~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

A 255 byte web page - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-15T17:20:21.000Z

Tantek, in celebration of 8-Bit Day (the 265th day of the year), published a blog post with the following challenge:

[…] build an entire website where each resource fits into at most 8-bits worth of bytes. 255 bytes maximum size HTML, and maximum size of any linked external stylesheet, image, or even script file.

Alongside the challenge, Tantek has a demo showing a web page whose HTML is under 255 bytes, with an external CSS stylesheet that is also under 255 bytes. This inspired me to try and see what I could make with such a small number of bytes.

Here is what I made:

(I’m not sure if my submission is fully valid because it contains an image whose size is greater than 255 bytes, but I wanted to include my mascot anyway. The HTML source itself still falls within the rules!)

My page has a brief introduction to my website, a list of my three most recent blog posts, a favicon, and a search box. The page is 253 bytes. The page is styled by an external CSS file that is 220 bytes long.

The HTML looks like this:

<style>@import "8.css"</style><img src=/favicon.ico>
<p>Hello! I'm James (he/him/his, capjamesg). I live in Scotland. This is my blog.
Writing (search for):
   Second person birds
   Rain
   Walking
search: <form action=/search-pages><input name=q>

My CSS is:

* { background-color: #410d3d; color: #d295d1; font-family: system-ui; border-color: #d295d1; }

{ max-width: 45em; white-space: pre-wrap; margin: 0.5rem 1rem; }
img { max-height: 3em; float: right; margin-top: 1rem; }

In designing my HTML, I considered what the browser would do for me. Browsers try their best to render HTML documents even if they aren’t syntactically valid. This is a wonderful attribute of HTML. You can make a mistake or leave something out and still get a page that opens and renders.

I left out the html, head, and body tags. I also left out all the quotation marks for HTML attributes like the src of the image.

Initially, I had all of my text in paragraphs, until I realised every p tag was a character I could be using elsewhere. I really wanted to see if I could fit a form element on the page. I opted to use only one opening p tag and apply the white-space: pre-wrap rule so that the document would preserve the spacing in the source file.

My page doesn’t include links to my most recent blog posts; I thought the titles were enough. You could find the blog posts with my search page (although it looks like some of my most recent posts aren’t showing up on the search page, something I need to fix). The list of titles doesn’t update automatically, although if it did I would likely cut off each title after 3-4 words with […] and make sure I had enough space on the page to accommodate that.

I skipped as many HTML attributes as I could; my input doesn’t have an id or a name. As a result, this page likely has some accessibility considerations. This has me thinking about another challenge: to take the same 255 byte limit but impose the requirement for a website to be fully usable and understandable with a screen reader. (See also: Whimsica11y.)

This was a fun project that reminded me of how hard the browser tries to take your code and render it to a user, even if it is missing some pieces.

I encourage you to try and make a 255 byte web page! Remember, you also get 255 bytes for your stylesheet. If you make one, let me know!

Second person birds - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-14T21:37:36.000Z

I remember the feeling of the light shining around and through the curtains. Then there was music: melodies in chirp. I wanted to close my eyes and go back to sleep for just a while longer, enjoying the warmth of my bed, but I didn’t want to forget the light and the music – there was a moment so wonderful just behind the curtain.

Bird song plays the role that so many people do and have done in my life: the bird song is the music that starts my day.

I wonder if the birds know how far their songs carry, how we notice the patterns and changes in their tone, how we find both wonder and joy in figuring out from where the song calls, how their song starts and adds life to the day.

This is my entry for the September 2025 IndieWeb Carnival, hosted by Sophia at toground.link. The topic is "second person birds".

Rain - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-14T18:44:03.000Z

I don’t think it’s going to rain that much I thought to myself before going out yesterday. I took my summer jacket: a light blue denim coat that brings me a lot of joy. My jacket keeps me warm.

However, my jacket doesn’t have a hood.

Later in the day, when I got to my destination, the rain started to fall. But after so little rain this year, I felt less bothered by the rain. I wanted to be outside and take in the scent that the trees and Nature make only during and after rain.

The scent has a word that has stuck in my mind from the moment I first heard it: petrichor. The way the letters sit by each other in the word is poetic. So, too, is the feeling that there is a word that exists to describe the scent in the air. There is a word for the refreshing scent in the air after rain! So many other people have experienced this scent that we – the world – gave it a word.

I took shelter under a tree in the park, holding a warm, decaf flat white coffee that I had bought earlier. I bought the coffee because I wanted something warm to cusp around my hands; the drink would keep me warm inside, too. With my hands warm and feeling good from the coffee, I watched the rain fall past the leaves on the tree. I stood under a spot where less rain fell, but the occasional drop did fall on my hand and my coffee cup. The raindrops made me feel alive.

In the distance, I saw the sun that would set in an hour or two was beaming gold onto some clouds. I think the rain will let up soon. A few minutes later, I took the first step out from under the tree. The rain was progressively turning from a shower to a pitter-patter. The park path was damp but there was no longer as much rain falling as there was. More people who were taking shelter started to come out.

I went to get dinner – a sandwich, among my favourite dinners on the go – and got caught in the rain once again. This time, the rain was much heavier, but I also had a plan! I could take shelter under the columns of a nearby museum. With a to-go sandwich in one hand, I walked at a brisk pace toward the museum.

There, standing in the cold outdoors – but somewhere the rain could not fall on us – I found many people who were, like me, waiting for the rain to pass by. I listened to the active conversations of people making plans about where to go next; people young and old, couples and families, tourists and people for whom this place was home. All together in one place, waiting for the rain to let up.

