Unattributed

Let's Talk About Hosted Blogs

Tue, 04 Aug 2026 07:55:33 -0500

Introduction

Going to make a bet that you didn’t know that I was gone, and really, you don’t give a ~~bleep~~. And you know what? That is perfectly fine. In fact, I’m happy if no one missed me.

Want to know where I went? No? Well, okay… But I’m going to talk about it anyway. I was in the process of migrating web hosts. Oh, so now you are interested? Okay, so, I think it’s fair that we talk about hosted blogs for a bit. But not just any hosted blogs, ones that are specifically more Fediverse native or adjacent.

Blogs We’re Not Talking About

Of course, there are some juggernaut blogs that have been out there for years. And, some of those blogs have adapted to the Fediverse. What do I mean by adapted?

Well, the biggest name that comes to mind is WordPress. They started offering Fediverse integration a few years back. Automattic went so far as to hire the author of the first working ActivtyPub plugin for WordPress in order to integrate support for ActivityPub more tightly into their platform. Which all sounds great… Except for a few things.

There are two routes to go with WordPress: hosted or self-hosted. If you go the hosted route many providers don’t know anything about the ActivityPub integration, and you will find yourself having to figure out what isn’t working in order to get support to fix the issue. All the while you are likely paying pretty good money for the service.

If you go the self-hosted route, you likely have a fair amount of time to spend maintaining your WordPress installation. There is very little that is easy about maintaining WordPress, plugins, a database, etc. It’s not the kind of activity that most people want to do when they are trying to write.

For similar reasons to these we can skip Blogger, Drupal, Wix, etc. They all have interesting features, some have better integration for the Fediverse, and some offer none.

What We Are Talking About

Let’s call them the minimalist blogs, and specifically ones that offer Fediverse integration. In particular, I’ll talk about five of them very briefly: Bear, write.as (WriteFreely), Pika Page, Micro.blog, and Pagecord. There are others, but most of them fall into the self-hosted category, and I want to focus on hosted options.

Bear is the one that I initially saw getting a lot of buzz. The promise of a “forever” blog with minimal features that you could just rely on was quite appealing. For me, it was too minimal. And, in order to enhance or extend it, you have to find a bunch of recipes that have been gathered together and copy and paste the ones you want into the back-end. The whole thing has a very hack-ish feeling to it. While the pricing for Bear was great, I had concerns about extensions being incompatible or breaking. That would lead to more time invested in maintaining the back-end of the blog than I wanted.

write.as is the hosted version of WriteFreely. It has a minimal interface that allows you to write as much as you want. And, the paid plans are competitive with Bear. But, write.as does have some odd quirks. For example, to create a page you write a post and then pin it to your menu. This can be annoying because you have to pin posts to the menu in the order you want them. But, not only that, since you have to save your page as a post first, it gets posted to the Fediverse, even if you don’t want it to. I could go on about quirks of the system, there are a lot of quirks.

Pika Page was probably the cleanest minimalist blog setup I’ve seen. It’s flexible and has a fair number of options, but isn’t overwhelming. As such I think it looks really nice, but there were a couple of things that I didn’t find all that nice. First, I didn’t see any Fediverse integration (ie, I didn’t see a way to directly publish posts to the Fediverse). Second, the pricing was limiting for me personally. I need to have 4–5 blogs, which would be considerably more expensive than either Bear or write.as.

Pagecord is the next level of Pika Page. It’s a simple blogging system, but has a fair amount of flexibility. It has Fediverse integration, but not as complete as a platform like write.as. I had a long talk with Olly, the Pagecord creator, about a number of features… Without getting into the weeds too much, some he was investigating adding, and others were outside the scope he had in mind for Pagecord. Pricing wise, Pagecord is a more expensive solution than Bear or write.as, but not quite as expensive as Pika Page.

Finally there’s Micro.blog. Micro.blog is (potentially) the most interesting option out there. Not only is it a blogging platform, but it also adds a lot of extra features, like Bookshelves, Movies, and Notes that can be used as part of the platform. Basically, Micro.blog is the fusion of a blogging platform along with a Fediverse Mastodon-like system. You can read, follow, and interact with users on the Fediverse. You can write blog posts, and publish them directly to the Fediverse, and you can send out notices for new posts on your existing Fediverse, Bluesky, and other social media accounts. Pricing is in the sweet-spot: between Bear and write.as, while offering options that aren’t as expensive as Pika Page or Pagecord.

But, there is another consideration when it comes to Micro.blog. It is based on the Hugo flat-file website generator. This is great for page loading speeds, but it brings a level of complexity that may not be for everyone. If you aren’t comfortable getting into the guts of templates, HTML and CSS, it may not be for you.

My Ultimate Decision

Admittedly, I wasn’t one hundred percent happy with any of the options. But, I knew that I needed something that would be flexible enough to let me create the site(s) I wanted, and at a reasonable price. So I made the decision to migrate to Micro.blog. It wasn’t the easiest migration. I spent several days reading documentation on templates and stuff in Hugo in order to make the site look and (mostly) feel the way I want it to.

But, once I had one site done, it was simple to copy-n-paste my work to the other sites with minimal changes necessary. And, much to the credit of Micro.blog it made migrating one of my sites easier than I’d expected it could be. (I had a site with over 400 posts, images, etc. that needed to migrate. I was able to backup the posts and import then into Micro.blog in a very short amount of time.)

So, that’s where I’ve been the last week: investigating blogging platforms, and deciding what to do. And, yes, there is more to this story. I will write about my research (which went a lot deeper) in another post. And, I will likely share more of my story on why I decided to migrate a second time after setting up my previous blogs.

UPDATE: Just to clarify my comments regarding the pricing of each option. I was thinking about this in a price-per-blog manner. write.as has an option for a 5 year plan with 5 blogs. This plan is $250, which amounts to $10/yr per blog. Bear is $49/yr for up to 10 blogs, or $5/yr per blog. And Bear offers their $189 one-time / forever price. Pagecord is $40/yr for 2 blogs, which is $20/yr per blog.

AI and Cognitive Dissonance

Sun, 26 Jul 2026 08:04:28 -0500

The old Postville Courthouse in Lincoln, Illinois, via The Library of Congress. Abraham Lincoln practiced law there from 1847 to 1859.

Well, as a surprise to me, my silly little Gravatar article was posted to Hacker News. This has called a lot of attention to the post, and made for some interesting comments. The most interesting of this is the claim that I have “cognitive dissonance”:

We live in a world with cognitive dissonance. We have to because if you don’t you’d go insane.

This article is perhaps a good example of that. On the one hand live in public (post blogs, use the same avatar on multiple sites) but at the same time try and control how that publicness is consumed (humans only, no AI).

Right now, whatever you make public is in AI. Whether that is on HN, or your blog, or wherever. You may not like that, but public is ultimately public.

Ironically a blog post about leaving some service because they used the marketing phrase “AI”, is immediately added to the AI training corpus.

So, of course, I feel the need to respond to this.

First off, I don’t have cognitive dissonance on this topic. Instead, I would say I have a rather refined set of principles when it comes to AI. But, I’m sure you aren’t here to read all my thoughts on AI. So, I will summarize them as: AI is a technology that holds promise, but at this time it’s not ready for public consumption. Despite what Alphabet, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other companies have you believing, there is still a lot of work and research that needs to be done. And, it seems that a substantial portion of the AI research community agrees with this stance, according to a report published by the AAAI.

Now, on to the idea that “whatever you make public is in AI.”

The questions surrounding this are matters for legal discourse. There are, in fact, many ongoing lawsuits with respect to AI companies (OpenAI, Meta, Alphabet, et al.) vacuuming up large quantities of copyrighted material into their system. There are currently 163 cases according to this tracker. Not just in the United States, but globally. Anthropic settled one case already, to the tune of $1.5 Billion, which shows that there is reason to believe these companies are aware of the harms they are doing in violating the ownership of the works they are ingesting.

This is not a matter of public versus private. This is a matter of ownership. In the U.S. and quite a few countries works are owned by their creators automatically on creation. Sharing a work publicly does not remove that ownership. Works are not transferred into the public domain for lengthy periods of time, unless the creator explicitly assigns their works to the public domain. (And, even then it’s difficult to do. See the reasoning behind the Creative Commons 0 license.)

My ownership of a work means I have the right to control how that work is reproduced. I could, for example, assign the rights to reproduce the work to a publisher. Or I could transfer those rights to a foundation or another organization. I can even reproduce the work publicly, while still maintaining ownership of the work.

Social media websites such as Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, etc. are potentially a different matter. Originally they stated that their reproduction of your posts did not transfer ownership to them. However, over time, they have slid more and more towards a position that they have the right to reproduce your work in ways they feel is appropriate (this was mostly for advertising originally, but that’s becoming increasingly blurry these days).

Alphabet has a contract with Reddit to slurp up users postings, and they are certainly using Gmail, YouTube and as many other sources as they can to train their AI. Meta is almost certainly using Facebook, Instagram, and What’s App to train their AI’s. And Elon’s companies are doing whatever they can to feed Grok. But I don’t have to capitulate to this loss of ownership. I’ve left all of those platforms behind for a reason. They might have whatever relics are left over from my time there, but I never agreed to their usage to feed AI systems, and I won’t willingly provide them with more fodder.

Hopefully this clears up the misunderstanding that I might have “cognitive dissonance” where AI is concerned.

As a final side note: I was amused by the side discussion regarding the aesthetics of my site. As noted, the font is indeed Work Sans. And, I have done some very minor tweaks in terms of the spacing to make it nicely readable. The overall structure of the site is designed to be minimal. And, through its minimal design I’m aiming for each page to be small and fast loading (there is an issue here, which is based on how the underlying platform works). There are no images in the footer, the buttons are all HTML. The images I use are hand edited to reduce their size (I aim for under 250K per image). As for the color: I just wanted an earthy tone, but yeah, tan isn’t really my favorite color either. As for the person that said they didn’t like the logo, well what can I say? :) The logo is meant to be mildly humorous—the “A” being a triangle is intended to be a slight visual cue to the name “Unattributed” being a joke about the Attribution clause of the Creative Commons license. (IE, “Attribution: Unattributed”) Yeah—I know it’s a joke that passes over most people heads.

Categories: #Features Tags: #AI, #HackerNews, #repsonse, #cognitivedissonance, #public, #ownership, #copyright License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 4.0.

Update: RSS Feed Readers

Sat, 25 Jul 2026 07:54:45 -0500

Green and Blue Nighttime Landscape.

A couple of RSS based projects have been brought to my attention since I published The State of RSS Feed Readers a little over a week ago. So here’s a brief update.

Kagi News

Several people mentioned Kagi News in comments on Mastodon to the original article. Kagi News was really not what I had in mind when writing the original article. It is more of a curated news service along the lines of Google News or Ground News rather than a reader that you can add the feeds you want to track. However, it bears some more resemblance to Techmeme or Memeorandum than Google News in a sense.

Kagi News uses hundreds, possibly thousands, of RSS feeds to aggregate news stories. These stories are then fed into an AI system that reads them, and writes a summary of all the articles it has consumed. The summary is heavily cross-referenced against the original sources, and all the sources used in writing the summary are listed at the bottom of the article.

While AI is a very controversial topic these days this is one of the few times when I believe it is used properly. There is little chance that anyone could read all 50+ versions a story published by all the newspapers and magazines in the world. Having a summary that pulls all of them together, and tries to present a story with facts that align with the majority of the available reporting is interesting.

It’s also useful that they provide an RSS feeds for each topic, so you can pull their feeds into your personal choice of RSS reader.

Miniflux

I didn’t mention Miniflux as an option in the self-hosted portion of the original article, despite its popularity. The reason? Quite simply: I forgot it. :) Miniflux was one of the options I had looked at, and has a major selling point in its favor.

Miniflux is an extremely lightweight RSS feed reader with a minimal interface that is fast and responsive. The whole application is minimal, even a full Docker image is under 20meg in size. The only downside I see is the requirement to set up an external database to use it.

If you don’t want to self-host Miniflux, there is a hosted version for $15/yr.

Feedgrab

This is the reason I decided to write this update. I don’t think I saw Feedgrab referenced anywhere, and it’s a shame. Feedgrab is a beautiful, minimal hosted RSS reader from the creator of Pagecord. And while it’s a hosted application it is completely free.

While Miniflux may have a some more features than Feedgrab, it makes up for them with one feature: starting feeds. When you create an account you are presented with a menu of categories, in each category is 30-50 feeds for you to chose from. This makes it quick and easy to populate your feed with stories that will be of interest to you.

And, there is a little extra: there is a browser extension for adding the feeds of sites to Feedgrab. Just install the Feedgrab extension, and whenever you find a site you want to follow, just add it to Feedgrab. And, of course, you can import your own OPML file if you have one, or export your feeds to an OPML file.

It’s a very simple system. No special features or options for you to set. You can star items, mark them read / unread. That’s it. No categorization of feeds. No ranking feeds, or tagging items, etc. It’s all about reading the feeds that you have selected.

Conclusion

This was just a short update, a few items that I had missed the first time around, which seemed relevant to add to the discussion of RSS feed readers.

