12/24:

Dev:

• MF feed
  • Recreate existing feed in /projects
  • Check, validate
  • Automate with .astro listing
  • Publish w/ 307 redirect
• Webmentions.app
  • For scanning new posts for outgoing mentions
• More MF, like author
• Finally implement the video/youtube switcher

Writing:

• Time-sensitive:
  • Future of Indieweb
  • Alien intro
  • 20 years since moving to SF
  • New year resolutions/rituals
  • Chris Aldrich interview
• IWCSD
  • Recap
  • Photos
  • Publishing mishap (how to handle? Redirects, new slugs? Does new guid make new entries? Preserve and show outline?)
    • “Intentionally double-posting to RSS”
• Book
  • Outro? Link to next one
  • Tack on a roundup to intro?
  • Re-promote on socials?
• New MF feed
  • Rationale
  • Less complexity, maintenance, brittleness
  • More post types, easier previews
  • Fun new thing
• Site documentation
  • Changelog of recent updates
  • Recap and deep dive on particular topics, e.g. microformats or photos
• 2025 recap
  • Best TV shows: The Studio, Franchise, Devs, Pluribus…?
  • Best movies: go through Letterboxd
  • Books: Game of Thrones audiobooks, War and Peace, Jules Verne

Reading:

• Coffee break to go through feeds and carnivals

  • Quick replies for as many as possible

Fall/Winter 25 Project Ideas

I’m going to let the long post about “the web is great” brew for a bit until I get a few more site projects out of the way:

• Using the gallery-and-article hybrid format to finally publish a long form memorial for my dog Cosmo. I already published the bones of it privately on Facebook to family and I want to do even more for when I bring it to my blog/indieweb family.

• Migrating from Astro to Eleventy under the hood so I can do all of the above faster and more smoothly with better RSS support web components instead of MDX/JSX.

• Clean up the redundant css and associated templates for the blog; finish the markdown migration after Eleventy.

• Creating a photo uploader that takes images in multiple aspect ratios at once, auto creates a post about it.

• My own custom auto-posting to Mastodon, possibly other services too.

• Recapping the last two IWCSD’s to prep for the upcoming one.

• Hosting the January movie club with Alien.

• More blogging and event topics to flesh out: books, movies, photography, design, microformats for beginners, interviews. Use the zooms to think about and capture blog posts, and blog posts and social media to drive more zooms. Think about creating recurring monthly zooms about the blogging carnival topics.

DONE:

• Write up a short intro for Non-Designer’s Design Book! Hosting the December book club with the design book.

• Hosting the photography popup and using that as a deadline to write up my work on photos and responsive images.

• Review (and possibly consolidate) the docs

• Doing as much of this before IWCSD as possible, so I can publish recaps from the first two beforehand as a way to frame some of the discussion points I’ve had floating around in my mind all summer.

• Wrapping up my photo gallery implementation that I’ve been working on all week (it’s so performant that maybe I should open source it? Never done anything like that before, happy to hear some advice or tips) ✓ UPDATE 11/20: V1 is feature complete and live!

Brain dump tracking idea

Can Cursor keep track of my projects?

The content ideas in this file were dumped here without a better place to go.

It’d be nice if there was a text-based todo for content strategy that cursor could work with, similar to how the Photos project came together. Maybe in the new /docs folder?

Long post brain dump

Apps vs Content

I.e. the web is awesome

(pasted from a message to #dev on indieweb slack on 11/8)

(sparked by sharing my “apps vs content” mental framing to understand the big commercial mainstream web vs the indieweb with a bit more neutral and empathetic mindset, rather than the antagonistic one)

“The web” isn’t just one thing (and it’s not dying either, IMO)

If the web was dying, then by definition the indieweb couldn’t be thriving, right? But it’s super alive and been a huge source of re-finding my love of the game again in the last two years.

James: Not only that, the “web is dying” discourse does not acknowledge that there are new people who are deliberately opting to make personal websites as a means of expression online.

Yes! The creative new spark that feeds the virtuous circle.

So true that we need more optimism.

Honestly, I think I’ve got a solid 5-10k word long form essay in me about how the web is thriving.

Something about how the indieweb doesn’t need big tech to die (or even be evil) in order to be good on its own.

Flesh out with:

Also, for this particular idea, maybe link to the webappreciation variations in the /drafts folder, it might be the same “web is cool, not dead” thesis.

Also also, consider parodying the Wired cover and make a cool giant orange graphic about the “web is alive” with the “dead” struck out and replaced with the alive text, or to style a “not” before the dead as a superscript with the ^ up carrot.