiosity, building connections, investigating rabbit holes, starting new projects, creating...
| indieweb | 720 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, self-hosting, community, infrastructure, fediverse, open source, homelab
Announcing folk.zone, a collection of free, community-run internet services I'm building as an IndieWeb commons. Including Mastodon, WriteFreely, Forgejo, Pixelfed, Lemmy, and more. All self-hosted on hardware in my living space. This is...
| indieweb, writing-craft | 1,280 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, publishing, writing, community, collaboration, creative nonfiction, lyric essays
Inspired by Good Internet Magazine, I'm starting a new volunteer-run IndieWeb publication tentatively called Long Horizon. Exploring my readiness to launch a digital and physical magazine focused on creative non-fiction and lyric essays, and...
| indieweb, community | 1,728 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, community, economics, mutual aid, support, capitalism, writing
Responding to criticism of 'buy me a coffee' links on blogs, I argue that asking for support isn't commodification--it's mutual aid! Exploring the economic pressures on creators, the history of mutual aid, and why the IndieWeb needs community...
| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,878 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, accessibility, web development, inclusive, web design, technical
Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre or checking off a list. It's about designing for everyone. Exploring the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than we think, and practical steps to make your website usable by as many people as...
| personal-favourites, lyric-essays | 816 words
TAGS: writing, creativity, digital culture, AI, authenticity, nature
The spotted lanternfly is beautiful and terrible, an invasive species that illuminates even as it destroys. AI-generated content is flooding the Internet, and authenticity is becoming a premium commodity. We must refuse the premise that human...
| personal-favourites | 1,290 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, philosophy, writing, creativity, risk, identity, accountability
Nassim Nicholas Taleb's concept of 'skin in the game' is the idea that true learning only happens when you have something to lose. And I look at IndieWeb principles of using what you make to publishing under your real name. Having risk and real...
| 2,014 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, fanfiction, community, technical, web development, law, moderation, tagging
Building fanfiction.lol taught me that some promises are impossible to keep. I wanted canonical tags for everything and 'write whatever you want' as a tagline, but Canadian obscenity laws and the philosophical complexity of tag wrangling forced...