man.
man is not a certain breed of anonymous, nihilistic blogger who mistakes callousness for wisdom and detachment for depth. man is different. man is better.
Posts tagged "indieweb"
99 posts with this tag.
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A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress
I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300-baud Apple IIe BBS to today's NetBSD network of DEC Alphas and Opterons; a tour of the shell, gopher, and gemini services; how to join, plus two hands-on bonuses: writing a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook and making a site Dillo-compatible.
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Static Site Generators for Beginners
Written for a 32-bit Café thread asking where to even begin with static-site generators. I go over the free resources I'd learn first (and why hand-rolled HTML beats an SSG for your very first site), a plain-language glossary of the jargon docs never define, a brief history from HSC and Movable Type to Jekyll, why git gets recommended everywhere, my own beginner starters, and tiny alternatives like barf, bashblog, and kiki.
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LLMs Democratize Extraction and Scale Malice
Responding to Coyote's essay on data ownership, I look at how genAI has democratized the kind of extraction that once required corporate infrastructure—iLands spam agents, scrapers, and agent swarms—why my apathy-and-ignorance approach to AI crawlers is no longer enough, the two competing realities of AI 2027, and the tools and organizing we actually have: ai.robots.txt, Glaze and Nightshade, tech-worker unions, and the CARE and OCAP principles of Indigenous data governance.
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Creating a Blog in Gemini://
Creating your own corner of Geminispace: why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; where to host a capsule (SmolPub, the Tildeverse, flounder, Gemcities); how the community's gemlog conventions work; and the surprising social life of Gemini BBS, Station, and Astrobotany. Plus ASCII art, CGI scripting, and every gemini:// link I've found worth keeping.
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There is so much to love and celebrate. Reclaim joy. Be open. Forgive.
Taking stock of myself and the world, I reflect on the overwhelming joy of being alive on this Pale Blue Dot—from the billions keeping civilization running to the unpaid volunteers maintaining curl and OpenSSL—and argue that reclaiming joy is an act of resistance against systems built on scarcity and fear. People are inherently good, and there is always room for grace.
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Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools
Reacting to the Omarchy and DigitalOcean news, I set out a curated low-spec, text-first alternative to the modern web: Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Lynx-friendly sites, terminal readers, public Unix communities, and peer-to-peer networks like Yggdrasil, I2P, and Hyphanet.
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How the Mysterious ScreenJesus can DDoS You
How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews, has no rate limits and will happily visit thousands of your pages—and anything they embed—in minutes. Notes on accidental DDoS, opaque infrastructure, and a plea for caching and rate limiting.
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Tending the Garden I Have: A Current State of Affairs
Taking stock of my digital garden before the first frost: an honest audit of everything I'm tending online, from Brennan.day and fanfiction.lol to my 565-day writing streak, plus the projects I've neglected, the intentional prunes I'm happy with, and the dead plants I need to admit aren't growing—including a shelved radio show, a dormant newsletter, and an unstarted school.
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100 Questions for Webmasters
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 everything else about being a webmaster.
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A Few Small Things
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.
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Creating an Open-source Blogging Studies Syllabus
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 pedagogy, and invite contributors and learners to help shape it.
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Bubbles.town: Four Months Later
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 problems, and sparse community participation. Overall, Bubbles is a valuable tool among many for web discovery, but not without its problems.
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A 450-year History of Blogging
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 Barger's 'weblog,' Justin Hall's online diary, the rise of Blogger and Medium, and the state of the blogosphere in 2026.
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IndieWeb Ethos and Pagecord
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 being aware of platform creators' values and operations matters, and the importance of eventually learning to self-host for true independence.
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Writing By Accident & Surrendering On 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 nature of my blogging journey, the finite fragility of life, and finding meaning in the surrender to compulsion rather than the pursuit of purpose.
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A Guide to Becoming a Rogue Scholar
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 Eleventy site as citable, permanent, and discoverable as institutional scholarship.
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Outjerked by the Trickster
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 trickster storytelling can build empathy through shared laughter.
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WEBMASTER@ a manifesto for everyone
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 become a webmaster with minimal tools. Webmastery is an act of digital repatriation and human agency against corporate platforms and AI orchestration.