One last thought: I was impressed with Kagi News. Enough that I added their feeds to Calibre to scan daily, as a “quick news” newspaper / magazine I can scan each morning. It’s quite a nice to have a publication that I can look at quickly, have an idea of what’s going on, and if something really catches my attention, I can dig in deeper by looking at the original sources.

In testing the Feedgrab extension didn’t work as expected in Waterfox. But, that could be some incompatibility with Waterfox. Or it could be that the extension hasn’t been updated for some time. At this point there were only four downloads of the extension, so I have doubts that it’s getting extensively tested.

Categories: #Features Tags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #update License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

RE: Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs

Thu, 23 Jul 2026 07:52:02 -0500

Shoreline with lights. License: CC-0

So, Brennan Kenneth Brown wrote about the experience of my response to one of his posts topping the Bubbles list for most of a day. To that, I have to apologize, and hopefully provide a little context. Brennan wrote at the beginning of his post:

The writing was critical, but it was also fair and written in good faith. That said, seeing a 3,500-word article about me on the top of Bubbles.town yesterday certainly did give me anxiety—but that’s par for the course. My chickens have come home to roost. I mean, if you’re going to share your work with the world, then you need to expect the world to respond.

So, to set the record straight: I didn’t start with the intention of writing a 3,600-word critique in response to Brennan’s article. Especially not one as critical as it is. Personally, I like to pick up on someone else’s thoughts that have some similarity to mine, or are tangential and seek a common ground. That’s how my responses to Gordon Mclean and Michael Lynch have largely gone.

In this case, it felt necessary to start out of with a few corrections before moving on to my own thoughts. But, by the time I had written those corrections, I was no longer sharing my thoughts. Instead, I was back in the role of the critic, attempting my best to use academic scrutiny (despite being out of academia for over forty years):

Believe it or not, we haven’t even gotten to the meat of Brennan’s article yet. This article is so dense with information that it’s going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

And this is where I failed. I wasn’t able to maintain the level of even-handedness in my criticism that I should have maintained. My only excuse: I was frustrated with myself for being so critical that I turned my frustrations towards the author at times, instead of maintaining focus on the work itself. For that I apologize.

Brennan then goes on to talk about his reaction to my article:

But my body doesn’t know the difference. I’m somebody who has struggled with scrupulosity, or moral obsessive-compulsive thoughts, for my entire life. I hold a high (maybe impossible) bar for myself to do good, and feel as though I’m failing no matter what I do or don’t do. Irrationally—because of mental illness—I see a bad article I’ve written as an awful moral failure. The same order of magnitude as the things that actually get people milkshake ducked

And I want to address this point because I think, while we experience it differently, there is some common ground here.

For those who don’t know, I have another website that has been dormant now for about ten years. But, during it’s prime, I wrote over 500 articles on it, over half (360-420) music reviews. And I have a netlabel that has been dormant for about the same period of time. The reason I bring this up is to talk about two situations I found myself in that bear some similarity to Brennan’s struggle.

The first, one of the artists I was working with on my label started demanding that I supply materials for him to use in support of his performances. None of those materials had ever been discussed when we started working together, and nowhere had I documented making any such materials available. The truth: the whole operation was running on a shoestring. I was putting in whatever money I could. There were no profits from the label to work with for supplying the artists with anything more than I had provided. The artist was enraged when he heard this, and started posting all over the place about me, trying to assassinate my credibility.

Nobody who knew me bought his allegations. I made a couple of posts correcting misinformation he was spreading, and providing receipts. Receipts I had pulled together in a panic because his attacks felt personal enough that I thought we were going to end up in a legal action. That’s when things got worse: his attacks turned into threats against me. Yes, those kinds of threats. However, after his attacks had been called to the attention of the platforms he’d posted them on (by others who knew me) he cooled down a bit. At least publicly. And that allowed both of us to walk away, working relationship shattered.

In the other case, an artist I had written numerous reviews about decided, at some point, that I was his enemy. He wrote a long diatribe to me demanding that I pull down all the reviews of his works over several years. Apparently, this started because I had made a couple of mistakes in some reviews, combined with him having some bad personal experiences unrelated to my reviews. It took a week (or more) of going back and forth with him, but in the end, he agreed that it would be best to just add corrections to the reviews in question. That was something I was always more than willing to do.

But, the reason I relate these two experiences is they are similar in some respect to Brennan’s experience. I was invested in the work that I was doing. I thought I was doing a greater good for everyone involved. Never would I have considered my work to be harmful in any way. (Even in my reviews I had a policy: I had to have a minimum of three good things to say about a release, if I didn’t, the review would likely not be published.) But both of these experiences made me feel like I was in a war in a way, under attack and on edge for days, even weeks after the experiences. Both experiences severely undermined the person I thought I was, made me question everything.

That is an experience I don’t wish on anyone. It is an experience I don’t wish to inflict on anyone. And, it is something I will endeavor to improve on in the future.

Categories: #Response Tags: #criticism, #scrutiny, #scrupulosity, #writing, #experiences License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

RE: Why I Stopped “Creating Content”

Wed, 22 Jul 2026 07:53:31 -0500

A city full of millions of people living their lives. Photo: CC-0

Michael Lynch wrote an excellent and thought-provoking article yesterday titled Why I Stopped “Creating Content”. In this article he discusses a lot of the mentality that motivates the mainstream web these days which is worth discussing a bit more.

Industry Speak

I started encountering a lot of the industry speak when I found my way into the bowels of the SEO industry some years back. At the time I just accepted that terms like “funnel,” “conversion,” “landing page,” “content,” and “traffic” had meaning. After all, these were the people that were making a lot of money, and getting a lot of eyes on their websites, right?

Turns out, no, they weren’t. I’ve known a few people who have been engaged in the drop-shipping industry for a while now. Basically, they use as many tricks of technology and marketing as possible in order to sell (often dubious) products at a substantial markup for profitability. Basically a “passive income” type of scheme. These are the kind of people that think of customers as “traffic”. They don’t care about their customers, they are only interested in chasing the dollars, pounds, or whatever currency…

When my eyes were truly opened about what the SEO world was really about, I was completely repulsed. I found the whole thing repugnant. And, while I’ve never mentioned it before, this was another black mark on Google’s reputation as far as I was concerned. Why Google? Because they enable this industry. They actively engage with SEO marketers to make certain they understand the changes being made to their search engine.

Why would they do this? While I never had the time to dig into it deeper, I believe Google is profiting from SEO marketers. And, I believe that it’s significantly profitable for Google. Why? If it wasn’t profitable, why would Google directly engage with these marketers?

The thing I found disgusting about this is: Google has been actively distorting search results for a long time. If some SEO marketer’s page can outrank bad review(s) of the same product, that likely means the SEO marketer had an upper-hand over the reviewer. At least that is what I keep seeing.

The Rise of Influencers

I don’t know if anyone will be surprised reading this, but the people doing “influencer” marketing are just a subset of the SEO marketing crowd. As social media started becoming more influential, it was apparent to many of the SEO marketers that Google didn’t represent the whole market anymore. So, they turned to “creators” to market their garbage.

What I think many don’t realize is that when your favorite YouTuber, Instagram-er, (or whatever platform) takes a sponsorship they are subject to the same measurements SEO marketers use. They are seen as a “funnel” to “drive traffic.” The result is “conversion” to a “customer.” Many times their agreements depend on the “conversion rate” of their audience. Basically, it pulls you out of your role as an audience member, and makes you into a commoditize-able asset.

But who can blame the people who are creating the things you watch? They need some way to make money in order to keep making things for their audience. And that’s what these marketers are preying on. They are living on the willingness of a person to turn their audience into “traffic” fodder.

Getting off the Roller Coaster

This entire thing is a big roller coaster. Once you are on it, it’s hard to see where or when the ride is going to end. And I took a long ride on the SEO coaster, but I managed to jump off it a few years back. I had been trying to decide what to do with the rest of my life during the pandemic. Actually, I knew what I wanted to do, but I didn’t know how I was going to do it.

The answer, of course, was writing. I t was the thing I’ve wanted to dedicate myself to since College. However, over the past few years I have been confronted with an old insecurity: would anyone be interested? It’s the age-old question that confronts every writer: who is your audience. When you start any project, especially a creative endeavor, you have to wonder if there is any appeal to that project. So, of course, I started writing again. First with this very blog, and then I started a niche blog. The idea was to see if there was any interest. No sales, no marketing, just me writing.

And, of course, they failed. Why, I wondered? I found several reasons. First was the demotivation provided by WordPress. But, I didn’t recognize that at the time. Instead, I turned to the SEO articles I had stashed away. I quickly found I was doing X wrong and Y wrong. I would never generate “traffic” unless I did Z instead.

This was when the proverbial light bulb went off in my mind. SEO was doing precisely the wrong thing. I was looking for answers from marketers. I was looking to generate numbers instead of considering the value of my work, and the value of those that would read my work. And that’s when I put it together: what I really wanted was to build an audience instead of “followers” or generate “traffic”.

The Difference

Artists, especially performing artists, understand the difference. Audiences are not nameless, faceless masses being marketed to. An audience is a participant in the performance or presentation of a creation. You are a participating right now by reading these words on your screen. And, you can take your participation further by upvoting, or leaving feedback. But, that is for you to decide: that’s the audience member role as a participant in this process.

Don’t believe this? Let’s try another example, music concerts. Have you been to a show that just felt different? That felt like it was something that was just more than you were expecting? Have you been to shows that were less than you expected, or shows that met your expectations? Now, have you ever heard about a band or an artist talk about a show that we extra special to them? This is because the audience is interacting with the band / artist. It’s all about the mood, the reaction, and interaction between an artist and their audience.

So, that’s the difference with the IndieWeb: we don’t use SEO marketing speak, we don’t think of people as “traffic” and more so, we aren’t in competition with each other. We each decide who we are, what the want to present, and we find the best way to present that through writing, music, video, painting, drawing photography, whatever form works for you.

We don’t use the tools of SEO marketers. We use aggregators like Bubbles to allow our audience to tell others what they might like. We use web rings and blog rolls to allow our audiences to find things that they like. Our audiences grow, shrink, change, and define their role in our work. This is exactly the opposite of what marketers do: they want their “traffic” to constantly increase so they can “convert” more of them.

Conclusion

The SEO marketing have done one thing correctly. They have provided us with some tools that are useful for making certain our blogs are set up in a technically correct manner. Beyond that, there’s little else they can offer in terms of genuine communication. Nothing about their terminology: “content creator,” “traffic,” “conversion,” “funnel,” and so on treats people for who they are. People are just numbers to SEO marketers, just a faceless mass.

This is what we reject. We instead understand that people are authors, artists, musicians, painters, performers, poets, sculptors, or any of hundreds of other things they decide to be. We understand that people choose to make available the things they want other people to see, experience, and appreciate.

We understand that you are an audience. You are not a faceless, nameless mass. You are people who have feelings, thoughts, and experiences you bring to our works. Audiences grow, shrink, and change over time, you are not a monolithic group. It’s through interaction that we learn to grow and change as persons. There is no place in SEO for that.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out at least a few of the interactions that have helped drive this point home to me. Michael Lynch is the very reason this article exists, he was the inspiration for it. Brennan Kenneth Brown was very humble in understanding my feedback on his work, as critical as I was. Gordon Mclean made a post that he thought was just a light little piece about Gravatar, my reaction surprised both him and me.

If it weren’t for these, and other people on the IndieWeb, I would not be learning and growing as a person. And that, in the end, is what the IndieWeb is about for everyone. F*** the SEO marketers.

Categories: #Response Tags: #seo, #marketing, #promotion, #artists, #writers, #painters, #audience License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

How I Write Blog Posts with Obsidian

Tue, 21 Jul 2026 07:58:52 -0500

You’ve probably run into some Obsidian evangelist espousing some convoluted system of organizing all their notes, and building some knowledge base. Heck, I was just involved in a conversation about Personal Knowledge Management. This isn’t that article.

My personal use of Obsidian tends to be simple. I build into it the tools that I need to get things done, to make things easier. There is a saying (which I can’t locate, so I’ll paraphrase) that a system should only be as complicated as needed, and nothing more. The idea is there is no reason to build a Rube Goldberg machine when all you really need is a wrench. That’s the approach I take: use a wrench to bolt on a few tools, and tighten things up where necessary.

So, this article will walk through how I work with things now. This system has evolved a bit over the last few weeks, and is likely to evolve further. But the primary idea is, and will remain: keep it simple, but make it useful.

Planning

When I switched from WordPress to write.as, the biggest thing I “lost” was having a way to plan the articles that I wanted to work on. Obsidian recently added a feature called Bases that made it simple to set up a table containing all the articles for all three of my sites:

View of the main planning table. Unpublished articles blurred—no spoilers! ;)

The simplicity here is that the table quickly lets me see which articles I have published, which are in the planning / drafting stage, and the scheduled date for the articles. But, looking at a table this big could be tricky to navigate. Fortunately, I have a couple of alternate views available:

The Plan / Draft view lets me see just the articles I am working on.

