Overnight hiking trip. 🗻☀️🏕️

Knot, my little microblogging system, can now crosspost to Bluesky and Mastodon. I admit this is more news for me than for anybody else — but in the long run you can expect more quality content from my side on these platforms!

Another step towards a more solid POSSE strategy: post to my own site first, then syndicate as well as possible to where the audience still lingers. Testing it in real life conditions now. If that holds up, it goes into the Knot repo next week.

Every year tinyawards.net hand out a prize for the best of the small, poetic, handmade web — personal projects, built by one or two people, far away from commercial mainstream. The public nominates, a selection committee picks a shortlist, and then the public votes.

If you want to see what's possible on the web if you have some time, some dev skills and a huge amount of daring creativity, look here!

Eleven sites are on this year's shortlist, and voting is open until September 25th. Go click! tinyawards.net

Jim Mitchell's IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto: eight theses reading the personal site as DIY culture. I hope new perspectives like this can help getting new audiences interested in independent web publishing!

indiewebispunk.net

This is what I packed for the holiday in Milan and Corsica this year. Not that I ever thought I would it read it ALL … Robin Sloan, "The Writer & the Witch" – On top sits the smallest and by far the most beautiful object of the pile: Robin Sloan's short story **The Writ...

At the moment there are two initiatives running in the world of weblogs and blogging: Blaugust and 100 Days to Offload. They differ in the details. The first is about a month of posting, the other about a hundred posts in a year. But the aim is the same: to get people writi...

It’s holiday time! Spend our first day in Milan. There might be more travel photography here in the next days. Or maybe not. Because I’m on holiday!

I just published a long essay on a question that nagged me for years. I always felt that more creatives should run their own self-hosted websites — but I was never sure I was right. So instead of arguing for it, I examined every option as objectively as I could, with its real advantages and pitfalls, so readers can reach their own informed conclusions!

Read here: tilman.me/garden/How+can+creative+practitioners+publish+on+the+web+today%3F

Geoffrey Litt has a great new perspective on how we work with AI-generated code. We're not bound to prompting and moving on. We can have the AI explain what it built — teaching the background, building intuition before showing code, even ending with an interactive quiz so w...

I just put together a »web feed roll« — a hand-picked list of blogs I actually read, each with a short intro and their latest posts pulled via RSS/Atom. Web feeds are a quiet, open way to follow people online — no ads, no engagement bait, just posts showing up when they're p...

I spent the weekend at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg, the fifth edition in this city — two days at the tollwerkstatt as part of Nürnberg Digital Festival, in good company with a bunch of IndieWeb folks.

The highlight of Day 1 was René's session, “Make the web great again.” It gloriously derailed into everyone trying to out-do each other with the silliest, most gleefully useless links the web has to offer. I hope there is a blog post soon, but for a starter: esd-systeme.de. A reminder that the indie web isn't only specs and Webmentions — it's also delight.

Day 2 was Create Day and I built a Web Feed Roll for this site. It deserves its own post, so more on that very soon.

Everything is documented in detail on the IndieWeb Wiki: indieweb.org/2026/Nuremberg

I love Daniel Eatock’s website! The way he publishes his art and ideas for decades on this beautifully simple website is a tremendous accomplishment. And very inspiring. That is why I wrote a page on my digital garden about it. Already part three of a series on inspiring websites.

Another Homebrew Website Club Nuremberg last night — and I'm still delighted that this friendly, diverse group of practitioners meets monthly in my city. Interesting, inspiring, relaxed, and funny, as always.

Once again, thanks to Björn for documenting everything: indieweb.org/events/2026-06-10-hwc-nuremberg

And if you're even remotely curious about joining us: we're hosting a special edition for the Nürnberg Digital Festival! nuernberg.digital/de/events/2026/homebrew-website-club-nuedigital

Skywalker

Last month I went to my first IndieWebCamp, in Düsseldorf. After years of Homebrew Website Clubs, this was a big step up. IndieWebCamp? The IndieWeb is a community of people who run their own websites – their own domain, their own content, their own identity online – inste...

I vibe-coded a mobile camera web app, because I miss the old days when mobile photography was such a great creative field. Surprisingly the Snapseed app is still around, so I used it for additional layering.

I published a new garden page one week ago documenting the Platformer Game Jam 2026 – students building games in Godot at the design faculty. (Godot's web export is genuinely great, by the way!) I used it as my first proper test of POSSE-style publishing. A long form text...

16 Bachelor of Design students at TH Nürnberg built a platformer in the faculty's project week. Only three had ever used a game engine before. Three days later, ten games were finished — solo or in small teams, all playable in any browser.

The most interesting part isn't the speed. It's what made it possible. Godot has become a solid open-source engine that students learn in hours rather than days. And the web has quietly grown into a remarkably universal free and open platform for interactive media — built on open standards, no media platforms or app stores in sights. WebAssembly lets compiled engines like Godot run in the browser at near-native speed. A finished game ships as a folder of HTML, WASM, and assets. You just send a URL. A good time to be designing digital things.

→ Full write-up, photos, all ten games: tilman.me/garden/Platformer+Game+Jam+2026

You can now subscribe again to new posts on this microblog by JSON and RSS feed! (Need some help on feeds?)

I managed to squash some tricky bugs with the help of Claude code. Does that mean I can reactivate development of the Knot system? I don’t know …

Thanks go out to Daniel, who I met at IndieWebCamp three weeks ago. In a very friendly and supportive manner he introduced me to the embarrasing truth that my web feeds were utterly and completely broken. He knows a lot about feeds, because he runs FeedCity.

Don’t ever underestimate what can happen, if a bunch of friendly like-minded people spend a weekend together. So thankful for having been a part of it: IndieWebCamp Düsseldorf 2026 indieweb.org/2026/Düsseldorf

www.inkandswitch.com celebrate their 10 year anniversary with a great piece of interactive creative coding on their website. Make sure you activate the ampersand shaped circuit in the upper left …

tools.rmv.fyi

A collection of small, low stakes and low effort tools.

No logins, no registration, no data collection. I can't believe I have to say that. Long live the handmade web.

Onionboots made a very entertaining wrap up about the independent web today: A Web Revival: the Internet didn't die, you're just not on it. This video is about making websites instead of scrolling reels. Also don't miss the follow-up video.

youtu.be/tkUgOT22F5s?si=bRzAv1HOxSwn9gWD

I haven’t heard of Ninajirachi so far, but this video seems to be exactly what electronic dance music must sound and look like in 2026. If you can stand audiovisual hardcore, please check her Infohazard music video. www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2ZdeIKJA8c