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Suspect Happiness in Pursuit: An Anti-Interview with Unstory
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: humanist optimism vs. anti-humanist determinism, and the strange beauty of two people staring at the same abyss.
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I Would Have Written a Shorter Blog Post, But I Didn’t Have the Time: Creating a WriterDeck
On the KISS principle and Pascal's apology for long letters, the cultural shift away from minimalism, and the growing trend of writer decks. A technical guide to creating a distraction-free writing environment by removing the desktop environment entirely and using terminal-only Linux distributions like Debian, Ubuntu Server, Arch, or Alpine. There's so much you can do in the terminal! There's applications for file management (ranger), web browsing (Lynx, w3m), markdown reading (glow, mdcat), email (Alpine, NeoMutt), IRC (WeeChat, Irssi), music (cmus, MPD), RSS (Newsboat), and writing tools (Micro, WordGrinder), plus document management via git or rsync cron jobs... oh, this is kind of long-winded, isn't it?
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Free Speech and the IndieWeb
After rescinding a recommendation for BlueDwarf, I explore the spectrum of harm across platforms from X to Substack, and argue that not all harm is equal. On free speech absolutism, cognitive dissonance in platform choices, and where we draw lines in the sand for what's acceptable in the IndieWeb.
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What Remains? My AuguStory
On the shutdown of EchoFeed and the ephemeral nature of services, why I blog (legacy, existentialism, making a mark), participating in AuguStory, academic studies on blogging benefits, and the paradox of 'nobody cares' as both a source of freedom and as a reminder that we all deserve to be heard, seen, and loved regardless of metrics or response.
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Five Interesting Indie Platforms You Might Not Have Heard Of
After deleting my corporate social media accounts, I've discovered four interesting indie platforms and online communities you might not have heard of: Special Fish, Ctrl + Shift + 3, web1.0 Hosting, and Pillowfort. A look at what makes each unique, from brutalist design to old-device accessibility, and a call to support the independent web financially.
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The Itch
Trying to figure out what 'the itch' is—my drive to create and contribute to the digital commons. A review of past projects, current interests in Indigenous data sovereignty and self-hosting, and the search for what comes next.
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Phoneblogging
Around 2 billion people access the internet exclusively via smartphones, yet the IndieWeb community largely neglects mobile-first design and phoneblogging UX. A casual survey of writers reveals three approaches to mobile publishing: no phoneblogging, partial (drafts on phone, finish on desktop), and full phoneblogging. The IndieWeb must prioritize accessible, simple ways to blog from phones while maintaining independence from corporate platforms.
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You Don't Have to Blog
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.
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Wow, I Love the 'Puter!
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.
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Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!
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.
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L'IndieWeb en français québécois?
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.
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Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder
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.
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Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb
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.
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People and Blogs Interview: Brennan Kenneth Brown
I was interviewed in Zachary Kai's People and Blogs series, founded by Manuel Moreale. I share about my background, the evolution of my blog, creative and technical workflows, philosophy on monetization, and advocacy for the IndieWeb.
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A Full Guide to Properly Delete Corporate Social Media Accounts
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and the human-side work the documentation doesn't mention.
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Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for how we spend them, the urgency of risk-taking in a world that needs it, and what it means to give everything you have before your inevitable departure.
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To My Readers: What Do You Want To See More Of?
I finally curated my blog posts into collections, revealing what I write about most: the IndieWeb, the craft of writing, community, technical tutorials, politics, culture, and more. A call to my readers to tell me what they want to see more of, and a reflection on how organizing my work helps me understand my own writing patterns and what I want to write more of.
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Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site
A walkthrough of how I wired up Standard.site AT Protocol lexicons into this 11ty blog: from writing a custom publish script to migrating to Sequoia, with code for the link tags, and handle verification.
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Blogging with Magic Unicode: Simple Doesn't Have to Mean Boring!
You don't need bloat. You can use CSS variables and Unicode symbols to add visual personality to your personal website while keeping it minimal, accessible, and fast-loading. Includes a reference of symbol sets (celestial, elemental, occult, card suits, chess, zodiac, and more) with colour examples using the Gruvbox palette.
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Shake Off the Dust!
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 crab outgrows shells, including the ones that still fit fine.
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Wonders of Webweaving Podcast Ep. #8: Brennan
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!
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Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers
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.
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How Webmentions Work on brennan.day
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.