In this moment, a moment in which my hair was dripping wet and my hands, holding a sandwich, were cold, I smiled to myself. We’re all in the same spot. We’re all here. We’re all making up this evening’s story of the city. We’re all living, while also waiting. I listened and enjoyed the sounds of conversation. I moved so that a few more people could fit in and stay out of the rain. I ate my sandwich and watched the world go by.

Walking - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-13T14:27:49.000Z

When did I stop walking as much? I realised this week after having found the motivation to go out for a few walks. I knew that I didn’t want to spend the whole day inside. I want to see the world. With each passing day, I felt more confidence in going out. My usual walk seemed more difficult than it used to be, but I got to the end. I even felt the spark of energy that I felt when I started running earlier this year (a routine I stopped after pushing myself too much too early).

I haven’t been out for a walk today; the sky is grey. I started to search for what to write about, then I thought back to the last week. My walks, and the realisation of a routine that fell by the wayside. Walking is not the only routine that I lost: my sleep schedule, too, could be better. Finding the right sleep schedule when you find ideas at midnight like I do is tricky, I have told myself, but those moments are really few and far between. Maybe I have been staying up late with the hope that I find more inspiration.

There is so much I don’t know right now; my world is changing. I do know one thing: I want to go out for more walks; to see and be among the changes of autumn, knowing that change is natural; to put one foot in front of the other and remember that moving forward is natural; to remember the way walking clears my mind, leaving room for ideas to sit and grow. Perhaps with walks I will find that inspiration I have been seeking in midnight: the spark that begins with I have an idea and is followed by I want to bring this to life.

Raindrop - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-13T14:07:11.000Z

The autumn rains are here. I have been looking forward to a bit of rain. There is something delightfully cosy about sitting inside reading or writing or watching television while the rain falls outside. And, rain means the opportunity for rainbows. This week, I have seen at least two rainbows, much needed after a relatively difficult week. After seeing the first rainbow, I started to keep my eye out for more. I just went to look out the window and there is another rainbow! Fainter than the others, but nonetheless breathtaking.

About ten minutes ago, there was a soft rain outside. The sun and the clouds exist together in the sky. From my chair I can see both blue and grey. As the rain stopped, I noticed a droplet on a railing outside from which several colours were radiating, flickering between blue, green, and others. I have never seen a raindrop so colourful, almost as if it were a prism through which the sun was shining (was this the phenomenon that made rainbows possible?).

The raindrop was about to fall, but all that mattered in the moment was that I was there to see it.

Two quick news items - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-12T15:25:00.000Z

Sometimes I post not because I have something to get out of my system, but because I have something I want to share. This is one of those occasions.

First, Cody has a new pop-up newsletter going called “Trespassing Through Montana”. I’m a big fan of what he does, and I also enjoy helping people connect with each other online, so I’m not gonna pass on this opportunity to suggest you to sign up for his newsletter.

The second is that the Internet Phone Book is back in stock. I mentioned this lovely object in an old post of mine, and I’m so glad I managed to grab my copy when it came out. I’m also happy to be in it and very pleased to have Luke as my neighbour.

That’s it, that’s all I have to say. Buy the book, sign up for the newsletter, and enjoy the weekend.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Creating a searchable archive page - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-12T14:54:16.000Z

One of the pages I use most on my website is the page that lists the titles of all of my blog posts. I made this page for two reasons: (i) for quick reference to all of my recent posts beyond those on my home page, and (ii) so that I can search the page by post title. I often do this if I already know the title of a post or a keyword that will help me find it.

Whether I am trying to find a blog post I wrote recently or a while ago, my archive page lets me find it.

I have wanted to write a blog post about this for the longest time because despite having a full-text search engine on my site I still find a lot of utility in searching posts by title with my blog post list page. That is to say: if you are looking for a way to search your site, a good way to start may be to have a page that lists yoru post titles! It's amazing how effective a single list of titles can be as a way to search through your words.

As a reader of a website, I also love skimming through archive pages to find more blog posts to read. Out in the wild, I have seen archive pages with titles is a common pattern on Bear Blog (maybe this is part of the default template?), which makes navigating many of the sites that use Bear Blog a delight.

P&B: Jack Baty - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-12T11:00:00.000Z

This is the 107th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Jack Baty and his blog, baty.net

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello, I'm Jack. I was born, raised, and live in west Michigan, US. I live in a quiet (aka "boring") suburb with my lovely wife, our dog, a few tropical fish, and a sea urchin named Lurch.

I was a paperboy, fast food worker, and ditch digger long before I started creating software for a living. My first programming project was a Laboratory Information Management System (L.I.M.S.) for a local environmental testing lab. This was in 1992. I was learning as I went, using a Macintosh RDBMS environment called 4th Dimension. I continued as a solo software developer for a couple of years.

In 1995, I cofounded the web design firm "Fusionary Media" with my two partners. Fusionary grew to a team of around 15 people. We built some very nice websites, software, and mobile apps for companies like MLB, GM, Steelcase, etc. This went on for 25 years, until we sold the company in 2020. I've been "retired" since then, but I miss working on things with people, so we'll see.

These days I spend most of my time with photography, blogging, and reading.

I enjoy tinkering with tech of all kinds and exploring what different software tools can do. This often means completely upending my workflow in order to shoehorn some cool new toy into it. I call this a "hobby".

What's the story behind your blog?

Which one? 😂

In the late 1990s, when the internet was still new and exciting, I wanted to tell everyone about everything. I was learning to create websites, so starting a blog was a great opportunity to do both. I created a couple of proto-blogs in 1998 and 1999, but those have been lost to time. My current blog at baty.net began in August 2000, 25 years ago this month. Everything before 2021 is archived at archive.baty.net. I don't delete old posts, although I probably should.

My early posts were mostly Gruber-style link posts. It's sad that so many of those original links are dead now. Eventually I started sharing more details about what I was doing and thinking about, rather than just linking to other things. This continues today.