And the Published view lets me see what I’ve already posted.

There are two “genius” parts to this system. First, all this information is part of the article, it’s not some extra information that I need to keep track of. Second, I can update the “Published”, “Scheduled” and “Status” fields from this list without having to open the specific post. How is this done?

New Post Drafts

Every time I have a new idea, I create a new document in the website’s folder, and insert a template:

Blog Template is for website posts, CMP Template is for my archived podcast posts.

Once the Blog Template is inserted, the document shows up in the Planning table. After the template is inserted the document looks like this:

Template inserted in document, with Properties for the Planning table circled.

You might notice there is both an Untitled field, and a Title field. Untitled is Obsidian’s filename for the document, whereas Title is the actual article title. Why both? Obsidian places some restrictions on the names of documents. For example, the character : isn’t allowed in an Obsidian filename, but there are times when I need it in an article title.

From here, writing is dead simple…

Writing In Obsidian

The full writing environment, with a few highlighted items.

Now it’s just time to write. The majority of the screen is dedicated to the editing window where I can work on an article. If I have images (like this article) they can be drag-n-dropped into place. To the left is the Navigation panel, with my folders on the top half, and the files in the selected folder on the bottom. To the left of the editing window is the version control panel for the current article (I’ll explain my choice in the next section).

When I am done with the article I export it to an output directory. The export process converts any Obsidian specific markup (such as using wiki style links) to standard Markdown formatting, and places all the attachments (images) in a folder with the article. This makes it dead simple to upload to write.as.

Obsidian Plugins

I have a selection of Obsidian community plugins that I use for working in Obsidian as can be seen in this image:

Image: screenshot of installed community plugins.

The most important of these are Harper and LanguageTool, both of applications these plugins call are installed locally on my system as I have a slow internet connection, and prefer to have my tools running locally. markdown export is the export tool I use for blog posts. Notebook Navigator enhances Obsidian’s built-in navigation panel a ton, I’ve barely scratched the surface of what it can do. Outliner provides better list handling, allowing drag-n-drop of items, folding, and more. Typewriter Mode is really only used for one feature: highlighting the current line I am editing. (I have been doing this for 40+ years as it helps with my unique form of dyslexia.)

Remotely Save is the tool I use for syncing my vaults between systems. Version Control is a simple built-in version control system. The advantage to using it over git or another external version control system is that the versions of my documents are synced with Remotely Save. This removes the need to synchronize a git repository separately from the vault.

Zotero Integration allows me to search and insert bibliographic references when I need them. Alas, write.as doesn’t support reference links, so I have to do it inline, instead of in end-note style.

Safi Site Audit is a tool that is unique to this vault for me. It’s used to check the health of my sites, and catch any major issues, like broken links, missing alt text, and so on. I don’t run it often, but it’s good to be able to check and generate a report once in a while.

Conclusion

Obsidian, between it’s recently added Base feature and a handful of plugins makes for a great writing environment for me. The ability to track the status of the posts I am working on, have version control over the documents, and have some additional tools that allow me to customize the environment to my liking.

I know there are a lot of evangelists of Obsidian out there, and their enthusiasm and overly complicated setups can make Obsidian seem unapproachable. Personally, I’ve found that it is excellent if you tailor it to your specific needs. And that is what is most important, and makes me most productive with a tool: doing what I require in the way that I need.

This wasn’t too detailed in terms how I actually tweak things (like key bindings for certain tools). Hopefully it gives you some insight into my workflow. And maybe it will give you some ideas about how you can refine your workflow.

Categories: #HowTo Tags: #obsidian, #tool, #writing, #blogging, #configuration, #workflow License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

Sun, 19 Jul 2026 07:55:42 -0500

Bridge heading into the smokey landscape. License: CC-0

I read Brennan Kenneth Brown’s What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?, and found myself writing a lengthy response. But, after I wrote my response I reread Brennan’s article and found myself in a bit of a quandary. I found myself asking a simple question: was it intentional that he presented both arguments and counterarguments in his piece? That seemed to have a simple answer: yes.

Any good piece of writing should undertake to present the relevant perspectives, and treat them seriously. But this is where I stumbled to understand Brennan’s position. While he presented the counterpoints, or counterarguments to these positions, he didn’t seem to treat them in the same manner as his primary arguments and points. That has caused me to think about his article from a different perspective.

What Was the Purpose

There is a statement, or rather a question, that forms the premise of Brennan’s argument about Personal Knowledge Management:

Obsidian has been out for six years now—has there been an increase in public-facing understanding and knowledge?

That is a question that, the more that I look at it, seems completely wrong. It’s taking the idea of a single piece of technology, a single application, and asking what that tool has contributed to the world. How does anyone measure what the contribution of a piece of software is to the world?

Take for example a couple of applications that have been around for many more decades than Obsidian: Emacs and vim. Have Emacs and vim contributed to “public-facing” understanding or knowledge? No, they haven’t. However, what they have enabled people to do a lot of things: write code, programs, applications, papers, documents, books, poems, and a lot more.

The tool doesn’t make the contribution. The tool enables people to make contributions to the world. But Brennan goes on to double down:

I think it’s safe to say that, while there have always been courses and lessons on productivity people sell and buy, the unique values and principles of Obsidian (local plain-text files written in Markdown, data privacy, portability, “future-proofing,” etc.) give the ideas and the people behind them a certain higher-brow purpose and epistemological value.

And this is where the wheels come completely off the train. Basically nothing about the linked document supports the statement that Brennan is making. The page in question does not mention: data privacy, portability, or “future-proofing.” What it does suggest is, “We believe in plain text for something as important as your knowledge base. […] When the file system replaces the cloud, you get flexible options to work with your files: you can back them up with Dropbox, use Git to do versioning, or encrypt your disk for security. Whatever works on your file system will work on your Obsidian knowledge base.” There is no hint at the concepts being “higher-brow” or anything to indicate an ascribed “epistemological value.”

Instead, the core argument the Obsidian team makes is nearly the opposite:

Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.

Instead of providing you with an opinionated and assembled product, Obsidian gives you a foundation and numerous functional building blocks to discover and build your own solution.

The foundation is to be able to view files, edit them, and search them. For the minimalist, that’s enough.

So where Brennan came up with all of this “future-proofing” and “highbrow” and “epistemological value” is minimally unclear, and maximally misleading. Obsidian is just a tool. A tool that is designed for users to create the system they want or need.

Where I think Brennan has gone wrong with this is reading or watching what others have said about Obsidian as a tool. I have seen this ecosystem that seems to have developed around Obsidian, and honestly it is quite off-putting. But should we judge a tool by its users? Or should it be judged based on what it’s developers have provided?

I think I am going to side with the developers on this one.

Brennan then posits his central thesis a second time:

My concern is in the lack of critical examination of what these complex, robust systems are producing: Has there been a meaningful increase of understanding and creation thanks to personal knowledge management systems? This is the question I want to investigate and try to answer.

I do wonder what “complex, robust systems” he means at this point. He’s only mischaracterized Obsidian, which certainly at its core is not all that complex. It’s a personal Wiki with a few extra features. Wikis have existed since 1994 when Ward Cunningham developed the first one (which was installed online in 1995).

Believe it or not, we haven’t even gotten to the meat of Brennan’s article yet. This article is so dense with information that it’s going to take a lot of work to go through and pull it apart for a clear examination.

Personal Knowledge Management Systems

After providing a list of PKM’s (most notable of which are PARA, Johnny Decimal, Zettelkasten, GTD, and Commonplace Books), Brennan sets out a series of questions for the examination of these systems:

First, what does it mean to make an important and meaningful contribution to our understanding of the world?

Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.

Third, what does the process actually look like for the actual people who write important papers and books?

Fourth, what is the throughput and output of the people who have dedicated themselves to PKM frameworks?

This series of questions, in itself, is something of a mess. The first question doesn’t have any relationship to personal knowledge management. What a person contributes to the world isn’t measured by their ability to store or regurgitate information. Making an “important and meaningful contribution” is a highly nebulous concept that is dependent on the audience and the author.

The second question is a complete shift in scope. Making “important, meaningful contributions” to academia and communications is not the same as making a contribution to “our understanding of the world”. And then there’s this: “…shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.” To many, academia is quite literally a form of elitism that gate keeps information. (Aside: I could make a long argument here about what happened to Aaron Swartz in his attempt to liberate the information that was being gate kept by academia.)

Third question: surely it looks like whatever works for them, right? I mean, this is what the promise of Obsidian is in the first place: “Note-taking is a highly personal activity. Naturally there is no single all-encompassing solution for everyone.” If someone wants to use PARA, they use PARA. If they want to invent their own system (spoilers) then they will do so. Again, how is this relevant? Is a person’s choice of system indicative or predictive of their ability to perform some task?

The fourth question is, possibly, the most valuable, and yet the most difficult. How do you know what people are choosing to use for their knowledge management? How does someone measure “throughput and output”? Certainly you can perform a quantitative analysis of this, however assessing the qualitative nature of this question is far more difficult.

Next we talk about German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, whose Zettelkasten system has become widely known, and is frequently cited as a “genius” method for organizing one’s notes or information. Brennan here thinks of this as a “Myth” because no one has been able to take Luhmann’s notes and create new works based on them. People have realized that his system was idiosyncratic to Luhmann himself. But does that make his methodology a “myth?” I don’t think so, it just means his method was specific to him.

The Questions

At this point Brennan starts going through the questions that he outlined (as quoted above), only there’s a bit of goal shifting here. For example, question one is now stated as “What counts as a meaningful contribution to understanding?” Before it had to be both “important and meaningful” and it had to apply to “our understanding of the world”. But, nonetheless, let’s continue. Brennan states:

The empirical literature on insight and creativity centers on incubation, the act of stepping away from a problem, unconscious restructuring, working memory offloading. This is not the act of browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.

Incubation is, quite literally, a portion of the process that systems like PARA (Forte, Tiago. Building a Second Brain: A Proven Method to Organize Your Digital Life and Unlock Your Creative Potential. Vol. 1. Simon and Schuster, 2022.) actually supports. In Chapter 3, he quite clearly states:

There are four essential capabilities that we can rely on a Second Brain to perform for us:

Making our ideas concrete

Revealing new associations between ideas.

Incubating our ideas over time.

Sharpening our unique perspectives.

(Emphasis added.)

The understanding is that this is very much in line with the ideas that works about insight and creativity have suggested. This isn’t just spending time “browsing a hyperlinked card catalog.” It’s storing information such that it can be found when it is needed and additional information might surface during the process that allows intuitive leaps in problem-solving. This whole concept is completely in line with the papers being cited.

And then Brennan disproves his whole point by pointing to a paper: Scholars ARE Collectors: A Proposal for Re-thinking Research Support which makes the point that academics are “hoarders” of information. And they organize and interact with this information in their own way. In other words: they make intuitive leaps through use of hoarded information.

The next question, “Are PKM frameworks used by people making real contributions, or mostly by people selling PKM?” is completely different from the one listed in the beginning of the article: “Second, are PKM frameworks being used by those making important, meaningful contributions in fields of academia and communications? By communications, I mean synthesizing the understanding of expert-domains, so these discoveries can be understood and shared among everyone instead of gatekept by elitism.”

Seriously? How does the literal questions keep changing this much? The first question mostly in scope. But now, the second question doesn’t even match between statements of the question. I think I know why this happening, which I will explain towards the end of this article. For now, we’ll talk about the revised question.

Brennan notes that there is a whole market of people selling books, courses, and other materials about PKM. And, makes note that it is likely that those who are writing and doing training about it are not likely applying their teachings.

Honestly, I don’t know that this is really an issue. There are people that get into many lines of work, including things like life trainers, gym trainers, motivational speaking, etc. What works for one person may not work for another person. Listing off a bunch of people that don’t use a system doesn’t disprove the system, it only shows that there are other methods that can be used.

The part that I think was hilarious about this section was the “gotcha” Brennan tries to make of this post on the Obsidian forum. The way the original poster made his post, it’s obvious that he was trying to promote his own book, and his website. But then one respondent posts a literal bibliography of at least fifty works the original poster didn’t reference. The clear implication of this post: the original poster is unqualified in the field, he hasn’t done his research. And yet, here we are, using this post where someone is debunking the original poster as an example.

Okay, on to the third question:”What does the process actually look like for people who write important books?” Hey, what do you know: this time the questions actually match!

Now, while I love to examine the processes of others when possible to glean any insights I can from them, and possibly integrate some of their concepts into my own, I don’t see how this proves anything. Just because people that are highly successful, or are high functioning in their field don’t adopt a PKM methodology or specific tool is no reflection on the methodology or the tool. It’s just a matter of the person having found the tools and methods that work for them.

So, let’s look at this statement from Brennan:

The analogue systems used by demonstrably prolific working writers are project-bounded and disposable. The digital PKM ideology sells the opposite promise of a permanent, ever-growing, cross-project system that gets more valuable the longer you maintain it.

Are the analogue systems always project-bounded? There are many times when fiction writers have started developing some idea or concept for a work, but found that it didn’t fit the story they wanted to tell. So, do they just throw it away? No. They put it aside someplace only to be retrieved when it fits in the story they are writing.