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Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare
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 thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.
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Announcing folk.zone: An attempt to build the IndieWeb commons myself.
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 infrastructure for the common folk, not for enterprise or scale, inspired by omg.lol and rooted in the IndieWeb and Fediverse principles.
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A New IndieWeb Publication? or: I Want to Start Something and Be Bad at It
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 seeking collaborators who want to build something meaningful on the Internet together.
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Yes, Buy Them a Coffee: Support and Mutual Aid on the IndieWeb
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 support mechanisms to sustain independent art.
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Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?
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 possible.
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A Ship in Harbour is Safe
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 stakes is essential for creative work. A ship in harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
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I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep
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 me to adjust. Here's what I learned about running a community archive, the legal constraints I face, and the promises I can still keep.
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Be a Lover: Make Sure the Quiet Wheel Gets the Grease
The world isn't full of critics, it's full of quiet kind people who don't get nearly enough time or attention from us because we're born with a negativity bias. We need to proactively choose to be lovers and proactively grease the quiet wheels.
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The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators
So, my silly little fanfic project blew up like crazy and received some really negative feedback. And I think I understand why. Exploring the concept of boundary spanning and cross-pollination in online communities. Drawing on organizational theory and the work of Michael Tushman. We need people who move between different online subcultures to seed ideas and build bridges.
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Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.
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Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware
A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.
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Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how these protocols meet you where you are, whether you're on a machine from 2005 or just tired of Chrome's monoculture.
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Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!
After finding the tildeverse and the Tilde.town feels engine, I decided to build my own simple command-line tool for blogging that handles the full lifecycle of a blog post (creation, editing, building, and git push). A walkthrough of the design decisions, the modular architecture, and the tradeoffs of writing 700 lines of plain bash.
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A Love Letter to Everything
My first IndieWeb Carnival entry—the theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. A letter to the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, to the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every day, and to the IndieWeb friends I've met over the past few months. And finally, to curiosity: the embarrassing willingness to fall in love with a static-site generator or a transit system or a protocol nobody's heard of, which I've come to believe is what kept me alive.
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I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes
A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.
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Last Online 620 Weeks Ago: Why I'm Loyal to the IndieWeb
You visit your parent's house and find your white Xbox 360 in your childhood bedroom. A friends list full of gamertags that haven't booted up their own console in hundreds of weeks. On the heartbreak of digital disappearance, and why I'm committed to staying findable.
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Announcing My New Radio Show (a Love Letter to Public Access Television)
From Shaw Community Television on Channel 10 to Paper Tiger Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access was original community media. Anybody, any channel, no notes from the network. In that spirit, I'm starting a self-hosted radio station built on AzuraCast, automated with a Python cron job pulling public domain recordings from the Internet Archive, and I'm going to try to show up and broadcast.
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Writers Who Burned All Their Words feat. Bix Frankonis
I am a compulsive archivist, terrified of losing my words, but many of history's greatest writers asked for theirs to be burned. Kafka, Dickinson, Plath, Virgil all had their reasons. A meditation on self-erasure, ego, and the difference between the writing and the written thing, with an interview with Bix Frankonis, a contemporary writer who one day decided he needed to be smaller online, not bigger.
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Dreamwidth and Yearning for Humanity on the Web
The sonder and vertigo I feel about people's interior lives. Corporate social media fails to offer genuine witnessing. So, I look to Dreamwidth, a fork of LiveJournal, and fifteen years of unbroken communities. On digital gentrification and the difference between syndication and participation.
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Floating Up: An Interview with the creator of Bubbles.town, Benjamin Behnke
An interview with Benjamin Behnke, the creator of Bubbles.town, a community-driven aggregator for independent personal blogs. After controversy on Mastodon and 32-bit Café over his use of Anthropic's Claude to categorize blogs and bypass robots.txt signals, Ben responds about the mistake, the removal of the AI classification pipeline, a locally-trained Naive Bayes replacement, and stricter robots.txt enforcement. A reflection on software harm reduction, forgiveness, my Grandma Bubbles, and the fragile labours of love making the IndieWeb.
