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.
| 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...
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
A guide to automatically deploying your Eleventy static site to NeoCities using GitLab CI/CD, including authentication, error handling, and optimizations.
| 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...
| 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?
| 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.
| 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.
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.
| 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.
| 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.
| 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.
Announcing the launch of brennan.day, an IndieWeb-focused personal site built with Eleventy, hosted on GitLab, and committed to ethical technology choices.