For the forseable future I’ll still be doing shorter posts here but longer posts have moved to a new hand-rolled labor of love. First post:
I’m not sure how well this will work out, this experimental next phase for my website and blog. This is the first time in a very long time that I’ve decided to return to an entirely manual blog. In a way it feels like returning home. My first websites were built back in the late 90s. Good times! I built Liberated Existence as the online version of our neighborhood resource center in late 1990s Memphis.
A blogging experiment that started with a bang of excitement but ends with a whimper
A story which begins with me excitedly experimenting with building a static blog for a client then dreaming of doing the same for myself only to realize I’m likely stuck.
After finally adding dark mode to my Beardy Guy Creative website a couple weeks ago I suppose my attention shifted to thinking a bit about that site as well as my Beardy Guy Musings blog. I’d previously hosted two blogs on Word Press, one for Beardy Guy Creative that focused on Apple tech and design, the other at beardystarstuff.net was everything else, mostly a mix of personal and thoughts on politics and world events. Fed up with Wordpress I moved beardystarstuff.net to Micro.blog a couple years ago and then merged the remaining tech focused blog into it a year later. I’ve liked having it all simplified in one blog on a service that is mostly reliable. I’ve got the visual character of both pretty well merged with similar logos on both as well as matching colors. All in all, it was a good move and posting to micro.blog has been much easier, more enjoyable.
So why am I experimenting with anything else? More than anything, it comes down to seeking even greater simplicity in the tech I’m using. I’ve used html and css for a very long time in building all of my websites. I started with coding html websites in the late 90s and I still love it. And, following on that, I’m thinking more about greater control of the tech I’m using. More about this further along in this post.
In August 2024 a couple things popped up that gave me a bit of inspiration and led me down a rabbit hole.
First, a client mentioned interest in a redesign of their website and along with it an interest in finally setting up some sort of blog. I’d mentioned it to them a while back as they have never had social media and didn’t want it. They do have a website that we update often and which could do with some sort of blog-like feature as a kind of social feed. As I redesigned the site I began to consider what a simple blog might look like. They don’t want to update it so I’ll be doing that. I’ll be lucky if I can get them to commit to a monthly post which they would send to me via Apple Messages for posting. Even with that kind of infrequent updating, if it becomes something we can stick to perhaps in the future frequency will increase so I wanted a manual update process that would be easy.
Short story long, this led me to create a process using Apple Shortcuts. It goes like this:
- Client sends text and/or photo for the blog.
- I copy it then use Spotlight to open the a Shortcut which opens a text entry field where I paste in the clipboard then hit okay. This runs a second Shortcut which:
- Creates a new html file in the Journal folder with the new post content. It copies that content along with a linked date at the top and combines it all. Opens up the main Journal index html file and I just paste the new entry at the top. All I have to do is upload this html file and the individual post html file. The end result is a blog that follows the usual format of most recent blog post at the top. Each post has a clickable date link to the individual post. The reason for this is I’ve also created an RSS xml file.
- After uploading the two html files I’ll open in Safari to confirm it looks as expected. Click through to the individual blog post page, select the text I want on the RSS feed, then use the Safari share sheet to run the “Selection to RSS” shortcut which opens the RSS file, I paste to the top. Upload to the server and the feed is now updated.
The whole process takes a couple minutes and isn’t much more than the time it takes me to post to my blog on micro.blog. I have a variation of the Shortcut that takes a selected image in the Photos app, optimizes and resizes, saves to the appropriate folder and duplicates the above steps to create a stand alone html file, etc. Again I just paste. The only difference is that with a photo post I have the additional temp of uploading the photo to the server.
Creating this blogging system on my client’s website was the first point of inspiration. The other was that I had also spent a few days rediscovering blogs and had begun experimenting with following blogs using Safari’s Tabs feature. That exploration of new-to-me personal sites and blogs got me mulling over my two sites, specifically how I blog and the question, do I want to make any changes?
I’m still mulling it over. I’ve got thousands of posts going back 20 years so I’m likely stuck. I don’t know how I’d go about getting them transitioned over.
If I were starting a blog today I’m fairly certain I would opt out of using a paid blogging service again. Instead I would use the above mentioned system or something very similar to create my own static blog. Now, this may seem silly, but damn, I really like the potential of doing it “manually”. As an experiment I spent a couple days just duplicating a handfull of posts into a new log style list of dated posts using a another Shortcut-based system. It’s easy to write and create new posts. If I wanted to pursue it I’d follow the same step to create an RSS feed. What are the benefits to this? Drawbacks?