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The IndieWeb is Wonderfully Dionysian
A personal plea from me to you to write your own comments. On the genAI plague of LinkedIn, Meta ads, and Medium, and the human warmth of the IndieWeb. From deviantART's old comment culture to Seneca's letters and the Vindolanda tablets, through Nietzsche's Apollonian/Dionysian divide, the Renaissance of Real in A/W 2026/27 fashion, and Charli XCX's Brat. A call to write the messy, human, from-the-heart comment only you can write.
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Good, Standard Work: Creating the Commons
A defence of digital stewardship, IndieWeb principles, Blackfoot models of collective flourishing, and what it means to plant seeds in a garden you'll never see. From Garrett Hardin's infamous 1968 essay to Elinor Ostrom's Nobel Prize-winning refutation, the tragedy of the commons was never inevitable. It was always a choice.
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The Fool's Autopsy
A review of the prank I pulled yesterday, in addition to serious discourse about being silly, including thoughts on the role and importance of satire and literacy. I also share a detailed technical breakdown of the scripts that I added to the prank as well.
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Great News: brennan.day is being acquired!
After MONTHS of hard, gruelling work being completely independent on my personal site, I've been lucky enough to find healthy, sustainable partnerships with several incredible companies. Today, I'm sharing some significant changes to how brennan.day operates—and what that means for you, my readers.
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Being Taken Seriously as a Writer
There's tension between creative authenticity and professional presentation in the IndieWeb space. What does it mean to be taken seriously as a writer while maintaining personal joy and rejecting the aesthetic standards of capital?
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Over/Under #58 with Brennan Kenneth
I was interviewed by Hyde on lazybea.rs for their Over/Under series. Covering Discord, journaling, chess, Letterboxd, strawberries, and more.
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Building the Good Web
What does it actually mean to build a better web, and what do we owe each other in doing so? A response to the 32-bit Café thread about trust, onboarding, and the distance between knowing something is wrong and doing something about it.
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Trust and Faith in Our Web
What is trust in an AI-saturated internet? And a related question, how do we reckon with the barriers to onboarding people to the IndieWeb? We must cultivate faith in our digital interactions and make independent web spaces more accessible.
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Building brennan.day Part Two: IndieWeb, New Features, and Three Months of Iterations
What have I added to my site since I started in December? Quality-of-life improvements, new pages, interesting features, and of course, easter eggs! When you add a little each day, it really adds up.
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r/Calgary Deleted the Top Post of the Day Because I Wrote It Myself
I was permanently banned from r/Calgary for posting my own writing about local public library funding. What does this say about the state of local journalism?
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How are we preparing for the Long Web?
What will the Internet look like in 2036? 2046? How do we reckon with the challenges of digital preservation, link rot, and building for the Long Web in an age of ephemeral content?
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'The Friend of Mankind Is No Friend of Mine': What's the Misanthrope's Place in Community?
My second principle for the IndieWeb requires good faith writing excludes the misanthrope. I want to reconsider that, carefully. Because the question of who gets to be here, and why, is more interesting and more complicated than I first let on.
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The Work Isn't Finished, It's Abandoned: Thoughts on WIP Pages
On executive dysfunction, the tyranny of perpetual drafts, and choosing messy immediacy over cultivated perfection.
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Introducing the Toonie Club!
A new approach to creative support: one simple tier, full access for everyone. Inspired by Manuel Moreale's 'One a Month' Club, the Toonie Club offers sustainable patronage without complex tiers or exclusive content.
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Won't you be my neighbour?
We need to be good neighours to each other. But what does that mean on the IndieWeb? A look at mycorrhizal networks, Indra's Net, and the importance of building intentional connections between independent websites.
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My Malware Story Gets Stolen; Yet Another Argument for the IndieWeb
A few days after writing about a weird malware campaign, I discovered that half a dozen cybersecurity news outlets had picked up the story. They now outrank me on Google. A metacommentary on the state of internet journalism, attribution, and what it says that a netsec industry has to rely on amateurs to break stories.
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Apathetic, Intentionally. Why I don't block AI scrapers on my website.
This is my swan song on generative AI after writing six articles on the topic. Why I'm done with the AI discourse and instead fully leaning into the human and more-than-human web.
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The Many Wonders of Being a Late Bloomer
Being developmentally delayed has benefits, and I am embracing the journey of being a late bloomer in writing, web development, and life.