The PKM system, on the whole, is about building a knowledge base, basically a library of knowledge that you can pull from. When you have a specific project, you pull the information that fits specifically within the scope of the project you are working on. This is basically no different from going to a library and gathering research materials. Just because a library has hundreds of thousands of books that don’t apply to your field doesn’t mean those books don’t have value. There are likely books that don’t fit in your field of study that still have value to you for other reasons.

Singling out three or four people that have processes that are completely different from PKM method doesn’t disprove anything about PKM methods. It just shows that those methods don’t work for them.

Okay, on to the last question: “What is the actual throughput of people dedicated to PKM?” Originally this was stated as “throughput and output” but now the scope is narrowed to “throughput”. And, what exactly is “throughput?” Is that quantifiable or measurable? Output could be quantified or measured: X number of articles, Y number of books, Z number of videos… More importantly, one could consider the potential impact based of their work product based on their relevance as measured by following.

The example given in this section is of Theo Stowell, someone who has been writing about PKM and using Obsidian for several years, and now is supposedly developing a new tool. How relevant is he? Well, the highest number of followers for Theo I could find was on Medium, where he has 1.8K followers. Everywhere else I looked (YouTube, Instagram, Substack) he had well below 1K followers, and in many cases well below 500 followers.

Now, how big is Obsidian? On Obsidian’s own website, they indicated there were around 750K downloads by 2022. The most recent estimate I could find of Obsidian’s distribution was in this Fueler article, which states there are between 1-1.5 million copies of Obsidian out there.

So, I don’t understand the example of Theo Stowell, he doesn’t seem to represent a significant presence in the Obsidian community considering there are plugins with well over 1 million downloads (23 as of this writing).

Now, we know that there is a big market around self-help, personal-development market. And organization systems, methods, and tools is a part of this market. But, honestly, it’s not as big as it might seem. Tiago Forte, the most notable name in the PKM had a revenue of about $2.4M from his “Building a Second Brain” book. But when all the expenses were factored in, he netted approximately $1.26M. That is on the sale of 500K books.

Sure that sounds like a decent chunk of change, but in a market worth somewhere around $46 Billion in 2025, $2.4M is a fairly small amount compared to the potential. Obsidian is very difficult to estimate, but based on the referenced Fueler article, its revenue is somewhere between $5M and $25M annually. And even that is still a fairly small amount when compared to the overall industry.

Where Did Brennan’s Article Go Wrong?

When I started the first draft of this response, I was stymied by how so much of the article had gone so wrong. I was thinking, “I don’t know how I can ever explain this.” But, then, just when I thought I was going to have to say “I don’t know” an article popped up on Bubbles that provided some insight: People and Blogs: Brennan Kenneth Brown. In particular, there is a segment about Brennan’s writing process where he points to a post on his own site: My Blogging Workflow: A routine for nearly a post a day for 4 months straight., wherein he talks about how he handles the research parts of his posts:

Regardless of my focus or topic, I go as fast as possible, as I want to reach 750 words in around 20 minutes, though sometimes it takes much longer.

How do I have articles heavy with links and stats and quotes from others if I’m writing so quickly? When I’m writing a research-heavy essay or commentary, I’ll put something in brackets with TK and return back to it in the editing process so I don’t slow down with the writing.

Rightly, he points out, this is a practice from journalism, as journalists are frequently writing in the field and don’t have access to the research materials. But, there is a pitfall to this process: in trying to write and edit articles quickly, it can lead to poorly done research. And that is what appears to have happened with this article. Many of the cited (aka linked) articles, papers, and websites are inconclusive in relationship to their supposed point. In some cases they don’t support the arguments that are being made at all.

This response post has been a two-day slog for me through all of this, and trying to do some quick research of my own to correct the misleading information in the original article. Indeed, a lot of this is my opinion or my interpretation of the materials that Brennan has placed before his audience. However, it’s pretty simple to see that there is a substantial portion of his article that just was not well considered.

Conclusion

And this is where I get to point to a substantial irony in this story. Much of Brennan’s issue with PKMs and tools like Obsidian is that we don’t see a lot more output from people. That instead, we see quite a few people that have gone the route of trying to become influential in the PKM field, and writing their own books about it (with or without appropriate levels of research).

Brennan himself, has documented that his approach is to write a post every day. He makes it a process by which is tries to write 750 words in 20 minutes. He also notes that he has written quite a few novels, all of which are self-published works.

Personally, all of this is sounding completely backwards from what I was taught to do when writing a research paper. I was always told: come up with a thesis, do the research, and only when the research is complete write the paper. In fact, I was called out several times in school for not having done my research well, and trying to use sources in a narrow manner to prove points that they didn’t support. Sound familiar?

I always had the excuse that I was working on a deadline, and I didn’t realize the complications that I was going to run into, so I did the best with the materials that I had. But the fact was that I hadn’t done the research properly, and I hadn’t based my writing on the research. Instead, I went into the writing process trying to prove my thesis correct, even when it was weak or incorrect.

And that’s the issue with Brennan’s article. There is just a lot of the research that doesn’t completely support the underlying statements. And even Brennan knew that he couldn’t make the information fit the narrative that he had in his mind when he sat down and started writing. That’s why we see things like restatements of questions that have substantial shifts in scope.

In the end, I think Brennan went into his post with good intention. But he became over-ambitious and let the whole thing creep out of his control. However, there is one thing that we both agree on: AI. As he states in his article:

I promise there is a deep debt to be paid if you attempt to offload cognitive labour to a non-deterministic machine, especially if you care about objectivity and facts.

Indeed, AI is no replacement for the labor of actually committing one’s own cognitive processes to the page or screen.

Categories: #Essays Tags: #response, #pkm, #knowledge, #management, #research, #writing, #notes, #notetaking License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

RE: Bye bye Gravatar

Fri, 17 Jul 2026 09:27:30 -0500

The latest anti-feature from Automattic—now infecting Gravatar. Photo by: Unattributed, Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Happily Imperfect posted Bye bye Gravatar a short while ago, and I have to say, I’ve had a similar thought about deleting my account on there as well. My feelings towards WordPress and Automattic started changing some time ago, back when they introduced the Gutenberg editor. Ever since this “improvement” it’s been a downhill slide for WordPress to the point where it’s become an unusable mess in my opinion.

I know a lot of people also think that Matt Mullenweg’s recent statements about WordPress, open source, and other companies have been problematic. I reserve my opinions on those areas. Instead, I am judging the quality of the software and the services that are being produced.

But there is an irony when it comes to Gravatar: even though it serves little purpose in and of itself, it does do one thing: it serves your avatar. I can’t say how many times in the past I’ve logged into some new site / application only to have my avatar automatically populate itself. For a while it was jarring because I hadn’t updated Gravatar for years. But at least it was filling in something rather than nothing. And, I felt that something filled a purpose: a consistency of identity across the web.

But, now I wonder about that. I cannot recall the last time my avatar was automatically filled in. The only notable case recently was that my avatar updated automatically on GitHub when I changed it on Gravatar. And, honestly my feelings towards GitHub and Microslop are in the shitter as well. So, there’s that.

And now, I have an absolute reason to nuke this f***ing account all to hell. I do NOT EVER consent to ANYTHING being done in regard to AI in my name. There was never any notification sent about this change to Gravatar. Hell, I haven’t received any notice of any changes being made to Gravatar in the last 5–10 years. It was a similar change that pushed me over the edge with WordPress, and I feel the same way about it with Gravatar.

I know, they haven’t actually sent anything directly to any chatbots on my behalf. But the fact that they saw fit to add this ANTI-feature without announcing it speaks more about where Automattic is in the process of enshittifying their products than anything else. Nope—it’s goodbye to any and everything Automattic, including Gravatar.

With newer sites like ~~Bio Link~~ (it has been called to my attention that Bio Link now has AI-anti features, and as such can no longer be considered a good option) and FediProfile I don’t see the usefulness of Gravatar. If anything, I think it now has ANTI-features.

And now Gravatar is gone, kaput, deleted. Goodbye and good riddance.

Categories: #Rant Tags: #response, #automattic, #ai, #antiai, #nukeittohell License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Accessibility Rant: Reader Mode

Thu, 16 Jul 2026 07:55:27 -0500

Wolf looking directly into a camera at close proximity.

There is a bit of an issue I have noticed lately: websites actively blocking Reading Mode in Firefox, and derivative web browsers. I was stunned to find out (just a minute ago) that Reading Mode doesn’t appear to be a default feature in Chromium, but instead an add-on. So, I don’t know if this is an issue for Chrome based browsers.

This is getting frustratingly annoying for me. Why? There are multiple reasons that Reading Mode is a necessity for many people, myself included. Let’s talk about a few of them.

Poor Contrast Color Schemes

This is a problem I see a lot with websites, it seems to be a trendy or fashionable aesthetic… Have a light gray background so it’s not completely white, then have a “dark” gray for the text. In most cases probably not too bad, but for some people that’s not enough contrast. My personal issue seems to be with blue versions of themes with this style.

I understand quite a few people like pastel colored themes. They really do look nice. I have even tried to take some from this aesthetic with my sites: use a medium/neutral background color, light color for the logo and highlights so they aren’t overbearing. But, I still maintain a fairly high contrast for the main content.

While sites like this can really look amazing in their simplicity, and soothing color choices, they can be a nightmare from an accessibility standpoint.

Neo-cities Style Sites

I get it, really I do: there is a lot of nostalgia for the 1990s personal websites… Heck there is a lot of nostalgia for anything that is “retro”. That isn’t a bad thing. I enjoy websites where personal expression is as important, or sometimes more important than the content.

But, sometimes, we want to read and potentially engage with the owner of the website… Sometimes the retro aesthetics get in the way. When it does, allowing visitors choices in how they engage with your content is necessary.

Tiny and / or Thin Fonts

I don’t know what has happened in the last twenty-something years, but somewhere along the way we seem to have gone wrong with fonts. There are a lot of sites that, while they are amazing from an overall aesthetic perspective, have fonts that are either tiny or have very thin strokes.

Personally, I think this is likely due to changes in displays. We have to have our websites look good on many devices (desktop, laptop, tablet, eInk tablets, phones), and under multiple browsers and operating systems. All of these factors can make it difficult to get font choices right. This is especially true when you are trying to make a site that has a clean look, or a professional aesthetic.

This is another reason to allow visitors options for how they view your content.

Audience Vision Differences

I’ll hold my hand up here and say this applies to me specifically. I have an issue that is categorized as dyslexia, but isn’t typical dyslexia. The problem is my eyes don’t synchronize properly all the time. One of the worst is when I am reading. Let me try to explain.

When I read my right eye will move through a line of text more quickly than my left eye. In order to compensate for the difference in speed between them, I slow down my right eye to keep it in sync with my left eye. This issue can be exacerbated by the font and color choices. This was found when I went through a series of tests over forty years ago. (Before anyone asks / comments: no, the “dyslexia font” doesn’t help, it makes things worse for me. That font is more for people with issues recognizing letter shapes, or people that tend to recognize letters out of order. I recognize the letters / words / etc. just fine. This is purely an eye muscle / neural control issue.)

More recently, a couple of color blindness tests have shown indications I may be partially color-blind. Not to any significant level, I can still differentiate all colors in the spectrum. Rather some blues may appear more washed out to me than they do to others.

Another, far more common issue is age. As people get older their eyes can become weaker. They need to be able to read sites in as comfortable a manner as possible. The best way for many of them is using Reader Mode. How do I know this? Up until she passed away, I took care of my mother. There were numerous times when she needed to read a website, but had difficulties. I showed her how to use Reader Mode, and helped set it up so it was comfortable for her.

Finishing My Rant

Basically, actively disabling the Reader Mode of any browser is an act of denying someone with a disability access. It’s the same as non-disabled asshats parking in the spots reserved for people with disabilities. Or stores / shops that won’t provide a ramp for people in wheelchairs or walkers.

While this isn’t a super common issue, I’ve been noticing it more and more lately. Especially with the IndieWeb, where we want people actively reading and interacting with each other.

I noted tonight on one site, an author made a comment about their site potentially being difficult to read. Honestly, the color scheme of the site was difficult for me. But, guess what: I was able to use Reader Mode to read their comment without issue. I wouldn’t change their site, it has a really cool semi-retro aesthetic to it. As long as Reader Mode is available, it’s accessible for me.

That’s all I’m asking for: accessibility.

End rant.

Categories: #Essays Tags: #accessibility, #readermode, #eyes, #disability, #rant License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The State of RSS Feed Readers

Tue, 14 Jul 2026 07:55:44 -0500

Two boats docked behind a berm.

Introduction

Many years ago (over a decade) I wrote an article about RSS Feed reader alternatives after Google announced they were killing Reader in March 2013. That article attracted a fair amount of attention, including a request from RedHat to republish the article on their blog. On the ten-year anniversary of the death of Google Reader, the Verge published the article: Who killed Google Reader? (pay-walled article), indicating (to me) that even a decade on there was still interest in these products. Today, with the rising profile of the FediVerse and the IndieWeb, it seems RSS readers and feed aggregation are seeing a bit of a renaissance with the likes of Bubbles. I’ve also noted several feed reader sites showing up as referrers on my sites.

