Responding to Dan Q's post on blogging expectations, I argue that you don't need to blog at all to participate in the IndieWeb. Your website can be shrines, art, or anything else. A retrospective on the poisonous gamification and commodification of blogging from the early 2000s, and the IndieWeb as a return to original weblogging where the Internet belongs to humans.

The desktop computer is a miracle of human ingenuity, from the microscopic precision of Intel's Core Duo processor to the vast possibilities of offline and online computing. On the tragic decline of desktop towers, the IndieWeb and open-source software as alternatives to corporate platforms, and why we should take the time to become system admins and webmasters.

The video game industry is in a cynical, exploitative state with unfinished AAA releases, microtransactions, rising hardware costs, and studio closures. But there's an alternative I'd like to talk about: indie art games, the growing retro handheld scene, and my decision to play the extensive library I already own on a Retroid Pocket 2S rather than chasing new expensive hardware.

Responding to Coyote's critique of Bubbles.town and feed aggregators, I argue that the IndieWeb needs more interlinkers—bloggers who meaningfully synthesize and weave together the writing of others. On the garden/stream/campfire metaphors for the web, the difference between linkdumps and synthesis, Justin Hall's early web work, and how every link out is a stitch that strengthens the fabric of the blogosphere.

Cet article de blogue est écrit en français. This blog post is written in French. Sur la traduction des termes de l'IndieWeb en français québécois, l'état actuel des ressources francophones (wiki IndieWeb, Vincent Breton, Radio-Canada), la tradition néologique du Québec via l'OQLF (courriel, pourriel, clavardage, etc.), les termes déjà existants (blogue, fédivers, auto-hébergement), et des propositions pour de nouveaux termes comme PSSA pour POSSE, rétrolien pour webmention, et jardin clos pour walled garden. Un appel à la discussion sur la traduction des termes techniques dans les langues non-anglophones.

I decided to build brennan.click, a wiki-linked digital commonplace book in Eleventy, with auto-generated stubs created with eleventy-plugin-interlinker, pure-CSS hover transclusion and footnotes with no JavaScript, and a plain-text /urlminder.txt feed that drives a Beeminder goal.

After deleting corporate social media, I'm returning to Beeminder, a commitment tool that charges you money for failing to complete tasks, to reclaim my productivity. I explain how Beeminder works through externalizing willpower, share my current 17 goals across personal development, learning, creative work, and productivity, and integrations that make it seamless.

What could a prestige antihero legal drama and a shonen apocalypse epic have in common? As it turns out, love. An analysis and comparison of Attack on Titan and Better Call Saul. Beyond the violent carnage, there's a tender love and labour which these two impossibly different pieces of media share.

Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has higher duplication, lower reuse, and can run up to 446x slower. Neither max lines nor min lines is the poin. Code is what you write after you've found something that needs it.

Yesterday, Unattributed posted a thorough dissection of my article on note-taking PKMs, analyzing my lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor research. I use this as an opportunity to discuss the milkshake duck phenomenon, my experience with scrupulosity (moral OCD), and how to stay visible while imperfect through self-compassion rather than rule-following.

Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence, people should climb rungs progressively. Start with BearBlog or Pika, learning hand-coded HTML, then move to static site generators when ready. This applies progressive disclosure to onboarding, avoiding the curse of knowledge that makes experts skip beginner-friendly steps.

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? Has there been a meaningful increase of wisdom since these became popular? I went to look for an answer.

Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my writing will do for others.

A sequel to my Eleventy build post: this time the bottleneck wasn't the build tool, it was the hosting bill. Notes on caching webmentions and guestbook fetches, killing a dead Discord webhook, nearly breaking my JSON feed, and a git error I still don't have an answer for.