I sporadically maintain several other sites/blogs. Other than Baty.net, there's also a "Daily Notes" blog at daily.baty.net, but lately I've just been rolling that into baty.net. I recently started a photo blog using Ghost at baty.photo. Ghost makes posting images easy, but I haven't decided if I'll continue.

I keep a wiki using TiddlyWiki (since 2018) (rudimentarylathe.org). I don't even know what it's for, honestly, but I keep putting stuff there when I don't know where else it should go.

My dream is to have only One True Blog, but that's been elusive.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Honestly, I don't really have a creative process. Nothing deliberate, anyway. My posts are mostly journal entries about whatever's on my mind. What usually happens is that I'll read someone's blog post or I'll try some new tool, and share my thoughts on it.

I used to write (bad) poetry and would love to compose longer, thoughtful essays, but that never happens.

More often than not I publish things long before they're ready. It's as if I'd never heard of proofreading. I just fix things later. If I had to make everything perfect first, I'd never post anything.

I write my posts in whatever text editor I'm infatuated with at the moment. 90% of the time, that means Emacs, the nerdiest possible option.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I prefer a tidy, pleasant environment. Usually, though, I sit at my desktop computer (an M4 MacBook Air and Studio Display) in my messy basement office. I just start writing whenever I have something to say. My wife thinks I have some form of auditory processing disorder, so I rarely listen to music while writing. It only muddles my thoughts (even more than they already are).

I do find that things come easier for me when I'm surrounded by books. They inspire me.

Once in a while, I'll draft posts longhand with a nice fountain pen or on a manual typewriter, but I'm lazy, so that's pretty rare.

If I had my way, there'd be a giant window in my home office, maybe overlooking water. Currently I stare at a bare wall, which is probably not ideal for creative inspiration.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I change platforms so often that it'll probably be different by the time anyone reads this, but I'm currently using Hugo to render a static website.

My static sites are hosted on a small VPS running FreeBSD with Caddy as the web server. I use Porkbun for domain registration and management.

For creating new posts in Hugo, I have Emacs configured to create properly formatted Markdown files in the correct location. I write the posts in Emacs. When finished, I run a little shell script that builds the site and uploads it to the server. I don't use any fancy Github deployment actions or anything. I just render the site locally and use rsync to push changes.

I've used nearly every blogging platform ever created. I've even written several of my own. Each platform has something I love about it, and when I start to miss whatever that thing is, I'll switch back to it. And so on. Sometimes moving to a new blogging platform gets the writing juices flowing. Sometimes it's just something to do when I'm bored and don't have anything to say.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I would love to be the type of person who started a WordPress (or whatever) blog in the noughts and never changed anything. So many of my posts have bad links or missing images due to moving from platform to platform. It's frustrating for both me and my readers.

I suppose what I'd do differently is pick a process and stick with it. Maybe focus on writing instead of tinkering with themes and platforms and such. Blogs are simple things, really, and overthinking everything has caused me nothing but trouble.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I'm running my static sites on a small, $5/month (plus $1 for backups) VPS at Vultr, so it costs very little. I pay another $5/month for Tinylytics to watch traffic/views. So I'm in for around $11/month.

The Ghost blog costs $15/month at MagicPages.

One other cost is domain registrations, which adds up to maybe $50/year.

I have no interested in trying to make money from blogging, even if it were feasible.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I hesitate to recommend specific blogs, since that means leaving out so many others. I'll just pick a few at random from my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow are by people writing about their lives and interests. I'm less inclined to follow Capital-B Bloggers or industry-specific blogs these days. I'm interested in people, not companies.

boffosocko.com - Typewriters!
82mhz.net - Publishes lots of great links every week or so
lmno.lol/puddingtime - Thinks like me, but is a much better writer
johnpweiss.com - Meaningful essays and short stories
joanwestenberg.com - Tangential to tech industry, on a tear, and nailing it
winnielim.org - Great example of someone simply writing about life

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

May I just suggest to anyone reading this, if you're even remotely interested in starting a blog, do it! 😁

This was the 107th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jack. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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Artemis Changelog #7 - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-11T22:35:55.000Z

Artemis, the calm web reader I maintain, has a few new features. Below is a summary of the features now available to all users.

Also, I have started a Discord server for the project in which I can both answer questions and will potentially share some stories of the behind-the-scenes design and engineering that goes in the project. All are welcome.

You can now set keyword filters that must apply in order for a post to show up in your reader. This is useful if you want to use Artemis to curate information around a particular topic. For example, if you want to follow academic papers that match a specific set of keywords, you can set up an exclusive filter to only see posts that contain one or more keywords of interest. To use this feature, go to your Account Settings, click “Keyword Filters” in the sidebar. If you want to only show posts that contain a keyword, check the new “Do posts need to include this keyword to show up in your reader?” box.
When you paste an Arxiv URL into the Add page, the URL will be transformed into the Arxiv RSS feed URL so you can follow the feed in Artemis.
Several back-end changes have been made to make the Artemis feed polling process more robust.
The Artemis demo video now has a transcript.
Many pages on the Artemis website now have a site footer that links to several important resources, including the Artemis privacy policy, information on how the Artemis feed fetcher bot works, and acknowledgements of software and design resources that the project uses.
A bug that caused password reset emails to not be sent has been fixed.

If you have any feedback on Artemis, please do let me know! You can email me at readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog. If you would like to try the software, you can sign up with the invite code “coffee”.

Dusted off the Jack Tries Linux blog - Baty.net

2025-09-11T15:25:25.000Z

Remember that time I was trying Linux “for real” and even created a blog to write about it? It was more an excuse to play with the clever BSSG blogging engine, but still.