And, just to make things more interesting, as I was working on the first draft of this piece, Rishabh P. Sharma posted an article on his site called: FreshRSS vs My Own Feed Reader: A fierce competition. I took this as yet another indicator that there is still quite a bit of interest in RSS/Atom Feed Readers.

This started me wondering what is the status of RSS feed readers and other news aggregators these? Are they the technology of a bygone era as once predicted by Google? Or are they still around and thriving as I’m starting to believe from seeing several readers in my websites referrers? Are there any new ones that might be worth looking at? And, most importantly, have they changed?

This Isn’t a Roundup Article

The original article I wrote back in 2013 was focused on a simple, and single question: what to do now that Google Reader is going away? Back then, everything was an opportunity for open source alternatives to shine. So, that’s how I wrote the article (and why RedHat was interested in it). I provided a roundup of what were the best alternatives that I could find at the time.

Obviously we aren’t in 2013 anymore, so it doesn’t seem like a roundup article is what is needed. Instead, what I would like to do is examine a few questions:

Are Feed Readers bygone tech?
What is RSS, and why is it so heavily used?
Why would you want to use a feed reader today?
What are your options for setting up some type of feed reader?
Are there any interesting, and lesser known options?
Are there any significant changes since 2013?

These might be more of interest to you today if you don’t use, or don’t understand why RSS/Atom feed readers are useful.

Tech of a Bygone Era?

From looking around for a bit, I was able to answer Google’s prediction: no, RSS/Atom readers and aggregators are definitely not the technology of a bygone era. First, not only do many websites still have RSS/Atom feeds available, but I was able to identify a number of different ways in which they are being used now:

Websites like Memeorandom, Mediagazer, Techmeme and WeSmirch actually use RSS/Atom feeds in several ways: First, they use feeds from other media outlets to gather current stories. The stories are then aggregated to produce their single-page quick view website. Second, they make RSS feeds available for viewing in a feed reader. Third, they use RSS/Atom feeds to export their content to social media, like the Fediverse. (Aside: they almost make a list of all the feeds they scrape available on the leaderboards, which are part of each site. This is a great way to find a list of feeds if you need one.) Basically, that’s a lot of RSS/Atom based tech to produce what is, essentially, a single page website.
Of course, we have the recent site Bubbles. Bubbles is a website that presents a ranked list of posts from IndieSites that sign up for the service. The use RSS/Atom feeds to populate their lists of articles to Pretty cool stuff, reaching back to the old days of the internet.
As hinted above, there is a lot of RSS feeds being bridged to the Fediverse. Possibly the biggest / most common are the weather and weather camera feeds. Of course, there is also the ever popular Elon Musk Jet tracker. Fedi Directory has an extensive list of bots on the Fediverse, including many RSS bridging bots.
Platforms like Mastodon and GotoSocial make public user posts available via RSS. For example, my feed is: Unattributed’s GTS Feed. Of course, this can be disabled by users if they don’t want their posts published use RSS/Atom. But why use it? It’s a good way to archive your posts, especially if you want to implement automatic post deletion application, but might want to keep some of those bangers around to reuse later.
The most unusual use of RSS/Atom feeds goes to Calibre, which uses them to scan websites and build e-Books for reading offline.
And, let’s not forget podcasts. Lots of podcasting platforms serve RSS/Atom feeds for retrieving shows, and many podcast players use RSS/Atom feeds to retrieve the podcast(s).

Hopefully it’s obvious that RSS feeds are not tech from a bygone era. I would say, in fact, that RSS/Atom is literally the protocol that is literally powering a substantial portion of the internet as we know it today.

What Is RSS?

The name RSS has multiple definitions, but for our purposes here, the best is Really Simple Syndication. Its purpose is to provide of stream of updated information from a website. This information can take many forms, and can include different types of media, such as photos, audio files, or video files.

The idea is that a website produces a stream (file) when another application or website sends a query to the site. The stream contains the information that has been updated since the last query. In some cases, the site (or client) may limit the number of items in an update. This is mostly true when the site has a lot of information that is changing very quickly.

The idea that only updated information is sent is what makes RSS flexible and light-weight. Since only a limited amount of information is sent during each query the overhead in processing each request is low.

Applications that receive these updates read them, and then take actions based on the updates. For example, if an update says there is a new article, the application can download that article. This processing includes items like images, video, and audio files.

Why Use an RSS Reader?

RSS readers are convenient. They allow you to keep track of the changes on as many sites as you desire. In most cases, the RSS reader will automatically check for updates on the sites you have specified, at an interval you specify. Most readers also allow you to set an expiry period for the information it gathers.

In addition to these features, many readers include additional features to allow you to tag items, mark items as favorites, or mark them for some other processing. Many times you can also export items to other formats or programs (say a note-taking application like Obsidian or Joplin).

And even more advanced readers will allow you to set up rules to tell the program how to treat items that match a one or more sets of criteria. For example, automatically download podcasts, or tag an item if the title contains a keyword.

This flexibility can allow the user to deal with massive amounts of information in a quick and efficient manner. You can think of a reader like a berm: it provides a barrier between you and the wide ocean of information that is out there on the internet. Inside the berm’s perimeter you have your docks organized into bays where each of your boats (ie, website feeds) are docked.

RSS Feed Reader Options

So, time to look at some RSS reader options that you might be interested in. This is not going to be an exhaustive list by any means. I checked out the Wikipedia Comparison of Feed Aggregators list earlier. It’s a large list, with a lot of applications that are both maintained and unmaintained, and some applications that probably really shouldn’t be on the list.

Instead, I want to focus on different classes of reader applications you might want to consider. We’ll talk about the reason(s) why you might want to use each, and These include extensions you can add to your web browser, desktop applications, cloud based applications, and hosting your own RSS aggregation server.

Browser Extensions

If you use a desktop computer or a laptop as your primary computing device, this is the most obvious place to start. Adding an extension to your browser can make your feeds available in a way that smoothly integrates with your current environment. The ones that I would look at are FeedBro, LiveMarks, SlickReader and The RSS Aggregator.

Of all of these readers, LiveMarks is available as both a Firefox and Chrome extension, and is rather unique when it comes to how it works. When you add a site to LiveMarks it creates a folder in your bookmarks with links to all the articles that are in the feed. You open the bookmarks to read the article, which actually literally opens the website web page. This can be nice if there are things about the actual web page that you want to or should see. However, this can also open you up to being tracked by the website, so I would only go this route if you have strong ad block and privacy measures in place.

The (unfortunately named) FeedBro for Firefox, and SlickReader for Chrome are the most traditional RSS feed readers, looking like an email application in your browser. As you add new sites, a folder is created in the application’s database. You open an email like view and can scan through and read the entries.

The RSS Aggregator for Chrome differentiates itself a bit by allowing you to interact with your feeds through your choice of a drop-down menu, or an email-like interface. When installed a button is added to your shortcuts which will indicate how many updates there. Clicking the button will show you the feeds you’ve added, and selecting a feed will show you the updates. From there you can go directly to the article, or mark it off. The one downside to this reader is if you want the Filters, Rules, and Collections features you have to purchase their Plus or Professional version.

Self Hosted

Personally, I think this is where the best options are for aggregating content using RSS feeds. However, the downside is that you need to have some technical skill, and the desire to set up a self-hosting system. This is likely most appealing to people that are already into setting up home labs. However, if you run a Jellyfin server, or other media server, maybe this approach will appeal to you.

There are three options for self-hosting that I am aware of: TTRSS (Tiny Tiny RSS), FreshRSS, and Nextcloud News App. Personally, I ran TTRSS on a server many years ago and absolutely loved it. This was right after the Google announcement that they were discontinuing their reader application. I haven’t used FreshRSS, but it looks to be comparable to TTRSS. The Nextcloud News App has the advantage of being available in the Nextcloud App store. If you already have a Nextcloud server set up then this is an obvious choice.

The reason I feel the self-hosted option is the best is that they offer the most flexibility. You can access them through their web based interfaces, or you can use them with standalone applications as clients. In this way no matter what device you are reading on, your clients will always know what you have / haven’t read.

Cloud Readers

Right behind the self-hosted options are cloud based feed aggregator / readers. The biggest advantage that these applications have is they often have the work to build large databases of feeds to make available to you. You get to select the feeds that you want to read without having to find and add them to your reader. Often during the account creation process you will be presented with a list choose from.

Some of the most notable cloud based aggregator / readers are: Inoreader, Newsblur, Feedly, FeedMe, FeedLand, and The Old Reader. The (to me at least) downside to many of these sites is that they want a subscription for “advanced” features. The prices and features vary between applications. The plus side of cloud based applications is they often have companion web browser plugins, and standalone cellphone apps.

The most interesting of the cloud based options is FeedLand. This is a platform created by Dave Winer - one of the originators of RSS. His idea is to make a site that is “social” based around newsfeeds. You can share posts from your feed to your own social feed, which others on the site can follow. The site also provides exporting lists of your feeds, which you can use with other feed reader applications. And, best of all, there is no charge for the system.

Another one that is a completely free cloud based platform is FeedMe. I was unaware of it until it showed up in the referrers list in my analytics. It is self-described as a minimalist feed reader, and it is. You add your feeds manually, or using an OPML file if you have one. You can make categories for your feeds, and read them. There is no tagging feature, only a favorite option, and you have to manually mark each item as read (or mark the whole feed as read). There’s no option to limit the number of items in a feed, or the age of the items. And there is no option for third party application integration.

Inoreader, Newsblur, and Feedly are all sites that seem to be fairly popular as they are ones that are showing up in my referrers, along with FeedMe.

Desktop Applications

There are a fair number of desktop applications, with a couple of them standing out as being available on many operating systems: RSS Guard is available on Windows, Linux, OS/2, and macOS. Fluent Reader is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS. Communique and NewsFlash are Linux native applications, while Fiery Feeds is available on iOS and macOS. The reason for singling out these applications is they all integrate with the Nextcloud News application.

Notably, RSS Guard also integrates with Tiny Tiny RSS and Feedly.

As I mentioned in the Tech of a Bygone Era section, Calibre can take your RSS feeds and produce e-Books from them, which turns them into a magazine-like reading experience. There are also a couple of desktop email applications that include support for reading RSS feeds: Thunderbird and Claws Mail. While Claws Mail is a Linux based application, Thunderbird is available on Windows, Linux, and macOS.

All of these applications should be able to import OPML files, if you decide to move from one reader to a desktop application.

iOS and Android Applications

While I am not very familiar with iOS applications since I’ve never used an iPhone, the aforementioned Fiery Feeds is an option that provides Nextcloud News integration. A couple more options with Nextcloud News integration are: CloudNews and Nextnews. Additionally, I believe (although I could be wrong) there is a news application that comes with the iPhone?

On the Android side there are plenty of options: Nextcloud News Reader, OCReader, Newsout, and Readrops are all notable for their Nextcloud News integration. A couple of other notable apps include Feedly, Flipboard. On the open source side there are quite a few more applications: RSS Reader, Feeder, Capy Reader, and FeedFlow to name a few (available in the F-Droid store).

And there are the applications designed to work with specific cloud platforms like Inoreader, Feedly, and NewsBlur.

(NOTE: while I did mention Flipboard, I am not mentioning apps like GroundNews, SmartNews, Google News, Yahoo! News as those apps are more specifically focused on gathering news from a predefined list of news outlets, and typically don’t allow adding your own feeds.)

Conclusion

What I find interesting about this is an image of seeing all the information that is available on the internet as a stream. Much of that information is available for the taking, consuming, researching, etc. However, it’s what we do with this information that matters. Feed Readers are like docks. You use a reader to set up the bays for all the information to flow into. How the docks and bays are organized is up to you.

So, what would I do given the whole sea of available options?

I’ve already mentioned several times that I use Calibre’s RSS scanning feature. I like the idea of having e-Books that I can just put on my e-Reader and read at me leisure. But, there is another feature of Calibre I haven’t mentioned: the Content Server. This feature starts a web server application that I can use on any of my devices within my house. So, if I wanted to read anything from my library, including all the news sites I download, on my tablet or phone, I can use the content server with my web browser.

But, if I weren’t using this solution, I would self-host Tiny Tiny RSS, and use RSS Guard on my desktop, and the open source Tiny Tiny RSS android app on my phone and tablet. The other option I would explore would be setting up Nextcloud, using the Nextcloud News App and using the Android version of the Nextcloud News App.

However, I wouldn’t take my advice in this area, as my needs and desires are likely far different from yours. Explore what’s out there, see which options give you what you want. Personally, I am happy reading the IndieWeb on my desktop using my web browser, and don’t see a need to do anything else with it.

Categories: #Features Tags: #rss, #feeds, #readers, #windows, #macos, #linux, #android, #ios, #cloud License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Three Water Songs

Sun, 12 Jul 2026 08:05:50 -0500

Calm waters on Lake Superior.

