About This Collection

Over the years I’ve written a lot of troubleshooting posts on my blog, describing problems I’ve run into and how I solved them in hopes that other people with the same problems might find it helpful. (Daring Fireball called this Writing for Google back in the day.)

Several things came together to inspire me to reorganize those posts:

• Tinkering with IndieWeb concepts.
• Building a Gemini capsule.
• Opening the developer tools on one of my WordPress-powered blog pages. There’s no reason a 500-word article should need 400KB and a dozen connections!
• Keeping multiple WordPress blogs up to date with security fixes.
• Reading about the garden and stream metaphor. (via)

The essence of the garden and stream is that we’ve gotten used to a constant, time-based stream of information, but some things are better handled as an idea-based, organically-growing and cultivated collection. Sometimes you want to post a status update to social media (into the stream), but sometimes you want to update a Wiki page (taking care of the garden).

A lot of stuff on my blog isn’t there because it belongs in a stream. It’s there because it became more convenient than copying a template, writing the page, adding links and uploading everything over FTP.

I’d already mirrored some of these troubleshooting posts on my Gemini capsule, so I figured they’d be a good place to start.

My goals with this sub-site:

• Deeper dive into Eleventy, the static site generator I’d used to archive my Les Misérables commentary.
• Dig into IndieWeb.
• Light as possible. One CSS file, images only for content, system fonts, no JavaScript unless I have a specific thing that needs it. (And if I do have to add JavaScript, only include the parts I need, not half a megabyte of some framework or another.)
• Look somewhat decent (and legible!) on screens from cell phone up to widescreen desktops.
• Create a reusable template, both for my own projects and for other people.
• Be at least as useful as the original blog posts, if not more!
• Keep going and put new tech posts here to begin with.

I’m also working with the same rough set of templates on a collection of reviews from my blog, Amazon, app stores, etc. In part, this is to help me generalize them a bit more by trying it on a site with different requirements.

August 2022: After building several other subsites to fill in different use cases, I’ve generalized the layout and released it as Indie’s Eleven.

October 2024: I’ve started moving some of my tech-related commentary over here too.