Well, I’m doing it again. This time with Omarchy, so I dusted off the BSSG blog and pushed a quick update. But, but, Omarchy! | Jack Tries Linux.

Don’t expect much. This usually lasts about 3 days before fizzling out, but it’s always a fun-but-frustrating 3 days.

Designing a new button to visually show and hide alt text - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-11T13:28:05.000Z

In Developing an alt text button for images on my website, I wrote about how I made a button for visibly showing and hiding alt text on my website. I enjoy reading alt text. Alt text is great.

My implementation method used a combination of a HTML checkbox and the CSS :has selector. A div containing the alt text for an image would appear or disappear depending on whether the corresponding checkbox was checked.

My code had a few limitations. I had to think a lot about how to visually hide the checkbox. Focus styles required a lot of thought and tripped me up a few times as I wrote my code. I also wondered whether a checkbox was the right semantic. In addition, if the CSS didn't load on the page for some reason, the interactivity would be lost. Since writing the blog post, I have wondered: what can I improve?

I went back to the drawing board with the intent to use the HTML details and summary elements. These elements allow you to show and hide content on a web page natively. With a bit of tinkering, I have a new version of the project, which is now in its own open source (MIT-0 licensed) GitHub repository. I have also published the code on a demo web page so you can try the interaction for yourself.

Here is a demo video showing the new button:

The button is not yet live on my website, although I hope to move to my new button code soon!

How the button works

Below I am going to talk about a few of the styles that make this alt text button work. For all the CSS, refer to the GitHub repository.

Before styling, I needed a good foundation of semantic HTML. This is the structure upon which my code depends:

<figure>
    <picture>
        <img alt="A supermarket in Berlin with a sign that reads 'freshly made smiles'." loading="lazy" src="https://jamesg.blog/assets/smiles.avif">
    </picture>
    <details class="alt" aria-label="Show or hide the alt text for the image">
        <summary>ALT</summary>
        <p>A supermarket in Berlin with a sign that reads "freshly made smiles".</p>
    </details>
</figure>

By default, the details element is closed. In this state, the ALT button appears in the top left of the image. This is implemented using absolute positioning. The parent figure has a position:relative rule.

When the details element is opened, the enclosed p tag is displayed. By default, the summary element (which contains the "ALT" label) expands in width when the details element is opened. To get around this, I set the width of the summary to max-content, which ensures that the summary tag stays the same size:

figure details[open] summary {
  width: max-content;
  margin-bottom: 0.25rem;
  list-style: none;
 }

The CSS makes use of the details[open] selector. This lets me apply styles exclusively to a details element that has been opened by the user. I originally used details:open, but that selector doesn't work in Safari at the time of writing this blog post.

When the details element is opened, its background is set to transparent and its border is removed:

figure details[open] {
  border: none;
  background-color: transparent !important;
  padding: 0;
}

Without setting the background colour to be transparent, the whole space that takes up the details element -- which includes the summary -- would have a white background, whereas I want the button and p to be in their own boxes.

I style the summary and p tags as their own boxes with this code:

figure details[open] p, figure details[open] summary {
  border-radius: var(--border-radius);
  border: 1px solid #ccc;
  padding: 0.25rem 0.5rem;
  color: black;
}

In designing this system, I wanted to make sure it was accessible. A big part of this was ensuring the system works well with a keyboard. The details element is already accessible (yay for semantic HTML!) but I wanted to add my own more visible focus styles. I like having a black background and yellow text: a colour combination that contrasts well and also stands out.

When a summary is focused, its parent details is assigned a black background and the summary text is set to yellow. This makes the keyboard focus clear as a user navigates through the page.

Conclusion, and what's next

With my new code, I am using the details and summary element, which I think is more semantically appropriate. I have also moved the code into an open source repository.

If you have ideas on how my code can be improved or made more concise, please file a contribution on GitHub, or email me at readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog.

The code is licensed under an MIT-0 license, which gives you the right to use, copy, modify, publish, and distribute the software as you want. I chose this license because I want this project to be as easy for other people to include in their websites as possible.

If you end up using the alt text button, let me know!

Collaborative web weaving - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-11T09:18:45.000Z

At this week’s Homebrew Website Club, I was introduced to the Live Share extension developed by Microsoft for Visual Studio Code. The extension lets you start a collaborative editing session to which you can invite others.

Excited to learn that this extension exists, and curious to see what collaborative features were available, I installed it and started a session from a folder I had open with a few HTML files. The extension gave me a link that people could use to join my live sharing session from their Visual Studio Code interfaces. I shared the link.

Five of us started collaborating in real-time on a web page.

Using a HTML file I had already started, we made our own changes. Without direction, everyone added whatever came to mind. One person added an animation that changed the font on the page every few seconds. From that experiment, we all learned that you can use CSS keyframes to create animations to change fonts. Another collaborator wrote a story. Someone put the whole page into a marquee tag. Someone made a strobing “rainbow” mode that changed the background of various elements.

Here is a screenshot from part of our web page:

The resulting page was a bit chaotic, but it was so fun to make. We had no prompt. We, like musicians, riffed. We played. As Angelo, who actively experiments with collaboration on his website, would say: we’re doing it live.

In our HTML document, we wrote code and stories. We asked how each other’s code worked. We debugged code. We made something that wouldn’t have existed without the collaborative session.

Joe, one of the people in the session, published the code from our web page which includes attribution and a button to toggle the “rainbow” mode (which is off by default, and should only be toggled if you are not sensitive to strobing light effects). You can view the page we made on Joe's website. You can also view my archive on my website.

With the Live Share extension, the cursor position of every author in the document was visible to everyone else. This meant we could follow along as everyone wrote in the document. There was also a feature to follow someone as they code so your view changes as they navigate the code. I couldn’t figure out how to toggle this; it was on by default for me. This feature would be especially useful for instructional discussions where someone walks through a codebase before another collaborator contributes.

