Tag: technical
A Full Guide to Properly Delete Corporate Social Media Accounts
Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and the human-side work the documentation doesn't mention.
Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site
A walkthrough of how I wired up Standard.site AT Protocol lexicons into this 11ty blog: from writing a custom publish script to migrating to Sequoia, with code for the link tags, and handle verification.
A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI
Are there ethical implications of generative AI consciousness? From von Neumann's self-replicating machines to modern LLMs, we must inventory the problem of other minds, the possibility of AI consciousness, and why we ought to consider the welfare of systems that may experience something like suffering.
Blogging with Magic Unicode: Simple Doesn't Have to Mean Boring!
You don't need bloat. You can use CSS variables and Unicode symbols to add visual personality to your personal website while keeping it minimal, accessible, and fast-loading. Includes a reference of symbol sets (celestial, elemental, occult, card suits, chess, zodiac, and more) with colour examples using the Gruvbox palette.
Fixing Work Imports from Other OTW-based Archives
By default, the OTWArchive codebase blocks all imports from AO3, a problem for every fork. My fix includes removing AO3 from PERMITTED_HOSTS, writing a custom Ruby story parser that extracts only the story content from AO3 work pages, and extending the same parser to support imports from other OTWA-based archives!
Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers
I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.
How Webmentions Work on brennan.day
A tutorial and walkthrough of how I implemented webmentions on my site, from setup to display, including webmention.io integration, Eleventy filters, CSS styling, and Bridgy for sending.
Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare
I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.
Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?
Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre or checking off a list. It's about designing for everyone. Exploring the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than we think, and practical steps to make your website usable by as many people as possible.
I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep
Building fanfiction.lol taught me that some promises are impossible to keep. I wanted canonical tags for everything and 'write whatever you want' as a tagline, but Canadian obscenity laws and the philosophical complexity of tag wrangling forced me to adjust. Here's what I learned about running a community archive, the legal constraints I face, and the promises I can still keep.
Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3
I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.
Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware
A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.
Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS
Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how these protocols meet you where you are, whether you're on a machine from 2005 or just tired of Chrome's monoculture.
Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!
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.
/r/SlopcoreCirclejerk and the Men who are pro-AI
With the AI bubble finally deflating, what can we learn from the gender gap in genAI enthusiasm? Looking at /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk's culture of contempt, historical Luddite parallels, crypto bro demographics, and why men are drawn to extractive technologies.
Cleaning House: Refactoring My Eleventy Config Into Modules
How I decomposed an 866-line .eleventy.js monolith into four focused modules, fixed some lurking bugs, and eliminated dead CSS and dead dependencies along the way.
I Made My Eleventy Build 5× Faster with Five Changes
A walkthrough of how I audited my 11ty build benchmarks and cut cold-start time from 14 seconds down to 2.6 seconds by caching two custom filters and swapping out a bare network fetch.
Announcing My New Radio Show (a Love Letter to Public Access Television)
From Shaw Community Television on Channel 10 to Paper Tiger Television and the Manhattan Neighborhood Network, public access was original community media. Anybody, any channel, no notes from the network. In that spirit, I'm starting a self-hosted radio station built on AzuraCast, automated with a Python cron job pulling public domain recordings from the Internet Archive, and I'm going to try to show up and broadcast.
The Fool's Autopsy
A review of the prank I pulled yesterday, in addition to serious discourse about being silly, including thoughts on the role and importance of satire and literacy. I also share a detailed technical breakdown of the scripts that I added to the prank as well.
Downgrading to macOS Catalina: A Sermon on Obsolescence
A complete step-by-step tutorial for creating a bootable Catalina USB installer using mist-cli on modern macOS in order to downgrade an Early 2015 MacBook Pro from macOS Monterey to Catalina. Accidentally also a philosophical look at planned obsolescence, e-waste, and corporate control over hardware lifespan.
Building brennan.day Part Two: IndieWeb, New Features, and Three Months of Iterations
What have I added to my site since I started in December? Quality-of-life improvements, new pages, interesting features, and of course, easter eggs! When you add a little each day, it really adds up.
Tests Are The New Moat
As AI becomes better at cloning people's open source work, what ends up becoming most valuable are software contracts, tests, and API surface area. This clashes the incentives of clearly defining your commercialized open source software with protecting it.
Turning Your Robot Vacuum Into a Mesh VPN
I bought a robot vacuum and went down a path of understanding how wi-fi enabled devices can cross a line of security and privacy. In doing so, I figured out how we can keep our devices secure and isolated to our own private networks while still being able to operate them from anywhere in the world.
The Curious Case of the Triton Malware Fork
Today, a weird malware distribution campaign targeting users of omg.lol and Triton, an open-source macOS client of omg.lol, was found. The attack leverages the trust of GitHub, creating a malicious fork where the download link has been replaced with malware hidden in presented .zip file.
Creating an Alphabetical Tag Page feat. Nunjucks Pitfalls
I transformed a messy tag list into an organized alphabetical sections, and there were a surprising amount of gotchas I encountered along the way.
twtxt: Simple, Decentralized Microblogging with status.lol
I set up an effortless sync between my status.lol updates and a twtxt feed, creating a bridge between IndieWeb tools and classic decentralized microblogging.
Computing for the Apocalypse
Building digital resilience through self-hosted infrastructure and permacomputing principles in an uncertain world. Using Docker, Caddy, and open-source tools for digital resilience and independence.
What I Have Learned Being on the IndieWeb for a Month
A month of building, connecting, and discovering the independent web. Small technical joys that turned solitude into dialogue. Treat the Internet like a personal playground and lab!
Posting to Your Static Site with Quill and Micropub
After building an IndieAuth comment system, I wanted to complete the loop by posting content to my site from an external client. Here's how I implemented a Micropub endpoint for my static site using Quill as the client.
Respecting the No-JS Choice: Making Your Site Work for Everyone
Gracefully degrading my site for no JavaScript, including the CSS-based .no-js approach, testing with Lynx, and creating an informative experience for all users.
From 65 to 83: Attempts at Performance Optimization
A humble look into the performance optimizations boosting my Lighthouse score from 65 to 83, including critical CSS, layout shift fixes, and image optimization while maintaining the site's design and user experience.
Extending the Post Graph Plugin: Adding Clickable Links and Tooltips
A technical walkthrough of how I extended the eleventy-plugin-post-graph to add clickable links and hover tooltips showing article titles.
Resources for the Personal Web: A Follow-Up Guide
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.
Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site
A journey through authentication, CORS issues, and the joy of owning your comments! Learn how to build a comment system for your static site using IndieAuth and Netlify Functions, storing the comments in your git repository.