Benefits
- Easy to change the css if I want to change up the theme. It’s just basic html and css. No mucking about with template system. The link in the above paragraph is literally just another html page on my site placed in its own directory with the individual posts and a folder of images. It could not be simpler or easier.
- Posting, as described above for my client’s website is easy. I’ve actually set-up a slightly different posting process because for my own blog I’d likely do a lot of full-on blog posts like this one. Locally, I’d be writing it in individual Markdown files, using iA Writer to copy as html then running a Shortcut that sends it through a template thet results in the new file and opens up my blog index page where I just paste the dated, linked post to the top. Then upload to the server.
- For the reader the result is obviously a very fast loading page of links. Clicking through to posts is fast.
- All under my control. Just a couple of folders to back-up.
Drawbacks
- The most obvious drawback is, as stated above, the huge archive I already have. I don’t see a way to move that over to this system. I could start cross posting everything to this new system and know that going forward I’ve got duplicates. Not sure what use that would be though. It would mean though that going forward I would have my own, up-to-date, completely self-controlled content in place.
- No obvious way to add comments. I’d likely just rely on email.
Why bother with any of this if I’m happy with my current arrangement? Well, it started as a bit of fun and curiosity. But there’s a bit of a nag in my mind about hosting at micro.blog. It’s an excellent service at a great price. It has built in ActivityPub support though given its limited implementation I can’t really rely on it so it is of questionable use for me. But more than anything, it means my 20+ year archive is sort of stuck. Yes, it’s possible to export and import it into another service. But the point is that I’m still reliant on a service of some sort to export-import to host my website which, when exported is a folder containing thousands of nested folders arranged by date: Year>Month>Day. Yes, each post is easily readable as a standalone markdown file which is great but I wouldn’t know how to put it to use.
Edit!! Very much my bad. I’m not stuck. As n3verm0re@mastodon.social pointed out, there is a real way forward for me. I went back into the export options that are available. I’d done an export last year that resulted in markdown files but I had not gone back recently to take a closer look to see if there were other export options. The option to export static html is right there and very obvious! Egg on my face for not taking a closer look.
So now that I have a way forward I have to decide if I actually want to take it! I think I’ll spend some time working on a local copy then give it more consideration.
Tiny Life Journal - Sunday morning health notes
My first encounter with Covid seems to be finished. Feeling better today, much improvement. Sore throat mostly gone and I feel mentally alert. So, assuming continued improvement, Covid symptoms will have lasted a full 5.5 days, Monday night till Saturday evening. My guess is I would test negative for Covid today or tomorrow. Will wait till Tuesday so as to have no doubt about outcome, don’t want to waste the test.
Summary:
- Days 1-2 were feverish and body aches. Taking ibuprofen.
- Days 3-4 were dominated by runny nose, congestion, sore throat. Extremely sore throat. My dad suggested that ice chips might help. I used a blender to make a spoobable ice slushee and it made all the difference. Instant relief though I had to keep eating it. I added frozen blackberries and sugar and had blackberry slushees all day on Friday. Helped a lot. Lots of napping. Low energy. A bit of brain fog. Added Sudafed to the ibuprofen for the congestion.
- Day 5 I felt tired all day. Napped much of the day and not much ability to focus. Sore throat mostly gone with much less congestion.
- Day 6 Feeling mentally alert and just about normal. Sore throat and congestion are no longer noticeable. Will take a couple doses of Sudafed today to be sure. To early to say anything about energy levels.
Final thought: Not only was this my first encounter with Covid but, also, the first time I’ve been sick since before 2020. Not counting the 2022 sudden and extreme vertigo which continues as some sort of new normal I attribute to labyrinthitis. I wouldn’t call it vertigo but rather a low level lack of balance that my brain has adapted to. Sorta feels like my head is floating in a bowl of water. And, along with that sensation is daily tinnitus.
A reminder: Do not assume that the technology and building methods of the Global North are “better” or the ideal.
Thesolarpunkgardener on Tumblr
Another video from the original creator on TikTok.
Exposed to Covid on Saturday afternoon. Symptoms set in last night. My first time with the Rona and in a way I guess I’m strangely relieved to have finally caught it so I can get it over with.
Writing for The Conversation, microbiologist Jennifer DeBruyn describes how our microbiome lives on after after we die, becoming a “necrobiome” to recycle our human cells into new life.
I find a kind of deep comfort in knowing that my body is a community of organisms. It is a biological fact that affirms my feeling and understanding of connection to the life around me. It’s not just comfort I feel in knowing these things but a kind of deep connectedness. Biological life is a beautiful continuum. We, in our current human forms and consciousness, only get to glimpse the briefest of moments in that continuum.
