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.

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

• Tinkering with IndieWeb.
• 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!

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.

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

TODO

• Import more posts.
• Webmentions?
• Accept new comments?