There was also a chat interface that showed when people joined or left the session, and in which we could chat. This was a useful auxiliary space to communicate (read: check if everything is working, then tell jokes) while we wrote code.

One limitation with the setup is that we think it required participants to have Visual Studio Code installed on their computer. The web version didn’t seem to support the collaborative extension (although maybe it does and we didn’t figure it out). I would love to see a web-native version of this technology where I could create a space to code, share a link, and invite others to contribute. Like Etherpad, but for code. It would be even better if I could self-host this and invite people with a password.

I would love to author more HTML documents in real-time! Making HTML documents with friends feels like it is truly of the spirit of the web: fun, playful, and with an output that you can share.

30 collaborative things you can do on the web - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-10T21:33:45.000Z

In 100 things you can do on your personal website, I shared ideas for what you can do with your website. Most of them were ideas that can be worked on yourself. With that said, I find myself increasingly delighted by the collaborative spirit of the web.

Indeed, one of the wonders of the web is that we can make something that we can share with others. We can author a blog post – whether a story, a poem, a tutorial – and publish it for people to read. The post may inspire someone to write. We can make websites together. We can build wikis. When we share a web page, someone might ask “how does that work?” and peek under the source code and learn a new skill.

This has me thinking: what can we do on a website that involves both our selves and someone else? With that question in mind, I have made a list of 30 activities you can do collaboratively on the web:

Help a friend create their first website! There are many indie tools out there that are approachable. omg.lol looks especially wonderful.
Write a blog post, a poem, a story, or something else with someone else in real-time that you can publish on the web if you want. You could create a Google Doc or an Etherpad or use another tool and write a blog post. You can use any writing prompt you like. One fun anchor for choosing a prompt is something open-ended. For example, I have written collaboratively about the topic of gardening. This is something we both knew we could find some angle to write about. If we got stuck, we could ask each other for help!
Write a blog post asynchronously with someone, with a writing prompt. For example, a friend and I each suggested paintings for each other to write about. We each wrote on our own time, then combined the results and published them on each other’s blogs.
Create a list of links that are relevant to something you and your collaborator know a lot about.
Start a blank HTML document and work on it with a friend in person.
Help a friend add a feature they want to add to their website.
Use real-time collaboration software like the Live Share extension in Visual Studio Code to collaborate with multiple people on the same HTML document. Make a web page in real time online!
Draw a design for a web page on paper with a friend. Discuss how you might build it.
Not in the same room as a friend? Use a virtual white boarding tool to scaffold a web page.
Create cut-out versions of HTML elements and assemble a page with a friend on a table or the floor.
Create a “mashup” post where you and your collaborator both take excerpts from things you have already written and combine them together.
Make a photo gallery web page that lists photos. Maybe you can take turns to each pick a photo.
Invite a friend to contribute a post to your blog. Maybe the post could be about a theme you have explored on your website in the past.
Make a web page just for you and your friend that you don’t intend to share with others. Let the knowledge that the web page is just for you encourage you to make whatever you want!
Create a fan site for an interest you have in common with your friend.
Contribute to a community wiki!
Create a website for a community you are in, with the community. For example, if you participate in a club like a zine library, you could ask if you could all design and make a website for the club together.
Start a collaborative blog where multiple friends can contribute to the blog. See also: Do blogs need to be so lonely?
Participate in a blog carnival, like the IndieWeb Carnival or the IndieWeb Movie Club. (Or start one for a community that you are in! Swiftie blog carnival, anyone? CSS Carnival?)
Ask a friend to review a draft of a blog post that you think they would have insights on.
When a friend says something you’d love to read more about, ask if they would want to write a blog post on the topic!
Study HTML and CSS with a friend. Front-End Study Hall is a good place to learn and ask questions about something you want to build with HTML/CSS that you don’t know how to build or want to discuss.
Choose a lesser-known HTML element. Ask a friend to try to use it in their next web page.
Choose a CSS rule or technique. Ask a friend to try to use it in their next web page. Share a link that would be helpful for them as they get started.
When they happen, participate in HTML day. Spend time after the event looking at what others made!
Participate in a 32-Bit Cafe Code Jam, where a prompt is chosen around which people are invited to make a web page. At the end of the code jam, everyone’s pages are grouped onto a single web page.
Start an interview series! I used to interview Scottish coffee professionals and technical writers on this blog.
Join a web weaving meetup like the 32-Bit Cafe’s Webweaving Workshops (join the Discord to stay up to date) or an IndieWeb meetup. In both meet-ups, you can listen to cool demos, share what you’re working on, and ask questions about the web!
Submit an entry to a magazine that publishes on the web, like the Good Internet Magazine.
Make a web page that others can contribute to. For example, you could make a web page that lists URLs on a specific topic, and have a form that lets other people submit a link for consideration. url.town is a great example. I would love an “indie web sticker club” site to exist where people who make stickers related to the web can share them with others, with links to purchase stickers.
Ask a friend to prepare some questions for you to answer on your website.
Tell a friend that you’re happy to review one of their blog posts if they would like feedback or a proof read.
Say thank you to someone whose blog post you enjoyed or whose website you appreciate!

Wait, that’s 31 ideas? Unlike in my first website ideas post, I have exceeded the number of ideas! Well, almost. I started out wanting to write 100 ideas, but I think I need more time to get to that number. I don’t have 100 ideas that fit that category yet, and I don’t want to push myself. I want my list to include either things I have done or that excite me and that I may want to do soon. I need to play more with friends on the web. I need – and want – to experiment more.