From the article:
Each human body contains a complex community of trillions of microorganisms that are important for your health while you’re alive. These microbial symbionts help you digest food, produce essential vitamins, protect you from infection and serve many other critical functions. In turn, the microbes, which are mostly concentrated in your gut, get to live in a relatively stable, warm environment with a steady supply of food.
But what happens to these symbiotic allies after you die?
Well, they flourish of course! I don’t mean to spoil the article and you should read it for the details because it’s fascinating. And though it is an incredibly stinky process it’s fundamental to life, it is life. This is why I don’t fear the “dirt” around me. I don’t use antibacterial soaps or bathe nearly as often as most people and while I keep my tiny house tidy it’s not scrubbed clean. I generally trust that the microbial ecosystem that lives in and on my skin and the rest of my body is doing what needs to be done to keep a balance.
This is also why the land around my tiny cabin is less of a garden and more of a wild space. My porch and cabin is surrounded by river oats, a grass that grows three feet tall and might appear to be “weeds” to someone who hasn’t considered what’s meant to grow in this landscape. Intermixed with it are many other natives that are a food source to insects and other critters. My cabin and I are just one element of this landscape.
This is why I don’t fear or kill spiders or other “creepy crawlies” that I find in and around my cabin. I’m in the woods and I understand that though my cabin has four walls and a roof, the ecosystem includes my cabin. I regularly find spiders inside and I fully understand that they’re not there to do me harm. They’re there because there is food to be had in and around the cabin. I find comfort in their presence and embrace the role they play in our shared lives.
We humans often wage wars against each other and perhaps, without realizing it, we also seem intent on waging war against the planet of which we are a part. Rather than understand ourselves to be of nature we seek to separate ourselves from it. We plow it, pave at and otherwise view nature as that which must be subjugated. This is especially true of the over-developed nations of the Global North where we devote an inordinate amount of effort to seal ourselves off from the natural world.
In the end it is a battle we will always loose. Sure, we have science as a tool and we should use it to improve our quality of life. And I’m not suggesting we not have comfortable homes to live in. Or that we should avoid technology. But, rather, that we would be better off if we spent more time understanding ourselves as natural animals. Yes, we’re very good at creating adaptive technology and complex societies as a result, but in the end, we are complex biological organisms living in complex ecosystems. Our health and our lives would be improved were we to make more effort at understanding the healthy, natural and essential connections that sustain us.
I’ve spent the past week experimenting a bit with a more active process of seeking out new blogs and have been pondering writing a post about the process as well how I’m logging discoveries. First though, I’ll share this post because it prompted me to actually start writing the post I’d been thinking about. Discovered via BearBlog’s Discovery page, it was just a brief recounting of several real-life experiences of social discovery that began with this late night encounter on a city street:
you’re not the only weirdo | hanki.dev:
I met most of my friends because I spotted them doing “weird” things. Like lying on the sidewalk at night.
I was walking, spotted a person on the ground in the middle of the city, went up to check if they’re alive. I asked “Hey, are you okay?”.
Dude said “Yeah, I’m great”.
So I asked “Why are you lying on the sidewalk?”.
“I’m stargazing” he said.
It was a simple, sweet post and I loved every word.
Blogs, not people
I’ll start by noting something really obvious which is that micro.blog, Mastodon and all social media have timelines of posts that begin with an avatar and username. It’s a seemingly small thing really, but it immediately sets the feel of the timeline to “social media feed”. It’s a sharp contrast to a blogroll or a postroll which is just the title of blogs or longer form posts.
One is an immediate, steady inundation of photos, ideas, opinions, etc where I am encouraged to just scroll and scroll and scroll. It’s like a conveyor belt. Even the non-algorithm timelines like Mastodon and micro.blog are still timelines built for scrolling through short posts.
The other is just a list of links on a page. When I click a link of an interesting title I’m taken off to an entirely different page with its own character, design, text and/or images. I’ve reached a destination. A may just read one post or I may spend hours exploring an archive of posts.
I decided to shift away from the never ending stream of conversations within the homogeneous visual feeds and, instead, to hop from blog to blog, enjoying the diversity of authors and visual presentations of pages. I’ve reduced my time on my micro.blog and Mastodon, instead using the above mentioned Discovery page on BearBlog and The Blogroll Club. First, a note of appreciation for BearBlog’s Discovery page. It’s a vast improvement over micro.blog’s poor attempt. The BearBlog Discovery page has three options: Trending, Most Recent and Search.