I’ve been collecting a lot of images of water lately. This is the outgrowth of a post I made on Ennui Vagaries about repurposing weather camera photos. There are a lot of weather cameras that are on the shores of lakes, rivers, or at the docks and launches. Collecting these photos has been made exceptionally easy by the Fediverse having many feeds of these images.

While collecting a bunch of the sunset images tonight, I thought of the song Downstream by Supertramp. It’s a gorgeous solo piece by Rick Davies with just a simple piano accompaniment. The lyrics are a tribute to his spouse at the time. Basically a simple love song, sung in a very simple manner.

This, in turn, started me thinking about another water themed love song. That would be To Be Over by Yes. Not a lot of people know the story of this song. It was a song that Steve Howe brought to the group. He had written it based on a boat ride he and his wife had taken on a Sunday. Of course, bringing in the start of the song, the rest of the band expanded it into a true Yes ballad. Possibly one of their most underrated works ever.

And then I was thinking, what else kind of matches this mood? Basically slow, gentle water themed songs. And there was one that popped into my mind immediately: Ruby Pool by Vola. The wonder of this song is the piano arpeggios by Martin Werner that lead off the song, followed by the pairing with Adam Janzi’s drum pattern is just magical. I could almost listen to a whole song just built off this pairing, but fortunately the lyrics of the song are just a gorgeous as the arrangement, and as always Asger Mygind’s vocals are stunning.

So, there you have it. Three, gentle, water-themed songs for a peaceful Sunday.

Categories: #Music Tags: #songs, #yes, #supertramp, #vola, #pop, #rock, #progressive License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch

Fri, 10 Jul 2026 07:53:55 -0500

The Harry Partch Ensemble, via Wikipedia, under a CC 0 License.

Listening to Harry Partch is like going on a surreal archaeological dig through history. Only this is history reinterpreted by someone who has been taking shrooms for two decades. Yet, with the emergence of microtonality in the music of King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and Angine de Poitrine his works are more relevant today than ever.

Harry Who?

Harry Partch was born on June 24th, 1901 to Virgil Franklin Partch, and his wife Jennie. They were missionaries to China who fled the Boxer Rebellion. His parents settled in Benson, Arizona. He was encouraged by his mother to learn music, and she taught him to read music. He was exposed to music from different cultures including Chinese (via his mother), the Yaqui people, and Spanish songs.

He began studying piano serious in 1913 after his family relocated to Albuquerque, New Mexico. He also began composing his earliest piano works (which he later destroyed). In 1919 He relocated with his mother to Los Angeles after the death of his father. In 1920 his mother was killed in a trolley accident. Partch studied music at the University of Southern California’s School of Music in 1920, but left two years later being dissatisfied with the teachers.

Rejection of Equal Temperament

Sometime during the 18th Century, western music settled on the tuning system known as twelve-tone equal temperament. After reading Hermann von Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone in 1923, Partch began to feel that equal temperament had forced music to become more abstract. This abstraction was stifling the true possibilities for expression in music, so he rejected equal temperament in favor of just intonation.

This marked Partch’s first step in finding a different direction for musical expression that remains the inspiration for many avant-garde and experimental musicians to this day.

Partch’s Journey

Per Wikipedia’s entry on Harry Partch, his career can be divided into several periods: Early Work (1919-1947), Academic Period (1947-1962), and his Late Period (1962-1974). These periods roughly correspond with the types of Partch’s compositions, and his exploration of tonality.

During the first period, Partch came to reject the system of equal temperament, favoring just intonation instead. His first experiments involved creating paper coverings that indicated just intonation fingerings for violins. In 1930, he decided to break from the equal temperament tradition completely and burned all his previous 12TET (12 tone equal temperament) based compositions. He then devised a 29 tone scale, and had a viola constructed with which to perform works using this scale (the Adapted Viola).

In 1932, he gave several performances of his works in San Francisco, and won the support of a private group of individuals which allowed him to relocate to New York. The Carnegie Corporation of New York granted him the money he needed to continue his studies in England, where he met Kathleen Schlesinger. Schlesinger had been studying ancient Greek music theory, and had recreated a Kithara from an image on a Greek vase. Upon his return to the United States during the great depression, Partch would spend nine years as a transient / hobo. In 1938 constructed his own Kithara approximately twice the size of Schlesinger’s and devised a new 43 tone scale. While in Chicago, Partch would design and build a 43 tone reed organ (aka the Chromelodeon).

The second period saw Partch settling into the University of Wisconsin from 1944-1947, during which he lectured, built more instruments, and finished his book Genesis of a Music. He left in 1947 due to not being able to join the permanent staff of the university, and there being a lack of space for his instruments. In 1949, he was offered the opportunity to convert a smithy into a studio by Gunnar Johansen to continue his work. During his work in the smithy, he recorded Eleven Intrusions and several other works. In 1951, he moved to Oakland, CA for health reasons, and put on a performance of his piece King Oedipus, but was unable to make a recording of it due to objections from the Yeats estate. Partch set up his studio / record label Gate 5 in 1953, and would release records via mail order. During this period Partch also started working with the University of Illinois, and was introduced to Danlee Mitchel, who would later become Partch’s heir. Partch produced several performances of his works with the University’s support. Partch also began what would a six film collaboration with Madeline Tourtelot. Partch left the University due hostility from the music department, despite having support from other departments and organizations.

Partch’s final period saw him returning to California, and setting up studio in Petaluma. He composed And on the Seventh Day, Petals Fell in Petaluma. And, in 1969, Columbia Records released The World of Harry Partch, his first major label release. Partch’s final theater was The Delusions of the Fury, produced in 1969. His final work was the soundtrack to the Betty Freeman film The Dreamer That Remains. In 1973 Partch retired. He died of a heart attack on September 3rd, 1974.

Partch’s Influence

As is, hopefully apparent, Partch’s work was both influential and controversial. During his life he was supported by numerous artists, such as Henry Cowell, Otto Leuning, Roy Harris, and Aaron Copeland. He also had the support of numerous foundations, including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the League of Composers, the Fromm Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Towards the end of his life, The Harry Partch Foundation was established to handle his expenses, and administer his work. His instruments. Danlee Mitchel served as the Executive Director of The Harry Partch Foundation until his death. Dean Drummond’s group Newband undertook the handling of Partch’s instruments and performs with them. The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music holds the Harry Partch Archive 1918-1991.

Partch was inducted into the Percussive Arts Society Hall of Fame in 1974. In 2004 U.S. Highball was selected by the Library of Congress’s National Recording Preservation Board.

Closing

While the work of Harry Partch has not seen wide acknowledgment throughout Europe or Eastern Countries, there is growing interest in his work. Partch’s work has established a culture where the exploration of alternate tunings for instruments has become something that is more common.

Groups like Angine de Poitrine, and King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard haven’t rejected the concept of equal temperament in their instrument selection. But, they are using the concept of adding more tones to the scale in ways that are substantive, just as Partch developed whole new scales and made large scale compositions with them.

This is the way forward for music. There is an entire world of sound out there waiting to be discovered, or in some cases, rediscovered. Twelve tone equal temperament has been the primary focus of music for centuries. With the advances in synthesizers and sampling over the past several decades, artists have started exploring all sorts of new grounds.

Hopefully, we will see more substantial work done in the field of using just intonation, and other tuning systems.

If you would like to explore the music of Harry Partch, I highly recommend the four volume set: The Harry Partch Collection Vol 1, Vol 2, Vol 3, and Vol 4, along with other recordings of Partch’s work on New World Records.

There is also an excellent film of Harry Partch’s Studio from around 1950 available on YouTube. This lets you see all of his instruments and provides a deeper understanding of how they were designed. Partch also plays each of the instruments.

Categories: #Music Tags: #experimetnal, #microtonal, #american, #influential License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Clickbait Lists Are Not Good

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 07:56:43 -0500

Image of a checklist with circle with a slash over the top.

I feel fairly certain in saying the author of the post 5 Albums meant no harm. Even the prompt: Introduce yourself with five albums that have shaped you seemed quite innocuous. And I thought: “Cool. I can write a response to this with one hand tied behind my back, and three of my fingers broken”. Part way in, I decided to throw a curveball: I was going to list ten albums. Actually more than ten because my list had multi-volume sets in it. I reject your rules and substitute my own! Take that!

As I worked on my masterpiece, I inserted a couple of snarky little comments between the first and second half that were intended to be humorous about me breaking the rules. Those comments used words like “reductive” and “de minimis”. That’s when I realized I was falling into a trap: the clickbait trap. Then I had a further realization: this wasn’t just a list, it wasn’t just clickbait, it was worse.

So now, after defending writing and blogging metas, I run the risk of being labeled a hypocrite in order to explain why these types of articles are not the silly puff pieces they appear to be. But rather, they are precisely the kind of thing that should be avoided. And, I even have a some potential fixes for what I see as the biggest (but not only) issue.

The Problems

Personally, I see three problems with these kinds of posts:

First: they don’t say anything about the author. At least they don’t say anything useful, other than being a list of objects. But there is no context to those objects. The author hasn’t given the reader any insight into why those objects have meaning. You might think they are objects the author likes or loves, but is that necessarily the case? Aren’t you just as “shaped” by the things that you don’t like, the things that repulse you, or you are indifferent to?

Second: The author of such a post is opening themselves up to be judged, and conversely putting their audience in the position of being judgmental. What does this accomplish? Nothing useful as far as I can tell. A larger portion of the social issues we have today are based around people being judgmental without having any real knowledge of the people they are judging.

I’ve read or heard numerous accounts from people that have found their way out of cults or hate groups that are surprised when they realize that whatever they hated was just not worth it. They often don’t realize or understand the people or things they hate because they judged them solely on the few things they thought they knew. Things that were regularly misrepresented, or twisted to cause them judge people hatefully.

I’m not saying that judging someone based on a silly list of five albums is on the same level as someone in a cult or hate group. But they do share a small similarity in that they invite judgment based on what is, at best, superficiality, or at worst a potential misunderstanding.

Third: These lists play to some of the trickiest and most difficult aspects of our personalities to navigate. They play to our ego, pride, superiority, or inferiority. This was what happened to me, I realized, when I was writing my snarky comments. I take pride in the fact that I have a wildly varied taste in music, and my ego wouldn’t let me just produce a list of five pop/rock albums when there is so much more music out there. That’s why I expanded my list (and, in reality, ten entries still weren’t enough to encapsulate my listening, and all the recordings that have shaped me.)

The Fixes

So, having talked about the problems, what are the fixes?

First: don’t make it a call to action. “Introduce yourself…” is a call for responses. This puts the reader automatically in the role of judging the list and the person that wrote it. If there isn’t a call to action, it removes some pressure to judge. There is still some likelihood the reader will judge the list. But it’s less likely they will have to navigate their ego or pride while reading it.

Second: The more obvious option: provide context. Tells us a bit more about yourself by telling your reader why these particular items are significant to you. Was it a recording you bought with your first paycheck? Was it playing when you proposed to your spouse? By doing this you invite your readers to relate to you on some level. Their responses can focus more on similarities or differences. This, in turn, may evolve into a sort of blogging based dialog between you and your readers.

Third: Don’t write a list. Okay, this sounds like I’m being pedantic. But, really, I have a better idea: take your list and turn it into a series of essays. Write 300–600 words about each of the list entries. Recall stories about them. Explain where they fit into your life. Talk about the things that you like about the item, and even the things that you would change about it if you could.

This is the kind of exercise that can be beneficial in so many ways. You may find new ways of expressing yourself. It can allow you to explore your relationship with the subject. Your readers may see the item in a new light. As with the second entry, responses to your post might be about the similarities or differences between you and your audience. Or, your audience might write about things that hold a similar place in their lives.

Conclusion

When I started writing my response list for the 5 Albums post, I thought it was just a little silly toss off article. But then I quickly threw out the original rules, and having done that, discovered there were bigger issues with this kind of post. The issues are they don’t provide any context, and therefore no real insight into the author. The second is that they are a call to judgment. The author is judged, while the audience is being judgmental. Finally, they play to some complicated aspects of our personality (such as ego and pride). Indulging in these complex aspects of our personalities isn’t always healthy.

So, I set about suggesting some fixes. The first is to not have a call to action. That will somewhat minimize the judgment aspect. The second is to provide context. Let your audience in on your relationship with these items. Third suggestion would be to write a series of articles instead. Explore more of your writing skills, and let your audience focus more on what’s important t to you, instead of the object.

So am I a hypocrite? Maybe partially. But, I am calling this out because I think we can do better. I think understanding when something is a bad idea, and why it is a bad idea can lead to us finding better ways to accomplish the same objective. I have little doubt that the original author of the post intended to make a positive contribution.

We see these kinds of articles all the time. I’ve even participated in one myself (see: The Shellsharks Music Quiz Challenge). But, I can say at the time I was just trying to get myself writing again. And, this was actually a quiz that was more extensive and open-ended than the “5 Albums” post. Looking back on it, if I were to take it again, a lot of my answers would change.

In the end, this is all just my opinion. Hopefully it has been food for thought, and it may do some good.