Do you have an idea that involves making web pages with friends? I encourage you to bring the idea to fruition! Reach out to your friend or community or family and make something. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It doesn’t have to be polished. It doesn't have to be complete. The most important thing is that you made it with someone. Indeed, some of the most fun things I have made on the web have started with a friend and the question “does the marquee tag still work?”

There are so many things you can do on the web! I hope the list above encourages you to think about things you can make with others. If you make something, let me know via email at readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog! And if you have more ideas, share them on your website!

Also posted on IndieNews.

Whimsy - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-10T17:40:50.000Z

Sometimes you need to make a web page about an air fryer. At least, this was the intution underlying my musing Maybe I should start an air fryer blog. in a Discord of which I am a member. It all started with a discussion about dinner and then website talk ensued.

With my dinner ready, I walked through to the other room and prepared (or, should I say, cooked up) a new website: air-fryer.jamesg.blog.

The website features an air fryer that I like. I don't own this air fryer, but if I'm ever looking for a two-drawer air fryer the one pictured will be the one I buy.

I am reminded of a quote from my favourite movie, listed on my quotes page, from my favourite movie, Tomorrowland:

Nix: How would your jet pack make the world a better place?

Young Frank Walker: Can't it just be fun?

On the topic of whimsy, but on a slight tangent, I highly recommend reading Sara Joy's slides from her presentation at State of the Browser 2025 for her talk "Whimsica11y". The slides – and talk – encourage us to consider: how do we bring the whimsy of the web to everyone? I wonder how I could do this with my air fryer website.

On em dashes - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-10T16:35:00.000Z

Stumbled on this post a moment ago—on a lovely colourful blog, I might add—and I have thoughts on the subject:

I'm low-key mad about this! So we just can't use em dashes anymore? We let the machines take them from us?? And we didn't even put up a fight or anything???

Although I'm frustrated, I promise from now on to no longer use em dashes and keep my heavy italics usage to a minimum as well. I don't want anyone to think I use AI. (I mean, I do use AI to research stuff, but not to write.) It just sucks because I feel like from now on there will always be this bubbling paranoia over writing that no writer will ever be able to avoid. I'm genuinely a pro-technology, "embrace the future but let's make it better"-type of person, but I'm wary of the "new normal" this precedent sends.

But whatever. You win, AI. You can have your stupid em dashes.

No you can't have them. Yes, we can still use em dashes. And no, I’m not going to stop using them because fucking chatgpt is abusing them. What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance. I’m not gonna miss you.

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Blogs don’t need to be so lonely - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-06T06:35:00.000Z

While clicking through my RSS feeds, I found my way to Jay’s post titled “Do blogs need to be so lonely?”. It’s an interesting post, especially interesting for me since I love blogs. Betteridge's law of headlines tells us that the answer to the question Jay is posing is “no”, but I think it’s worth expanding on why I think that’s not the case.

Do blogs, like this one I’m writing in now, need to be so lonely? Not always, but sometimes, I feel like I’m shouting into the void. I’m picturing something relatively simple. Something like a group blog, or a blog co-op. A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them.

So, I don’t have anything against the idea of group blogging or a blog co-op, but I don’t think that will address the initial problem Jay’s flagging, that sensation of shouting into a void. I guess shouting into a void with a few friends is better than doing it by yourself, but the end result is still the same. And unless by group blog he means writing posts together and not just posting them on the same site, then I don’t think the situation would change much.

The second part of that quote is the one I find the most interesting and the one I can’t stop smiling at every time I think about it.

A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them.

I can’t stop smiling because we already have this. It’s what people used to call the blogosphere. There are already potentially millions of people out there, posting together, without much oversight or coordination between them. I have interviewed one hundred and six of them for People and Blogs (which, btw, is a collaborative blogging project) and there are almost a thousand collected on the blogroll.

A lot of them I consider internet friends. I follow what they’re up to thanks to their blogs, and I occasionally send them emails, precisely to address the “shouting into the void” nature of blogging. And it’s working wonderfully.

I think we have all the tools we need to address the issue Jay’s flagging in his post. Now we just need to actually do it. I think it comes down to linking more to what other people are writing, posting more replies to other people’s posts, and putting some effort into connecting directly with the author when we stumble on a piece of writing that resonates with us.

So why not collaborative blogging? Why not groups of people coming together to create personal blogs? Something less formal than a journalist collective, but more communal than a personal blog. Blogging collectively opens us up to a new kind of content, one in which members of the blog are in conversation with one another in a way that’s comfortable and unique.

This is already happening; it doesn’t need to be invented. In his piece, Jay quoted Leon’s post. I have now mentioned and linked to both of them in mine. They’ll be free to respond on their blogs if they want to keep the conversation going, and anybody else is welcome to join.

Your blog doesn’t have to be lonely. But at the same time, you can’t expect it not to be that way without effort. So if you care, then put some effort into this. Trust me, it’s worth it.

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Sansui AU-6900 Integrated Amplifier - Baty.net

2025-09-05T15:37:40.000Z

A few weeks ago I swapped an unused turntable and receiver for a nice Nakamichi cassette deck. I paid a little too much in the deal, but I got rid of stuff I wasn’t using and gained something I wanted, so it was fair enough.

Playing with the old cassette deck got me charged up about vintage audio. I was suddenly bored by the Rega Brio3 (2007), which I bought new. It paled next to some of the cool vintage stuff on display at the new vintage audio store near me, Bring Back Analog. Plus, the Brio didn’t have a headphone jack, which always bothered me. Besides, something from 2007 isn’t “vintage”, it’s just old. So I started shopping.

I traded the Rega and some cash for a shiny new (to me) Sansui AU-6900 from 1976. It’s been playing non-stop since I brought it home. I’m no audiophile, but I love it. It sounds great, and looks gorgeous. I’m a sucker for big, shiny knobs and the Sansui has big, shiny knobs.