Trending is based upon an algorithm that uses a mix of time since post and upvote/appreciate button at the bottom of every BearBlog post. The algorithm/formula is explained at the bottom of the Discovery page, not that I understand it. It seems anyone (with or without an account) can tap upvote button on a post. In other words, it’s curated by everyone rather than the 1 person curation of micro.blog. The human curation of the micro.blog Discovery feed is touted as a positive feature but no, it just means that the feed is updated infrequently and reflects the biases of one person’s preferences. It’s truly a terrible implementation.
The “Most Recent” feed is self explanatory and I’ve had a good experience with that as well. Search of BearBlogs provides far more and better results than search in the micro.blog discovery feed which is so incomplete as to be functionally useless in terms of finding posts by keyword content.
Curating
As I’m finding blogs I tend to want to do something with those that I really like. In the past I would have likely added a blog to my RSS reader but I’ve found that doesn’t work well for me. I tend to use RSS for higher volume news sites and I’ve found that blogs get lost in it. For a long time I thought I could manage by having a folder for blog feeds but I use an RSS reader to skim news headlines. It’s a different mental mode for me. RSS isn’t about taking the time to enjoy the personality of a blog, it’s about getting the news of the day from larger sites with a variety of professional journalists.
For the moment my new process for curating blogs of interest is simple and relies on Safari’s tab groups which feel a bit more dynamic than a folder of bookmarks would. Once I’ve clicked through to a blog I’ll explore and read. If it’s a blog I want to return to and/or add to my blogroll I’ll pop it into the Blog Tab Group. Unlike RSS or a social timeline the point here is to go slow. It’s like a visit to a new acquaintance’s home or garden, there’s no rush, no commitment.
Discovery and Communities
In addition to the BearBlog Discovery page I’m also keeping a tab open for The Blogroll Club and iWebThings Hub. This little bit of exploration reminds me of my daily blog explorations in the early 2000’s. It’s obvious after these past few days that my habit of reading the Mastodon and Micro.blog timelines has been far too limiting. Also, perhaps worth noting is the different personality or culture of different blog communities. For example, after a few days browsing the BearBlog directory I’m noting that blogs there tend to be very personal, long form posts with few photos. Almost no short posts which tend to dominate micro.blog. I’ve yet to browse through Scribbles but I’m going to guess it will likely mirror micro.blog as it’s timeline seems to mirror the same design. Just a quick glance this morning and I doubt I’ll visit again. The discovery page is just one page with a limited number of posts from a small group of users. Pika doesn’t have a discovery page that I see. Write.as has a discovery page that seems useful. I’ve not spent much time there yet so I can’t say much about what’s being shared or the community, but visually, well, it’s very plain. It seems to be that the design is very much meant to mimic a piece of paper.
So it would seem that the various hosting services are also, to some degree, forming “communities” by which I mean certain shared design and content traits within their network. I’m hoping to spend a good bit of my time the next few weeks diving deeper into the process of exploration. I can see that Bear.blog makes it fairly easy and I suspect that I’ll enjoy that space more than the others. But I’m also curious about what other communities or networks I might find.
Tiny Life Journal - Treating myself to a cup of iced sumac tea! Though, really, it’s very tart and tastes far closer to lemonade than tea.
A fairly common small tree around rural Missouri and much of eastern North America, sumac produces large bunches of seedy red berries that hang from the branches by mid to late August. This particular species is Rhus copallinum commonly called winged sumac, shining sumac, dwarf sumac or flameleaf sumac.
To make into tea just soak the berries in water overnight in a fridge. It’s better and more flavorful to mush the berries a bit or run the mix of berries and water through a blender for a couple seconds to release the juices. Use a filter of some sort to separate out the berry bits which will contain seeds that can be planted if one is so inclined. I’ve also read that the berries can be dried for use in winter though I’ve not yet tried that. I added 4 teaspoons of sugar to that portion.
This. Well said.
Ben Werdmuller: “Reeeeeally wish there wasn’t a…” - Werd Social
Reeeeeally wish there wasn’t an American imperialism part to this speech. But it’s too much to ask for there not to be. She is still a universe better than Trump, and than most Democrats. I’d love for America to think of the world in a different way, where America is a participant rather than the enforcer of a Pax Americana.
I do appreciate the applause for the Palestinian people. And I am excited for this vision of the Presidency more than any other official candidate in my lifetime.
Tiny Life Journal - I took a walk in the woods yesterday in search of pawpaws. I didn’t find any but I did come across a few Cardinal flowers in and near the dry creek bed. A nice surprise! I’d seen one several years ago in the area but not since.