Now, if you’ll please excuse me, I have a series of articles to start writing… ;)

Categories: #Writing Tags: #blogging, #lists, #context, #judgment, #clickbait, #meta, #metas License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

On Getting Older: I Never Wanted This

Mon, 06 Jul 2026 07:40:12 -0500

Photo of a circular pill sorter box against a pale blue background. Photo by Unattributed. License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Sure, I hear you saying: no one wants to get old. But it’s a fact of life, we all eventually get old. And we all eventually have to face our mortality. One of my favorite sayings about this is: One Day We’ll All Be Skeletons. A perfect thought that encapsulates the fears of mortality, and it was uttered by a six-year-old, in front of his dad, on video, available for the whole world to see. But the father got mileage from it as everyone that saw the video wanted it on a t-shirt. I’ve got four of them.

What I am actually referring to, quite literally, is the photograph at the top of this post. The dreaded weekly wheel pill sorter. But ironically, it’s not because of the pills in the sorter (that is only a small part of it), but what it represents to me symbolically.

So, first, the pills. These are mostly an annoyance. A matter of compensating for a few small genetic defects that run through my family. I tried, really hard, to avoid taking medication for these defects. Alas, time caught up with me, and I had to start on medication for those defects a couple of years ago. But, given that I’ve known people that started taking these medications 10–20 years younger than me, I think I did okay to make it this far without them.

Instead, the pill sorter represents is the growing need to rely on medications. Not just the type that compensate for small issues, but the types of medication that keep you alive. The kinds of medications that one should question taking. The question we will all face one day: am I going to be able to live well just by taking this medication? Or, is this medication just prolonging the inevitable? Leaving me to cling to life in a degraded state?

These are complicated questions to answer. And they are doubly complicated to answer if you’ve had to take care of any loved ones who were dependent on medications. I have, and I honestly questioned if it was worth it.

I am of the opinion that the pharmaceutical industry is too invasive in our lives. They have pushed hard for deregulation, and often bring medications to market for their profitability responsibilities. Look at how many medications come to market only to be pulled within five years because of unknown side effects. My bet is if we hadn’t seen this level of deregulation over the last 20–30 years many of those medications wouldn’t have been marketed. The harmful side effects would have been found. I’m of the opinion that we need to be extremely cautious when judging the balance between good and harm, especially when it comes to pharmaceuticals.

On the flip side, I have to look at a recently passed family member who was even more anti-pharmaceutical than me. They tried as many suitable homeopathic remedies as they could before seeing a doctor. Don’t get me wrong: they weren’t stupid about this. They did research, they knew the potential side effects, and risks for any homeopathic course they chose. And yet, they passed about 20 years earlier than I would have guessed. But, it’s not clear this was related to their choices in homeopathic treatments as opposed to more established medical treatments.

The pill sorter is serving as a constant reminder of these issues for me. It’s reminding me that eventually I will face those same issues, the same choices others I have loved have had to make. For now, though, this pill sorter is just a convenience, allowing me to store my medications in one place, while having a supply of them sitting here at my desk where I take them every morning before starting my work.

Categories: #Essays Tags: #aging, #medicine, #mortality, #lifequality, #homeopathic, #convenience License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

On the Blogging and Writing Metas

Sun, 05 Jul 2026 07:53:10 -0500

The view from Lake Michigan from Michigan City East Lighthouse, 2026-07-03.

Fri, July 3rd, 2026: All of these articles were in the Top 12 on Bubbles this morning: You Don’t Have to Blog Like Me, Stop Writing for Bubbles, Re: Your Metablogging is Lame, Your Metablogging is Lame as Hell. If you went further there are a lot of similar articles, especially articles talking about blogging platforms. Yeah, so there is a writing obsession running through the Bubbles community. Well alright! Time for me to get on this train to fun and profit!!

Okay, okay, I’m joking. Mostly. Kinda. Definitely.

I agree with the sentiment that writing about writing, and writing about blogging platforms is (potentially) weak content. And that writing targeted simply to get clicks / become popular is lame. Do you know what is even weaker than those styles of content? Yup, you guessed it: complaining about those styles of content.

Metas in the world of writing have existed for just about forever. Longer than any of us have been around. And, guess what? There will continue to be metas in writing long after all of us have joined the ranks of a million monkeys banging on keyboards in another world.

Metas are something that come and go in communities, they are like the waves: sometimes larger and sometimes smaller but if the tides stopped completely we’d be in an even worse situation. Want to achieve low meta-tides? The best solution is to ignore them.

In my experience the thing that matters the most is having your own reason and purpose for writing, and not deviating from it. It’s too easy to get distracted by the meta high tides. It can make you want to jump aboard that wave and ride it as far as you can. But in the end you are just left standing on the shore looking for the next big wave to ride.

I’m in the middle of migrating all of my old websites to this platform. Why? The platform I had been using has become a completely unusable mess over the last decade. It is, in my opinion, a top example of the enshittification of platforms. I mentioned it already on this blog as part of a conversation. But, I’m not turning it into content. Why? Covering the enshittification of that platform is a little too on-the-nose for me. Instead, I can stick to my guns and write about the things that I want to write about without the distraction (although, enshittification is well within the range of topics I’m interested in exploring).

The writing in communities like this is at its best when the authors have a sense of why they are writing. They find a core set of values and range of topics and ideas that they want to explore through those values. That makes for more diverse writing: everyone brings something different to the table even when covering the same topic. That makes for more natural and interesting interactions. Much more than everyone riding the next big meta wave.

Categories: #Opinion Tags: #meta, #metas, #enshittification, #blogging, #communities, #community, #waves, #writing License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

A House Fifty Years Ago, A House Tomorrow

Sat, 04 Jul 2026 10:20:22 -0500

On this day in 1976 America celebrated its Bicentennial birthday. And my family had moved to a house that was less than a year old. We had moved into the house in the late fall of 1975. Today I am living in that house after having left it for over twenty years.

You might notice that I refer to this place as “a house” or “that house”. I don’t refer to it as a home. I am not certain that this building is, or ever really was, a home. There is a big differentiation between a house and a home. That likely isn’t a revelation for most people. In fact, many understand that home isn’t tied to a specific building. Instead, home is where you have a sense to being complete instead of just existing or enduring.

On this day, the 250th birthday of this country, I now know that the Bicentennial was the beginning of the end of my family. And, in an odd way, that end is similar to the state of this country.

My father had a vision for his family. A vision that he felt very strongly about. He wanted to right what he felt were the wrongs of his upbringing. He had a vision for his family. The problem was: the rest of us weren’t on the same page. We didn’t share his romanticized image of living in the country, of cutting ties with a larger portion of society for the simple life.

And that made everything complex.

My father had this vision of living the simple life. Of raising crops and becoming, at least in part, self-reliant. His vision included my mother, sister, and myself embracing his vision of this lifestyle. The reality is: we didn’t, and we never would have embraced it had we known what was in his mind. But, he was from a time when the father was the leader of the house, and the family was subservient to the head of the household.

My mother wasn’t the type of person to be isolated. She thrived on human interaction. It was a quality I often found downright irritating. She could meet someone in the grocery store, and instead of having a brief, polite and courteous interaction with them, she would have them telling her their life story. People just seemed to innately trust that she had the knowledge and wisdom to help them solver their lives problems.

My sister was the intellectual. She devoured books at a rate I never could have fathomed. A trip to the bookstore or library tended to result in her carry out stacks of books. A stack of a dozen books would last two weeks, at most. She was not the person that was going to be a “salt of the earth” type of person. She wasn’t destined to become a housewife, or given to the back-breaking physical labor of planting and harvesting a large garden. Her ambitions were never going to fit with my fathers vision.

I was the dreamer, the person given to looking at something and saying “what if?”. The sounds emanating from my stereo gave me more solace than any book or garden. I didn’t find any value in the social aspects of sports, and didn’t appreciate the bounties of the land. And, I didn’t have a green thumb to save my life. I was the person that wanted to go off and explore a library or museum on my own. I wanted to see how others had expressed themselves, and find my own form of self-expression.

My father predicted that Donald Trump was going to win the 2017 Presidential Election. When he told me this, I thought he was making a joke, trying to get back at me for predicting the election of Jimmy Carter. (To be fair, I hadn’t made that prediction based on any understanding of politics. I just made a prediction based on how I saw other people reacting to Carter. It was as if I was channeling my mother.) What did my father know at that point? After all, in his advancing dementia he had suddenly become fascinated with Dr. Phil.

But now, I wonder if there wasn’t something to that prediction? Could my father have understood that the rise of Donald Trump was exposing the deep divisions in this country? Did my father see the parallel between the rise of Donald Trump and the divisions that had been exposed in our family when we moved to this house?

There is no answer to these questions for me. Just as there is no answer to the future of this country. The only thing I know is: just as this building will still be a house tomorrow, there will still be a country called America when there is a different President.

Categories: #Reflections Tags: #home, #house, #family, #division, #vision, #demise, #history, #future License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

The Summer of Angine de Poitrine

Thu, 02 Jul 2026 07:06:23 -0500

Angine de Poitrine in May 2026 at the Great Escape by Pauil Hudson. (Via WikiMedia — License: CC BY 4.0)

This morning I installed a music player that I am unfamiliar with, and decided that the first thing I should listen to is Angine de Poitrine Vol. 1 and Vol. II since I hadn’t listened to them in a while. And then I found, by coincidence that they played the Montreal Jazz Festival last Saturday (June 27th, 2026) and broke the attendance record set by Stevie Wonder in 2009. I cannot imagine what the guys behind Khn and Klek are thinking right now. Just a year ago they were relatively unknown, and now they’re playing for 200,000 fans ~~in their hometown~~ at the second-largest music festivals in the world.

There have been a couple of things that I keep hearing and reading about Angine de Poitrine that bother me. The first is they are the “Answer to AI” or “AI could never come up with this music”. The second is they are just a fad and won’t survive. And, of course, I have some thoughts on both of these topics.

Are They The Answer to AI?

I both agree and disagree with people who say this. There are two ways to look at it. The first way, and this is what most people mean, is that Artificial Intelligence could not create microtonal music based on building loops. The premise is that we don’t normally listen to microtonal music, so there is no way an AI could come up with it on it’s own.

But, what if I were to say that we do listen to microtonal music, just not nearly as much or as often as we do equal temperament music? We’ve had groups like King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard that have incorporated microtonality into their music for over a decade. True, they haven’t risen to the same level of popularity of Angine de Poitrine, but they have proven popular enough to have produced twenty-five albums worth of music.

However, there are other things to consider. For some reason there are a lot of people that seem to assume that “microtonal” means using 24 EDO (Equal Divisions of the Octave), instead of the typical western style of 12 EDO instruments. But that isn’t completely the truth. We have had composers and musicians going back as far as the 1940s that used (and often built) instruments with different tuning systems. The most notable was Harry Partch, who came up with his on 43-tone non-EDO tuning system.

But also, we should consider that instruments from other cultures do not adhere to the typical 12 EDO tuning systems. Possibly the most notable being the Sitar, which uses a tuning system that is unlike western tuning systems. Of course Indian Raja’s have been reasonably known in the west, especially after George Harrison introduced the instrument on several Beatles songs.

Given that all of these types and styles of music are likely known to AI’s, which have been fed vast catalogs of music, it’s quite possible for one to come up with a form of microtonal music. The reason an AI hadn’t come up with something that incorporated microtonality isn’t because of the AI itself.

The reason that I agree with this statement is that Angine de Poitrine is more than just their microtonal music. They have an absurdist aesthetic combined with dadaism. They invented some lore for themselves as aliens that have come to earth and love rock music. Their music is more about making fun or parodying pop-rock music.

All of this is a complete package that would require someone with the imagination and artistic knowledge to have come up with. And, that’s why there is no AI equivalent of Angine de Poitrine. The majority of the people prompting AI agents to create music don’t have the level of knowledge and imagination.

Are They A Fad?

This is a more difficult question to figure out. There is one side of me that thinks the “gimmick” is likely to get old after a while. But, how long will that be? I don’t know, and I don’t think anyone really knows. If someone thinks they know they are likely just guessing. I mean, after all, how long did KISS go with their makeup and outfits? How long did Angus Young wear his schoolboy outfit in AC/DC?

In Japan, it’s not at all unusual for music groups to adopt some form of aesthetic. Band Maid has been going for over ten years now wearing maid costumes. And I won’t even get into the Visual Kei artists and their adoption of varying types of costumes. There is a whole culture in Japan which links visual aesthetic and artistry in a way that isn’t a gimmick, it’s expected and accepted.

What could be a bit trickier is where they go musically. Right now it seems that a lot of people see 24 EDO based sound as a novelty, instead of being a serious form of music. But I don’t think that is an issue. There is still a lot of ground for them to explore musically with microtonality.

But I do think they will need to find some way to change up their format. Right now they have a uniquely identifiable music style. They will need to find a way to iterate on this style. They will need to find a way of keeping it fresh, while not alienating their current fans. I could speculate on several ways they could do this, but I am not them. I don’t have the same thought process they do. After all, they’ve been playing together since they were thirteen years old. It’s only for them to figure out where they want to go next.