Something cool about it is that the rear jacks are situated horizontally. This makes them easier to reach and presumably has other positive effects. I wonder why we don’t see more of that.

There’s something about listening to beautiful devices made half a century ago. They may not objectively sound better, but they definitely feel like they sound better.

I guess they did not, in fact, make it - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-05T14:50:00.000Z

Back in March 2024, The Browser Company—a name I still find hilarious, all these years later—published a website called “We Might Not Make It”. They described it as:

A limited series that breaks down the top 5 reasons our company might not make it to next year. (And why we think we can.)

The plan was to release a 5-part video series. Quite ironically, considering the name, they stopped at video number two and the whole project was quickly abandoned. The three remaining videos that were planned were:

We ruin the internet
We listen to our members
We can’t make money

The first one is not even worth talking about. This was a company that was so small to the point of being insignificant in the context of the whole web, so there was no risk of them ruining anything. The other two points, though, those are quite funny to look at in retrospect. Many people loved Arc, but it was quickly abandoned when everyone and their moms pivoted to AI. A move that surprised literally nobody. And it was also not surprising to read the news that The Browser Company got acquired because they couldn’t, in fact, make money, and so the only two options were either shut everything down or get acquired. This is a story we’ve all seen a million times in the tech world: someone makes a nice product using VC money, a product that has zero chance of being commercially viable because it has no business model. They promise the moon, only to then turn their back on their user base and sell everything as soon as someone makes a decent offer.

And, like literally every other company that gets acquired, they promised that they “will operate independently”. If you believe that, I have a bridge to sell you. I honestly doubt the whole team will still exist in 12 months. I guess we’ll see.

I was never an Arc user, and you won’t be surprised to know I couldn’t give less of a fuck about Dia because the last thing I want is to spend time chatting with my browser. But, if you were an Arc user, maybe give Zen Browser a try? I heard it’s quite good.

And, since we’re talking browsers here, I won’t miss the chance to mention the Ladybird project since they’re actually making a new browser, which is so awesome to see in 2025.

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P&B: Louie Mantia - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-05T11:00:00.000Z

This is the 106th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Louie Mantia and his blog, lmnt.me

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Louie Mantia. I grew up in St. Louis Missouri, and have lived in California, North Carolina, and Oregon, before moving to Japan a couple years ago. I started using the Internet in the late nineties (when I was about 9 or 10 years old), chatting with AOL Instant Messenger and learning about what my computer can do. Stemming from a desire to customize the appearance of my PC—and later, my Mac—I frequented forums and communities like DeviantArt, AquaSoft, and MacThemes.

As a result of that interest and influence, I’m an artist and designer who primarily makes icons for software. For fun, I design fonts, create playing cards, and write for my blog.

What's the story behind your blog?

I published my first website and blog on April 16, 2004. I was fifteen years old. I was proud to have it run “on PHP” though I barely knew what that meant. I kinda still don’t. But I could post somewhere that was entirely my own rather than just to forums.

At some point in 2005, I started using Wordpress (1.5). At this time, due to my age, the topics on my blog were fairly juvenile. But the more art I made, the more I shifted the focus of my website to be a more of a gallery and less of a blog.

However, in October 2008, I moved my website to mantia.me and began “seriously” blogging about icons, Apple, and early iPhone app design conundrums.

With new social media like Twitter taking attention away from blogs, I moved my artwork to a new website called Louieland in 2015, and hosted one-off blog posts seldomly, without an RSS feed. For entirely novel purposes, I changed the website again to LouieWorld in 2020, though it admittedly didn’t have a blog at all, because starting in 2016 I had been posting to Medium.

In late 2022, I had been frustrated with what the web had become. I lamented posting so much to websites I did not control like Twitter and Medium. In November that year, I made an RSS feed with a single HTML page (no CSS!) for the only post I wrote: The Teenage Web. There was no index page. It was all hosted on a domain I had owned for a very long time, as a personal short-URL, lmnt.me. I directed people to the feed, wrote a few more posts, and started creating index pages and CSS.

Since November 2022, I have written over 300 new blog posts on LMNT. I have also rescued most of my old blog posts from previous iterations of my blog, from Medium, and even salvaged some text from Twitter threads, integrating all of them into my blog.

I have made it somewhat of a personal mission to ensure everything I post publicly is done on my website first, and moving as much as I can from third-party sites to my own.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Rather embarrassingly, most of my blog posts start when I fire up Mastodon to type out a banger. When I manage to catch myself doing it, I cut the contents of the post and paste them into note file, and continue writing. If I don’t catch myself until I’ve written a thread, I might copy out all the posts into a note file and delete the posts, the continue writing if necessary. Old habits die hard.

Other times, I’m walking around and text myself a one-liner about something I know I want to write about. Or I record a quick voice memo. Sometimes those end up as long, thoughtful posts. They could end up as nothing.

I do have a little graveyard of posts that didn’t quite make it in my notes. Perhaps if one of those themes comes up again, I’ll have something to start with.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

For blogging, the local café is my most productive environment. It doesn’t just provide the right mix of “café noise” that facilitates the writing, but it also directly inspires things I write about. It was also partially responsible in introducing a chat-format to some blog posts.

In my life, I’ve gone back and forth between being a one-computer and two-computer person. But now I’m living a laptop-only life, really embracing the portability, writing at the café. I’m doing it now!

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I suspect this will either be the most- or least-satisfying answer, depending on the reader. I don’t use a CMS of any kind. I create new pages manually, update indexes manually, upload files via FTP …all manually. I edit the XML for my RSS feed manually. At times, it can be rather unforgiving. The downside is that I’m the only person to blame when something goes wrong. The upside is that my website is ultra portable.

