FeedCity

Hiking at Lake Brownwood State Park, came up on this red cardinal.

On Bluesky: I can't tell you how tired I am of copying and pasting the same text into five different silos. When will this ridiculous system that claims to be the web, get its shit together and start acting like the web (ie interop).

One never steps into the same river twice. The natural world is dynamic. The molecules in our human bodies–presumably you’re a human being if you are reading this–get replaced. I suppose that’s a “Ship of Theseus” thing. Anyway, this website you’re reading this on, or the feed you’re reading it on, is continually changing. And...

The war in Iraq started in March 2003. That was also the month I arrived in Cambridge after driving cross-country from Woodside, CA. Because I did most of my blogging on scripting.com, I still have a good archive of how I experienced both those things. It's also the month we got the Harvard weblogs going, but they have not stood up so well. I wouldn't have predicted then that my personal blog would survive the system we started at one of America's great universities.

Today feels like the day the war in Iraq began. Wars are easy to start, hard to end. They actually called Bush a "visionary" on MSNBC, they were so in awe of his courage, but that would end soon. And this time, no doubt Trump started the war with the approval of China and Russia, which will be left alone by the US in their conquest of Taiwan and Ukraine. Leaders of smaller countries must be wondering where they can hide from this. A very depressing moment. I've lived through two voluntary wars by the US, first Vietnam, then the post-911 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and now this war.

Hand-coded, syndicated, and above all personal websites are exemplary: They let users of the internet to be autonomous, experiment, have ownership, learn, share, find god, find love, find purpose. Bespoke, endlessly tweaked, eternally redesigned, built-in-public, surprising UI and delightful UX. The personal website is a staunch undying answer to everything the corporate and industrial web has taken from us.

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The past is a foreign country that we should impose tariffs on.

— Matt Webb

Start a blog. Start one because the practice of writing at length, for an audience you respect, about things that matter to you, is itself valuable. Start one because owning your own platform is a form of independence that becomes more important as centralized platforms become less trustworthy. Start one because the format shapes the thought, and this format is good for thinking.

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They’re both long reads, but worthwhile.

Stopped for a view of the sunset along the road to Brownwood, with Honda Element micro-camper.

December 26, 2025 through January 2, 2026 Recent Events From events.indieweb.org/archive: January Hackathon Kickoff Thursday, January 1 at 12:00pm Join the kickoff for the first IndieWeb Hackathon event of 2026 with Omnibear maintainer Anthony Ciccarello! Front End Stu...

Joan Westenberg’s blog post this week is such a perfect start to 2026. It sets the tone for what we should keep working on throughout the year. Just picking out a few things to quote… On the value of exploring ideas through longer blog posts: You can write a post working th...

While traveling last week, I found myself thinking back to when Kindles came with free cellular connectivity. It’s a minor problem, but it’s not worth the trouble of connecting a Kindle to hotel wi-fi, so if juggling multiple devices you miss sync. I’ll sometimes read on both a Kindle and my iPhone.

Working on support for standard.site in Micro.blog. I had blogged earlier this year about potential AT Proto lexicons for long-form posts, but I didn’t get much feedback, so I’m happy to follow the work that has already been done here by Leaflet and others.

This is one of those times when you pay the price for working past your timeout, like a pitcher pitching too many pitches in one game. There's an item on your checklist, and you'd love to take it off before you start the next session. You copy paste something, get it to work...

BTW, I used to have a tradition in the early days of this blog to write new stuff about an important idea on January 1 each year. At some point I stopped doing that. Now I realized that unintentionally I have just written such a piece, below. There's a lot of good stuff in that piece and in the places it links to. See the web is still useful. You won't hear these ideas on CNN or MS.NOW or in the NYT, WP, or from any billionaires either. I'm not saying I'm right, I've definitely been wrong before. But I think I'm mostly right. ;-)

This year I switched to Original Medicare for 2026 after being on super duper insurance industry enhanced Medicare for the first five years. I should've known that it's super duper for them but not so great for the insured person or the taxpayer, that is -- me. They have set...

I still use Google. And I like the AI response they put at the top of the page, even though I get that it's bad for the web. Maybe there's a position for a web-only search engine. One where my writing has a chance of being seen by interested parties, rather than being conver...

Looking ahead: humans are cool again.