Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder
I decided to build brennan.click, a wiki-linked digital commonplace book in Eleventy, with auto-generated stubs created with eleventy-plugin-interlinker, pur…
Feedroll
Sites I follow.
Beeminder: Getting Back on the Horse
After deleting corporate social media, I'm returning to Beeminder, a commitment tool that charges you money for failing to complete tasks, to reclaim my prod…
It Was Always a Love Story, Actually
What could a prestige antihero legal drama and a shonen apocalypse epic have in common? As it turns out, love. An analysis and comparison of Attack on Titan and
Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad.
Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. …
Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs
Yesterday, Unattributed posted a thorough dissection of my article on note-taking PKMs, analyzing my lack of intellectual rigour, nebulous wording, and poor …
Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb
Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms an…
People and Blogs Interview: Brennan Kenneth Brown
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 te…
What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?
As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and met…
The True, Unglamorous Life of a Writer
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 …
300 Minutes a Month: Cutting My Eleventy Netlify Build Time in Half
A sequel to my Eleventy build post: this time the bottleneck wasn't the build tool, it was the hosting bill. Notes on caching webmentions and guestbook fetches,
CLOWN BURNOUT
Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history of whit…
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 wh…
Why Does Conor McGregor Get a Comeback?
Conor McGregor returns to headline UFC 329 tonight after being found liable for rape in civil court, a comeback made possible by the UFC's right-wing politic…
REVIEW: Missing 'Missing Richard Simmons'
Nearly a decade after Dan Taberski's Missing Richard Simmons first asked the world where its brightest fitness star had gone, a review of the podcast that he…
Is the Juice Worth the Squeeze?
A laminated poster with an unsourced quote changed the trajectory of my entire life when I was a teenager. On the immutable transaction of trading days for h…
To My Readers: What Do You Want To See More Of?
I finally curated my blog posts into collections, revealing what I write about most: the IndieWeb, the craft of writing, community, technical tutorials, poli…
There Are People Who Would Give Anything For Your Ability to Read and Write
In our current year, there is a global literacy crisis. As a result, there's a privilege in being able to read and write. Notes on Frederick Douglass, the pr…
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 co…
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 …
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