These were all deliberate choices, to avoid dependence on any service. I don’t have to rely on much else besides the FTP connection to a server.

The site is made with only HTML and CSS that I write myself, so when I need to change something like the header or footer, I find-and-replace across hundreds of files. To me, this is much easier than wrangling with services and dependencies I do not control, which could be deprecated at any time, or could change direction, politics, or price.

When a new post reaches some undefined level of merit, I duplicate a template HTML file for the category it belongs in, move the text into that file, and finish writing and formatting the post in HTML, manually wrapping paragraphs and links.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

The current version of my blog started in 2022, and my mindset hasn’t changed too much since then. I like the name. I like the structure. It’s proven to work beyond just LMNT too. The same structure and style is used on grafera.zone and my side-blog, nandakke.jp.

I made a couple painful changes early on that would’ve been nice to avoid. I changed the blog directory from /post/ to /blog/. I also changed the UIDs in the RSS feed from URLs to proper UID strings, realizing that while URLs can change, but UIDs should not.

Understanding everything about the scope of my blog today, I still don’t think I would use a CMS to manage it all. It might have to be self-built to meet the expectations I have, but I doubt I’d have the patience to do it.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

It costs $30 every month to host my blog. That includes hosting for all of my websites, including Parakeet, Junior, Crown, Kadomaru, Mantia.me, Nandakke, and Luka’s site, GraferaZone. Thirty dollars a month is such a reasonable price to pay for this kind of publishing power.

I don’t post to my blog for the purpose of generating income. I post because—innately—I have to. However, I do accept donations, which I interpret as appreciation for what I’ve posted as well as encouragement to continue posting. The donations I receive usually pay for the hosting cost. I don’t want to charge for things I’m able to provide at no cost, though I do sell playing cards, fonts, and t-shirts, due the costs to produce those things.

Forming a reliance on income from a blog could potentially alter the authenticity of it. At least, I fear it would for me. I’d be scared that the money would influence too much of what I post or how often I post. I can’t hold it against anyone who wants to try to make money where they can. But for me, it’s squarely a hobby.

Generally speaking, the blogs I follow are ones that aren’t trying to actively monetize, and might not even accept donations. They don’t have paywalls. If they make and sell something, I may buy those things. But the best blogs for me are the ones that do it for the love of it, not because it’s a way for them to make money.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Some of my favorite blogs are Deja View from Andreas Deja, Waxy from Andy Baio, and the Ohno Blog from James Edmonson and friends.

Andreas is a former Disney animator responsible for some top-tier characters: King Triton, Jafar, Scar, and Hercules. I don’t just admire his own work, but I love that he uses his blog primarily to gush about other artists.

Andy has been writing his blog since 2002. He’s one of the earliest linkbloggers, which is crazy to think about. He manages to discover the very best of the web before anyone else. He’s really attuned to what’s happening across the Internet.

James is an independent type designer who writes in-depth process posts about each of his foundry’s fonts, hosts a podcast with other type designers, and teaches us all how to draw each letter of the alphabet.

What I love about all three of these people is that they use their blogs to highlight other people doing cool things. Accomplished in their own right, they use their blogging time to appreciate the world around them and bring what they love to everyone else’s attention.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

If there’s just one thing of my own to share, it’s Make a Damn Website. I believe anyone who doesn’t have a website should try making the simplest one they can. It’s not that tough.

Links to my own things:

LMNT, my blog
Nandakke, my “Japanese” blog
Womprat, a 4000-character Star Wars font
Junior Hanafuda, an interpretation of Japanese flower cards
Parakeet, my design studio collaboration with Luka Grafera
Me on Mastodon

A few links to other websites and tools I love:

Guidebook, an incredible resource for historical UI design
Tofu, a CJK character comparison tool
kenichi27.com, an extremely fun website from my friend Kenichi
Michael Tsai’s blog, with great industry commentary about Apple operating systems

This was the 106th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Louie. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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On my August challenge - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-02T14:30:00.000Z

Contrary to what I had planned, I didn’t post weekly updates on my challenge throughout August. No particular reason why, I was just busy doing various other things and posting updates on the hikes was low on my list of priorities. But, I am happy to report that I have successfully ended the month at 5033 meters of elevation gained, which is easily over my target goal of 4810!

Congratulations to me, I guess. This was a fun challenge that went way differently than what I had envisioned back in July. As you’ll notice from the screenshot above, I managed to record some activity on most days. The stretch from the 11th to the 17th is mostly empty because it was way too hot to do anything remotely challenging outdoors. I think we peaked at 39°C. So that was pretty much a wasted week for my challenge. We also had a few rainy days here and there, which slowed me down even further.

The distribution across the month of those 5000+ meters is also far from even. You’ll notice that there are a couple of big spikes, and that’s because I knew I had to do at least a couple of decent hikes if I wanted to get to my target goal. Those five spikes are:

619 meters hiked on the 9th
322 meters on the 10th (at 3 in the morning)
327 meters on the 18th (and two other minor walks with the dog the same day for some extra 190 meters)
480 meters on the 19th (and again, two other walks with the dog, 240 meters)
1095 meters on the 24th

There was another 1000+ meters hike I wanted to do, but August’s weather had other plans, and so I only managed to do one. I’ll take it.

I think I’ll attempt this challenge again next year, but I might do it either in May or in June. August is definitely not the right month for something like this. But it was fun, and that’s all that matters.

Now that August is behind us, you might be wondering what’s on the menu for September. I thought about participating in the Suck At Something September, which is such a great idea, but to be honest with you, I think I’ll take a few months off from doing challenges and just go day by day without having to think about some self-imposed challenge. There are a lot of other things going on anyway, and so no risk of getting bored anytime soon.

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