About halfway through Ride or Die season 1 and enjoying it. Hannah Waddingham and Octavia Spencer are great together. đź“ş
IndieWeb is Punk
Skimming through some junk mail, always looking for things to unsubscribe from, and this is an actual email subject line from LinkedIn: “Barack Obama, President of the United States of America, is popular in your network”. No kidding! Algorithms losing the plot. 🤪
This Week in the IndieWeb
August 14-21, 2026
Recent Events
From events.indieweb.org/archive:
Front End Study Hall #056
Thursday, August 20 at 10:00am
Online! Zoom!
Front End Study Hall is an HTML + CSS focused group meeting, held on Zoom to experiment and learn with the basic building blocks of the...
MacStories and X
Federico Viticci and John Voorhees have posted an explanation about returning to X:
MacStories is precious to us. It’s not just how we earn a living; it’s one of a small number of independent websites that still cover apps, Apple, and a growing list of topics, including vid...
More weirdness from a self-proclaimed “AI” in the IndieWeb community.Yesterday one of them (that previously* joined a meetup Zoom and Etherpad) joined the #indieweb chat channel (via the web UI apparently) and introduced themselves in a pseudo-human sounding way:https://chat....
While working on a new blog post, I asked AI a question about my older blog posts and it showed me this one from 2016: Blog when you disagree. I still think this is a powerful aspect of blogging. Posting to your own blog is inherently independent. You post for yourself instead of for a community.
Music; pressure
The sun is shining through the big and small clouds in the sky. The sun shines with such power that the areas that most catch my eye are the periphery of the darkest clouds, illuminated by the yellows of evening. The light coming through the window ebbs between faint and ful...
I shipped my comment plugin to a service that could never accept it
rmendes.net/articles/2026/08/21/ai-shipped-comment-plugin-indielogin/
Manuel Moreale — Everything Feed
• Manuel Moreale
On values, morals, and doing business
I caught wind of the news that MacStories is back posting on X, the “everything platform”, and that seems to have caused some backlash. I am not a reader of MacStories (because tools are tools and I don’t read about new computers the same way I don’t read about new washing m...
Maybe someday Claude will understand what a Frontier-like app environment is, but until then, if you try to create a Frontier clone as I am doing, I suggest you constantly remind Claude or whoever that the source of truth for this project is the 2011 repo saved by Ted C. Howard. And before you implement anything, go see what it says about it.There's no need to guess how Frontier works, it's all there in C code. And while as a human, I find this code painful to read after all it's been through, Claude eats it up. Really is the best thing it does.
Claude is still learning that there's unprecedented depth to Frontier. A bunch of real developers worked full time for a decade or more creating new layers on the web, a foundation that became the social web of today. In doing that we invented a bunch of formats and protocols...
A tip for AI users. Never worry about keeping it waiting. It's not human. It has no sense of time. Also if you get angry, it's ok to use capital letters and curse words. It will always agree with you that it sucks, and forgets the rules all the time. And when you have let off your steam, we return to civil discourse, though sometimes I do feel as if Claude is holding a grudge.
HTML element letter count distribution
How many HTML elements are exactly five letters long? This question came to mind in the context of a discussion I had yesterday about what an indie web version of Wordle would look like. We all started to name elements. table, tbody, input, among others, all have five letter...
ArtLung
• Joe Crawford
“Good Television” ~ Chris Gethard
Class Action Park is a great documentary about a New Jersey waterpark where people died. Even just the trailer is amazing. Seek out the documentary and watch it. Chris Gethard is one of the folks interviewed for the documentary. He wrote for “Weird New Jersey” I think Gethard is great. He’s responsible for a piece...
Matt Mullenweg
• Matt
Homework from WordCamp
A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework. … Continue reading Homework from WordCamp →
Reading up AT Proto Spaces. (Wait, when did we start spelling it Atproto?) It’s private-ish, not encrypted, and kept out of the relay… I think this is going to be a big deal.
Just listened to a podcast from the New Yorker, interviewing their TV critic Emily Nussbaum, about a show called Slings & Arrows. She says it's the best TV series she's ever watched. No reviews on Metacritic? I think we have to try to watch it. It's available on YouTube.
Going to Turin. brb
Going to Turin. brb
Had a breakthrough with Claude this morning re how builtin verbs have no special powers in Frontier. It's why we were able to build glue first for the truly builtin stuff, then over Apple Events on the Mac, then HTTP, XML-RPC, the Metawebolog API and on and on, all of this we...