brennan.w10.site

ARCHIVE

Building an IndieAuth Comment System for Your Static Site

| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,726 words
TAGS: eleventy, IndieWeb, javascript, netlify, technical, tutorial

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.

REVIEW: How do we reckon? On Yiyun Li's 'Things in Nature Merely Grow'

| culture | 845 words
TAGS: Mental Health, Cultural Criticism, personal essay, philosophy, review, suicide

CONTENT WARNING: Suicide | A matter-of-fact memoir about the endurance of loss, where Li considers grief to be regarded as having an end-point, as though there could be a finite amount felt when both of your only children choose death instead of...

How Can We Use the Internet for Good?

| politics | 2,270 words
TAGS: creativity, IndieWeb, philosophy, politics

A manifesto on what we do when the world is on fire: Daywriting. The deliberate, daily documentation of ordinary existence as both personal archive and political resistance.

How a Taylor Swift Lyric Gave Me an Existential Crisis

| culture | 2,022 words
TAGS: creativity, Cultural Criticism, philosophy, music

The lyrics 'You know the greatest films of all time were never made' is obviously not about films. It is, somehow, about how we're living on this planet for a fragile, finite amount of time and we have something inert within us to give, to gift.

auld lang syne: The Commonplace (micro)Log

| technical-tutorials | 1,785 words
TAGS: eleventy, personal essay, technical, tutorial

A simple gratitude journal online, with media tracking and Beeminder integration. Yes, yet another 11ty project technical write-up, but I promise you'll learn something.

Deploying An Eleventy Site to NeoCities with GitLab CI/CD

| technical-tutorials | 1,143 words
TAGS: cicd, eleventy, IndieWeb, neocities, technical, tutorial

A guide to automatically deploying your Eleventy static site to NeoCities using GitLab CI/CD, including authentication, error handling, and optimizations.

Why I'm not a Full-stack Dev

| technical-tutorials | 1,348 words
TAGS: internet, technical

The Internet should be a place where ideas can live and spread without people extracting rent at every turn. Where an emerging nonprofit can publish their mission statement without paying Squarespace $300/year. Where a poet can share their work...

To Dance is to Live

| lyric-essays | 1,382 words
TAGS: creativity, personal essay, philosophy, spirituality

Nietzsche and Rumi had something in common: dancing. I wrote this mundane life update and found myself getting into the weeds of what's important to the physical body. What can I offer myself? How can I enact movement each day?

Building brennan.day Part One: Design, Rainbows, and Accessibility

| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 1,473 words
TAGS: eleventy, IndieWeb, personal site, technical

A dive into how this site is built, why it exists, and the philosophy behind owning your corner of the web.

What Can We Give One Another? On Public Domain, Preservation, and Living Without Copyright

| culture | 2,267 words
TAGS: copyright, Cultural Criticism, Digital Preservation, public domain

Could you only consume public domain work for a year straight? With the new year coming up and various IP being released to the public domain, I thought I'd muse on copyright and the future of art and culture.

Thoughts on Digital Third Spaces

| community | 2,587 words
TAGS: community, Cultural Criticism, IndieWeb, philosophy

Can the Internet be a place we can visit again? Can it replace what malls were supposed to be for us? A blog post about what we can do with what we have.

Do It Ugly: On Bad Art and Civic Duty

| personal-favourites, writing-craft | 1,546 words
TAGS: creativity, personal essay, art, philosophy

Thoughts on embracing the ugliness of your early creations as a form of civic duty and spiritual practice. A call to action without judgement.

Choosing Quiet: I'm No Longer Using AI Editors

| ai | 1,525 words
TAGS: AI, creativity, politics

An exploration of cognitive dissonance around AI usage, parallels to meat consumption, and the decision to transition to Sublime Text for an AI-free coding experience.

Bring Back the 90's Guestbook with JAMstack: How I Added Dynamic Comments to My Static 11ty Site

| indieweb, technical-tutorials | 696 words
TAGS: netlify, technical, tutorial

Reviving the classic guestbook for a static site using Netlify Forms and serverless functions, with lessons on distributed systems and race conditions.

Building an Independent Literary Publication in 2025

| 2,392 words
TAGS: creativity, publishing, technical

Breaking free from platform dependence to build an independent literary publication with Eleventy, exploring privacy-first analytics and sustainable publishing models.

Why Start Again? On Cycles, Beginnings, and the Art of Returning

| 1,500 words
TAGS: creativity, learning, meta, spirituality

Exploring the value of public writing as reference material, why blogging serves as better knowledge management than private notes, and embracing cycles of beginning again.

Dawn of a New Day, Dawn of a New Year

| 1,122 words
TAGS: IndieWeb, meta

Announcing the launch of brennan.day, an IndieWeb-focused personal site built with Eleventy, hosted on GitLab, and committed to ethical technology choices.

Worse than Wrestling with God

| 721 words
TAGS: technical

An all-night debugging session wrestling with web design issues, from omg.lol glitches to CSS mysteries, and the decision to migrate to Eleventy.

Getting Things Up and Running

| 652 words
TAGS: meta, projects

Transitioning from private to public writing, sharing progress on the Calgary Groups project and plans for the brennan.day website setup.

Time to Fun Blog

| 733 words
TAGS: creativity, spirituality, blogging

A pre-dawn reflection on overcoming fear and perfectionism to create an authentic, no-stakes blog for genuine self-expression.

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