23 posts with this tag.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Let me be unglamorous and honest about the actual furniture of a writing life. What do my private, invisible days look like? What does it cost and what does it pay? A look at the 4 a.m. writing routine, the physical setting, and what I hope my writing will do for others.
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.
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.
Vagueblogging and subtweeting are the most toxic modes of online communication, yet research shows people prefer them to direct confrontation anyway. On the psychology of strategic ambiguity, insecure attachment, context collapse, and the online disinhibition effect. A case against the culture of passive aggression online, and a call for those with safety and privilege to stop hiding behind the same hedge as everyone else.
Writing publicly and frequently for the past seven months has saved my life. Six ways consistent public writing transformed me: cultivating curiosity, building connections, investigating rabbit holes, starting new projects, creating accountability, and seeing life's patterns in real-time. An invitation for others to begin writing without restraint.
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.
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.
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.
My daily writing is a practice of releasing messages in bottles and folding paper cranes—from Montaigne in his tower and Johnson writing in poverty, to Sadako Sasaki folding 1,450 cranes in a hospital ward. What the essayists, drift bottles, and Senbazuru share, and why the attempt itself is the whole math.
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.
Exploring constitutive moral luck through Nagel and Williams alongside Nietzsche's Übermensch and amor fati, I reflect on the recursive gratitude I feel for who I constitutively am—and argue that blogging is a philosophical practice of self-overcoming: a daily, recursive Yes to existence.
A detailed look at my personal blogging workflow that has enabled me to write nearly a post a day for four months straight, including how I generate ideas, organize thoughts, and maintain consistency.
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.
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.
A pre-dawn reflection on overcoming fear and perfectionism to create an authentic, no-stakes blog for genuine self-expression.
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.