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  1. Screw it… I’m sprucing up the ol website today with a holiday theme. I implemented Zach Leatherman’s snow-fall web component across the site.

    My site is red and green (mostly forest green) today but the message in the footer is universal: “Peace on earth, good will to all.” Happy everything you celebrate.

    Enjoy the holiday theme until Jan. 6 or whenever I decide to take it down.

    Dec 19, 2025 09:24 PM

  2. I got a new computer recently and I think I configured NVM, NPM, and all the dependencies this site runs on correctly so I can update my website from this new machine.

    I RSVP’d to an IndieWeb event today: IndieWeb Black Friday Create Day — Build Don’t Buy. A clever bit of holiday season counter-programming. I’ll see if I can work on the site a bit on my day off today.

    Nov 28, 2025 11:49 AM

  4. Early this morning, I edited yesterday’s post on Understanding Comics to remove a chunk about the Cracker Barrel logo backlash, meme culture, and AI generated comic strips. I don’t know what kind of argument I was trying to make about visual communication or visual literacy with these examples, or what any of it had to do with Scott McCloud’s book. I added some observations about creators and world-building instead and I think it makes the post a bit easier to read.

    I wanted to get the post out there Sunday, while some of my impressions were still fresh in my mind. My blogging process is a bit messy and I’m always sanding off the rough edges. This seemed like a big enough change to note here for anyone who may have noticed the missing paragraph.

    Nov 10, 2025 05:14 PM

  8. Slow renewal

    If a RSS feed goes a month without updates, or a social feed goes quiet for a week without warning, do you assume the worst about its creator? Or can you assume the best?

    Apr 21, 2025 10:24 PM

  9. Oof. My sincere apologies to anyone subscribing via RSS or other means who has been flooded with posts from me this weekend. I’ve already heard from at least one of you.

    I had to set up redirects from the old RSS feeds to the new ones, and changed DNS settings, and also made the www prefix my primary domain. Seventeen years of running this website, and you’d think I’d have learned some things by now.

    I’m so sorry for messing up your experience.

    Feb 17, 2025 12:38 AM

  12. Made a couple updates to my /now page.

    This thing is now powered by several widgets pulling in stuff automatically, plus some blocks of text I update manually.

    From top to bottom:

    1. My latest status, powered by status.lol.
      (daily-ish?)

    2. What I’m up to these days, powered by the block editor.
      (seasonally)

    3. My current pile of books, powered by Literal.
      (monthly)

    4. Latest tracks from Last.fm, powered by this pretty good Vercel app.
      (daily)

    5. The current weather in Albuquerque, powered by the Location Weather plugin (which is itself powered by the Open Weather Map API).
      (hourly)

    I signed up for a Letterboxd account recently, and I might add a widget for that next if I can find a good one. But I don’t watch a lot of movies these days, so I don’t know how appropriate it is for my /now page.

    I like to think of a now page as a snapshot in time, and mine is a mix of things that are updated hourly, daily, weekly, monthly, or on an ongoing basis.

    If I were a better programmer this would all be APIs, not this fragile mix of third-party widgets. What’s nice is that none of this third-party stuff contains ad trackers or cookies (as best as I can tell).

    Jul 23, 2024 10:08 AM

  14. In IndieWeb parlance, POSSE means Publish (on your) Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere. I like the concept. Today, I’m changing a few things about how I syndicate my content.

    All my main feeds (posts, notes, likes) will continue to automatically syndicate to my account over at Micro.blog. Micro.blog is a wonderful platform. While I no longer host my content there, I will still syndicate and interact with the community.

    I turned off automatic cross-posting to my Bluesky account and my Mastodon account. The way Micro.blog handles cross-posting is nice, but I want to have a little more control over what my notes and posts look like on these platforms. They are similar to Micro.blog, but different in many ways too. Not just in the way links look and character limits, either.

    When I look at my timeline on either of these apps, it…looks like a bot.

    So I find myself deleting many of the automatic Bluesky copies and editing the Mastodon ones later, because I’m fickle about how these things look. So I’m going to always post here first, but will try manually cross-posting to Bluesky, Mastodon, and elsewhere. My hope is that this will make me more intentional about what I share and how I share it.

    Also, maybe not every post on my website needs to be versioned on another social network. I’m going to try being OK with that, too.

    Jul 2, 2024 08:43 PM

  15. I added a new page to my site at /loves.

    I already have IndieWeb “likes”, but I thought it would be nice to add a site section for things I love, or have meant a lot to me over the past decades. Currently: favorite newspaper comics, sports teams, music, and “Misc.”

    Loosely inspired by The Loved List by Ankur Sethi, and anyone else who has something similar on their personal site.

    Jun 30, 2024 07:30 PM

  17. Bookmarked Remove Cookies from YouTube Videos in WordPress.

    Here’s a handy code snippet which I copied into my inc/filters.php file that modifies WordPress’ default YouTube block to use the youtube-nocookie.com domain.

    /**
 * Modify YouTube Embeds to Disable Cookies.
 * 
 * @link https://www.wpexplorer.com/wordpress-youtube-embeds-nocookie/
 */
add_filter( 'embed_oembed_html', function( $html, $url, $attr, $post_id ) {
	if ( str_contains( $url, 'youtube.com' ) ) {
		$html = str_replace( 'youtube.com', 'youtube-nocookie.com', $html );
	}
	return $html;
}, 10, 4 );

    Using Blacklight from The Markup, I can inspect a URL and see that the third-party cookies from Alphabet, Inc. are now removed. Even in a cookie-free YouTube embed, however, there still appears to be an ad tracker from Alphabet. Vimeo embeds also use third-party cookies, by the way.

    It would be awesome to somehow provide a cookie-free embed option for YouTube and Vimeo in WordPresss core, or offer this functionality with a plugin. I’m imagining something like a toggle in the block settings. Toolbelt could be a good contender to offer this extra functionality. The search terms “cookie” and “youtube” bring up a bunch of plugins in the WordPress directory I probably would not want to install on my site.

    I currently do not have a cookie banner on my website, and I don’t want to create one. Maybe instead of embedding videos on my site in the future, I should just link to them (on an Invidious instance?) instead.

    Apr 9, 2024 01:55 PM

  18. The Website Carbon Calculator recently updated its rating system, and it has been a while since I tested my website. So let’s see the results.

    My home page, which is an index of the most recent 10 posts scored a B today: “cleaner than about 66% of all web pages globally”. My web hosting appears to be running on “sustainable energy” which sounds good…I don’t have a ton of insight into how Flywheel/WPEngine runs their data centers, so there is a chance that the company offsets their emissions.

    I wanted to test another page since there’s an embedded YouTube video on my homepage today, so I tried the All The Things page, which scored an A – hooray! I suspect this is because there are fewer assets and requests happening on this particular page.

    I’m sure there is much more I can do to optimize my website performance and reduce my website’s carbon footprint. Maybe I can do some digital xeriscaping this year.

    Mar 17, 2024 09:35 PM

  21. In case you were wondering what the process looked like for creating featured images, type specimens and other visual examples for the 26 Days of Type series…here’s a peek at my file in Adobe Illustrator.

    dozens of pastel colored adobe illustrator artboards plastered with type

    Mar 1, 2024 03:07 PM

  26. I removed the WP Dark Mode plugin from my site. Too much extra JS. Too many conflicts with other third party code.

    I think I can implement a better version on my site using other tools…someday. For now, I changed the main background color to something a bit dimmer as a compromise.

    Dec 26, 2023 09:54 PM