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The 1% Rule: An Open Letter to Everyone Who Doesn't Post Anything Online
A call to action for the 99% of internet users who consume but never create. If that's you (and it most likely is), then please read and consider what I'm asking."
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What is the IndieWeb?
I decide to throw my hat into the ring and define what exactly the IndieWeb movement is, the core principles, and why it matters for the future of the Internet.
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Introducing Ⓜ️ Meddler!
I created a Medium export converter for the IndieWeb that converts your Medium archive into clean Markdown for Jekyll, Hugo, Eleventy, or Astro.js. Available as both a command line tool, and a web interface.
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Announcing Three New Free JAMstack Blogging Themes
I've spent the last few weeks working on three new free themes for IndieWeb blogging: Indiepaper, Newsprint, and brennan.jp.net, all of which centre around giving people a place to call their own on the internet.
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Substack's Subpar Subculture
The newsletter platform is supposed to be the new economic engine for culture. Yet, they let hate speech fester. Why? The answer is obvious. Writing is treated as commodity instead of sacred art. But there is a solution.
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A Beginner's Guide to the IndieWeb for Writers Who Don't Code (But Maybe Want to a Little)
You don't need to be a developer to own your corner of the internet. A guide for writers, poets, and creators who want to escape algorithmic feeds and reclaim their digital presence. No computer science degree required.
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twtxt: Simple, Decentralized Microblogging with status.lol
I set up an effortless sync between my status.lol updates and a twtxt feed, creating a bridge between IndieWeb tools and classic decentralized microblogging.
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How You Can Support Indie Creators—and You Need To
Beyond tipping culture, there are meaningful ways to support independent creators that don't involve money. Here are eight of the best.
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What I Have Learned Being on the IndieWeb for a Month
A month of building, connecting, and discovering the independent web. Small technical joys that turned solitude into dialogue. Treat the Internet like a personal playground and lab!
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Posting to Your Static Site with Quill and Micropub
After building an IndieAuth comment system, I wanted to complete the loop by posting content to my site from an external client. Here's how I implemented a Micropub endpoint for my static site using Quill as the client.
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Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide
A guide to tools and resources for joining the independent web movement. Discover blogging platforms like Pika, search engines that prioritize small sites, directories for finding like-minded creators, and more.
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Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site
A journey through authentication, CORS issues, and the joy of owning your comments! Learn how to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions, storing the comments in your git repository.
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How Can We Use the Internet for Good?
A manifesto on what we do when the world is on fire: Daywriting. The deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance.
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Deploying An Eleventy Site to NeoCities with GitLab CI/CD
A guide to automatically deploying your Eleventy static site to NeoCities using GitLab CI/CD, including authentication, error handling, and optimizations.
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Building brennan.day Part One: Design, Rainbows, and Accessibility
A dive into how this site is built, why it exists, and the philosophy behind owning your corner of the web.
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Thoughts on Digital Third Spaces
Can the Internet be a place we can visit again? Can it replace what malls were supposed to be for us? A blog post about what we can do with what we have.
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Dawn of a New Day, Dawn of a New Year
Announcing the launch of brennan.day, an IndieWeb-focused personal site built with Eleventy, hosted on GitLab, and committed to ethical technology choices.
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omg.lol is the Internet We Need Right Now
Take back your corner of the Internet. Stop building on rented land. Stop trusting platforms that see you as product. Stop waiting for some company to make the “perfect” tool.
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Move to a Better Internet in 2026.
Why You (yes, you) Should Join Medium, Tumblr, and NeoCities.
![A trompe-l'œil painting depicting a scattered arrangement of printed papers, pamphlets, and book pages pinned to a light wood-grain surface by a vertical red stick or stylus. At the centre is a crumpled blue card bearing a detailed botanical illustration of a pink cabbage rose with green leaves on a dark background. The surrounding papers include fragments of English, German, and Latin text — visible phrases include 'LONDON,' 'WORK,' 'EVERY M[ONTH],' 'Printed for W. Griffin,' 'ELLARMINUS GENERTVS,' and a German title in red Gothic script reading 'Helmstädt, 1689.' The papers vary in style from English pamphlet typography to German blackletter, suggesting a multilingual 18th-century scholarly or publishing context. The overall composition mimics the look of real layered documents with careful attention to shadow and paper curl.](/assets/images/thumbnails/flower-letters-600w.webp)