What’s notable is that these flowers are a favorite food source of the ruby throated hummingbird which, while in flight and feeding, seem to resemble the flower. There are three lower petals that look like the tail of the bird, two petals each stretched upwards and sidways from the center that look like wings. The central pistil looks like the body and head of the bird. If you’ve ever seen a hummingbird feeding you may note the similarity when viewing the flower from the front or side.
This seems important:
Major Union Backing Harris-Walz Joins Call for Palestinian American to Speak at DNC | Common Dreams
The United Auto Workers—a major union backer of the Harris-Walz presidential ticket—added its voice Thursday to the growing chorus demanding that a Palestinian American be invited to address the Democratic National Convention in Chicago over Israel’s U.S.-backed assault on the Gaza Strip.
“If we want the war in Gaza to end, we can’t put our heads in the sand or ignore the voices of the Palestinian Americans in the Democratic Party,” the UAW said on social media.
Do the Democrats believe Palestinians are lesser humans? That seems to be true given the difference in who is being allowed to speak inside the DNC. Israel gets a voice. Palestine does not.
DNC Tells Uncommitted Delegates There Won’t Be Any Pro-Palestinian Speaker | Truthout
Tiny Life Journal - While on a bike ride back in June I noticed that there were paw paw trees growing along the road. I have no idea why I’d not noticed them before. They were right there! In any case, I kept a lookout for flowers and fruit. I didn’t see any flowers but finally spotted a few fruit recently.
I harvested one a several days ago and I ate it yesterday. Oh my was it delicious. If you’ve never had one, it’s similar to a banana and mango combined, both in consistency and flavor. Also, it’s native to much of North America and is the largest native fruit. That said, they’re hard to come by. They’re usually not sold in stores so you’re most likely to only get the chance if you grow them, discover them or know someone that has them.
You can buy the trees from some mail-order nurseries. I’ve got a couple that I planted from a nursery and not long after I discovered a patch of them that recently started growing just hundreds of feet from my cabin. They’re probably less than 3 years old. The seeds are very large, not wind born so I’m guessing they were transported in via some animal’s poop. Most certainly there are others in the nearby woods I’ve not yet found. I went in search a couple weeks ago and was, not surprisingly, rewarded with a leg full of seed ticks for the effort. No paw paws though.
For now I’ll enjoy the fact that I’ve got a handful growing, I’ve got some seeds and I know there are a few more fruit nearby waiting to be harvested. That’ll have to do.
I wonder about the folks that are still praising Biden, what will you say when the ICJ changes its ruling from plausible genocide to genocide. At what point, if ever, do people acknowledge that Biden knowingly, willingly supported and aided genocide? Do Palestinians not count as people?
Democracy Now reports that during President Biden’s speech on the first night of the DNC, a few delegates were able to briefly unfurl a banner that read Stop Arming Israel.
Other delegates attempted to take the banner which was then taken away by convention staff. The delegates were then forced out.
So, that’s democracy in action huh? Only approved signs and cheerleading? No dissent, not even from delegates?
Got it.
We were there specifically to confront President Joe Biden. He’s the one who can stop this genocide by picking up the phone and making a phone call, and he has chosen not to do that.
Morning porch time. Unconventional use of the Logitech Combo Touch Keyboard with back kickstand resting on the keyboard as a stand. Easily balanced with weight on the pillow. Perfect for reading, screen at eye level. If I want to type, it only takes a second to attach. iPad modularity for the win.
Love this post and the whole site. So personal and cozy. TheSmallWay.txt | the library of alexandra
i like “the small way;” it fosters my need and desire to contribute and grow the personal web. i want more people to understand that interacting with other websites doesn’t have to be based on comments or reactions or likes. i like showing folks how to trade pixels with one another, how web cliques work. your website can be a slice of your personality, what you do, what you value about yourself and life in general.
Tiny Life Journal - I have a large forehead. It’s not a receding hairline, always been like that. I won a jar of mayonnaise at a party once for largest forehead. True story. And my eyes are not symmetrical. My eyebrows are out of control. I am unkempt. Year-by-year I am disappearing into the surrounding woodland. I am becoming that weirdo in the woods I’ve always dreamed of becoming. 🤓
A harrowing recounting of Antifa activists countering fascists and thoughts on the bigger picture of America pre-2024 election.
Seven years ago, anarchists and other anti-fascists converged in Charlottesville, Virginia to oppose the “Unite the Right” rally. The organizers of the rally intended to bring together Klansmen, neo-Nazis, far-right militias, and fascists from the so-called “alt-right” to build a unified white supremacist street movement.
Rosie enjoying the porch on Caturday (though technically from a week ago, whoops). Also, Cosmo looking into the distance wistfully, my guess wondering about his lunch.