So, in the end, are they a fad? Who knows, and who really cares? Just ride along with them. If they fail, they fail. If they succeed, then they succeed. I’ll keep listening and decide when and if I want to stop listening. That’s all you can do.

[Edit: 2026-07-03: fix mistakenly calling Montreal the hometown of Angine de Poitrine. It’s actually Saguenay, Quebec.]

Categories: #Music Tags: #microtonal, #antiai, #rockmusic, #parody, #dada License: Copyright Unattributed. Licensed under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0.

Am I Becoming a Neo-Luddite?

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 07:56:17 -0500

If you look up Neo-Luddite or Neo-Luddism in Wikipedia, Chellis Glendinning, who is considered to be one of the major influencers of the movement, wrote in her paper Notes towards a Neo-Luddite manifesto that Neo-Luddites are:

20th century citizens—activists, workers, neighbors, social critics, and scholars—who question the predominant modern worldview, which preaches that unbridled technology represents progress.

And, looking at the hobbies I am most interested in shows that at least half of them are rooted in more heritage ideas:

Heritage style footwear
Wristwatches
Fountain pens
Photography
Audio gear
E-books and E-readers

It could even be argued that my interest in Photography also fits in with the concept of Neo-Luddism. However, given that modern photography is highly dependent on current technologies, I don’t count it.

But, just looking at my hobbies isn’t a reflection of my thoughts in this area. While I absolutely agree with the sentiment that we should question the concept that unbridled technology represents progress, I cannot align myself with a number of other movements that appear to be related to neo-Luddism. Some of those are the anti-globalization movement, and the anarcho-primitivism movements.

Then what do I consider myself? I came up with a different term to describe my relationship with technology over a decade ago: Techno Curmudgeon. Basically, a curmudgeon is similar to a misanthrope, a person who distrusts other people and human nature. However, instead I have a distrust of technology. I maintain that a lot of the changes that we have seen over the last two decades have really been more change for the sake of change, instead of change with specific goals to improve technology for people.

This mistrust of technology is rooted in the many, many cases of the abuse of technology that we have seen. If I were to say there was any single story that made me into a Techno Curmudgeon it would be the story: How Target Figured Out A Teen Girl Was Pregnant Before Her Father Did. (Note: the original story was in the New York Times, but it is heavily sourced in the Forbes version).

The fact is, that was, in my book a severe invasion of privacy. This is on the order of the Police or a government body requiring that your Library book records be made available to them. I also consider this on the order of an Insurance Companies building a profile on you so they can deny your claim because of something ridiculous.

This can be extended to more recent things that we have seen. For example, the Mozilla Foundation deciding to become an advertising company. Just because they lack imagination needed to stick to their original principles while raising the capital they need, all of a sudden you become the product for them to sell.

In the end, the concept of becoming a Techno Curmudgeon (a term I would love to spread even further) means that I don’t accept technology for technology’s sake. I maintain a healthy skepticism which is reflected in my hobbies. All of them are about minimizing my interactions with computers and the online world. Instead, I make use of technology to disconnect from technology (like using my E-reader to get away from the computer). Something else that isn’t reflected in this list: I minimize the number of subscriptions I have. I don’t have Spotify, Netflix, or other streaming services.

This isn’t to say I am completely able to avoid harmful technology. For example, given where I live, I am stuck using Amazon. They are the only company that can reliably (most of the time) deliver things that I need. However, when possible, I avoid technology that has proven itself to be harmful, or technology that hasn’t proven there is a need for it to change.

No, I Put That (Em)Dash There…

Sun, 28 Jun 2026 07:39:50 -0500

I would like to supply a TLDR; for this document, but it’s too long for there to be a simple summary. The closest would be the conclusion of the article, but there is a lot of information along the way that would be lost if you jump to that. Therefor, if you clicked on this article, I would recommend reading it completely.

Introduction

I read Jola’s article The social contract of writing the other day, and was impressed by their well reasoned arguments. I then read the response from Segun Famisa: No. You can’t tell it was written by AI, and felt that it was quite a bit off the point.

Jola’s primary arguments were:

The use of LLMs are homogenizing writing. Their repetitive use of specific idioms and patterns that are frequently occurring. Like, statistically too frequent to be an anomaly.
Even if you don’t use an LLM in your writing, you are being caught up in the blast-radius of LLM written works. These works have been tainted are affecting how you write.
Writing that is assisted by the use of LLMs is a violation of the social contract between the author and their audience.

Segun, on the other hand, seems to have disagreed with concept that LLM assisted writing can be identified. He makes the arguments that:

The tools used to identify LLM written works often fail.
In order to judge a piece of writing you need to know the author of the work to determine if they wrote it.
The reason for things like em-dashes, and unusual vocabulary is due more to the social background of the people who trained the LLMs.

There is a lot to be said about both of these pieces. I have some things that haven’t been considered to toss into the discussion surrounding the use of LLMs in writing. And, along the way, I want to rebut a couple of the arguments that have been made.

I Am the Author

Before we dig into the exceptionally muddy waters of the ethical questions of using LLMs in writing it’s necessary to be clear about this: I am the sole author of this article. Yes, I use some tools to assist in the writing of this article: (self-hosted) LanguageTool and Harper. Why? Because my grammar and spelling sucks.

But, rest assured, all the words on your screen were typed by me. All the awkward analogies, idioms, and other quirks of this text emerged from my mind, and not from an LLM. I will most certainly guarantee that this will lead vocabulary choices that are unusual, and may, therefore, not read in the same way that others might have written this.

And, I am the one making the choice to use properly formatted em-dashes and ellipses throughout this text. These have only been the convention for typeset prose since the invention of the movable type printing press by Johannes Gutenberg around the year 1440.

Donald Knuth spent years working on TeX, trying to find a way to automate properly typeset texts. Along the way he solved many problems that were far more complicated than anyone had thought they were. I don’t understand why we don’t honor the work of Knuth and use these machines to the fullest extent of their capabilities, especially when it comes to typesetting.

I do feel like these silly “tell-tales” were originally intended as a joke: “An em-dash? No one writes like that! Right?” and somewhere along the way the joke was lost.

Simple Tell-Tales Are a Lie

That’s one of the first things I would like to contribute to the discussion. Simple, easy, tell-tales just aren’t a reality. LLMs are not simple pieces of software that are just glorified “autocomplete” machines as some people would try to have us believe.

Even a cursory study of how an LLM is designed and trained will make this fact self-evident. While I am not an expert in this field (far from it), I have watched and read enough background information to have some appreciation for the complexity of the accomplishments in the field.

The facts are that there are many elements that go into an LLM:

The design of the neural network
The design of the model
The algorithms used in the model
The information used to train the model
The people who performed the training
The person(s) interacting with the model
The bugs / shortcoming of the agents

This is only a top-level view of some of the factors. It’s pretty clear that the resulting output from an LLM can be vastly different based on changes to any or all of these factors. This also points to the fact that this should still be considered a research technology, and not something that is being implemented as a tool for the public to use, In my opinion.

Given this level of complexity, how can we think that there are simple tell-tales for LLM written works? It’s simply ridiculous.

There Are Indicators of LLM Writing

There is a whole field of study around linguistics which can, using varying methods be used to identify patterns in written language. This is often used with historically significant documents to verify the authorship of said documents.

How is this done? By analyzing works known to be authored by a person, and comparing the documents in question to the known writings of the author. This process involves numerous factors:

Vocabulary of the author
Unique grammatical constructs employed by the author
The overall structure of a document
The presentation of arguments, explanations, etc.
Other narrative or exposition elements
The references or supporting evidence

This idea of examining the constructs and patterns found within a document isn’t limited to written bodies of work. These concepts are applied to analyze things like music compositions.

Then why have tools like OpenAI’s AI Classifier failed?

Because it’s kind of like a dog chasing its own tail. A dog generally chases its own tail not because it wants to catch it, but because the activity itself is fun. The dog knows how to catch its tail, it does so all the time by laying down bending over to get to its tail.

An LLM trying to analyze a text to determine its provenance is like the dog chasing its tail. It can do the assigned activity, but the results are unlikely to end in success. Why? Quite simply, an LLM is likely unable to make a distinction between the information it has been trained on versus information it has generated. In terms of an LLM these two things are equal. The LLM written document is the result of the information it was trained on. What things can it do to find a distinction?

This is a topic that authors discuss at length. The question of the relationship between an author and their audience is frequently questioned.

Take, for example, a mystery author. Just how much information do they have to present to the reader throughout the text to make the solution satisfying? Is there an issue with presenting too many facts that lead to the solution? What amount of misdirection is appropriate in a story? Where is the line between misdirection and confusing the reader to the point frustration?

Similarly, Science Fiction authors faced the dilemma of writing “hard” Sci-fi, aka basing the technology strictly on known science and technology, versus using known science and technology as the basis for more advanced systems. In some cases, is there a basis for inventing whole new scientific concepts or principles in order to introduce a new technology to their world. Where is the line? What will the reader accept or reject?

These, and many more, types of questions exist throughout all genres of fiction writing. And, likely exist through many more forms of written communication. This discussion is something that is not going away anytime in the future. And now, there is a new topic to add to this: what is the line with LLMs?

Jola’s reference to the Oxide Computing RFD 576 brings a lot of subtlety to the questions surrounding the use of LLMs in writing. It simultaneously seems to be advocating for some roles for LLMs, while still acknowledging that there are issues and dangers in using LLMs.

The issue I see with this is there is little to no objective measurement for the effective use of LLMs in their environment. I see this as a missed thought that needs to be carefully addressed. For example, it is suggested that LLMs can be used as research assistants (which is something that I’ve thought about myself). However, the document warns of the propensity for LLMs to make things up, insert claims that aren’t true, or hallucinate, or fail in other ways. Therefore, the user of the LLM for research needs to verify all the claims in the output, and go through all the references to make certain they are valid.

When I considered this question, I started to wonder what the impact would be on my personal research process? In other words, I wondered if the time that I would save would be sufficiently greater than the amount of time I needed to validate the work of the LLM? While I have no experiential data on which make such a judgment, I do have an experience that informed my thoughts on this topic.

A few years ago I asked ChatGPT to write a profile of an artist I am deeply familiar with. I asked it to write a profile under 500 words in length to be used in the liner notes for a new release by said artist. The results were scary. The first part was not all that bad, it got the artists real name, his approximate age, and the region of the world he was from. It then went on to explain his style of music, and his range within that style of music.

Then things fell completely apart. It started listing the most popular releases from the artist. First, several of the releases were little known works by him. But if that wasn’t bad enough, it listed a work that he has publicly and widely disavowed. And, to take things to the last level: it made up two works.

I spent over an hour researching the releases, especially because I couldn’t any reference to any of these works in the artists online discographies. Once I had determined all the facts surrounding those works, I went back to the LLM and challenged it on the works it had listed. It took numerous exchanges to get it to recognize the fictional works, but it would never explain where those works had come from. As for the disavowed work, it did acknowledge that the artist had disavowed it, but wouldn’t answer why that work had been included on the list.

Realize, this is only a 500 word profile. About 2 pages of typewritten text. Several hours spent in validating, and interrogating the LLM about its output. This was a task that would have taken me approximately 30 minutes to complete. At this point I saw that using an LLM for such tasks had an actual negative impact on my work process.

Now, a sample set of one does not make for a good basis to draw broader conclusions. However, when considering what is the line with LLMs, it should be considered whether the use of the tool is going to significantly contribute to the quality of the work, or if it is going to become an unduly burdensome tool. While some roles, such as a proofreading or critiquing one’s writing might be a viable and useful option, other areas such as researching, writing assistance, or editing a work might be more burden than useful.

Does AI Fit?

There is something that I have been thinking about. We have been worried that LLM writing are changing the way that we communicate. However, isn’t that something that we have been doing throughout history? Consider a few brief examples.

Pens

Yeah, this might seem like a boring way to start things, but there are things that we have to consider, seriously.

The first writing implements were reeds or feathers that were cut to a point, and slit in them. When dipped into an ink pot they held a small amount of ink to allow a person to write. This was an actual advancement over earlier forms of writing. And, because of the limited education, at the time, only Royalty (and possibly extremely wealthy people) had access to these tools. From the quill, we moved on the dip pen. Same concept as before, but now we had nibs made from steel.

The next major change would be to what we now call “dropper” pens, but were referred to at the time as reservoir pens. These were pens where the barrel portion was treated as a reservoir which could be filled with ink. The ink would flow into a part of the pen known as the feed. The feed was connected to the nib, and supplied ink to it. There is a lot of uncertainty about when this was first invented. There are claims that such a pen was invented in the mid-900s in Egypt, but there is no physical evidence of such a pen existing. It is also believed that Leonardo da Vinci may have made one for his own use. His journals contain designs for such a pen, and it’s notable that his journals reflect a more continuous ink flow than other writings of the same period. However, there is definitely evidence that there were reservoir pens being produced and sold in 17th century Germany.

Innovation in the design and manufacture of pens remained steady through the 19th century. However, at the beginning of the 20th century a new era of fountain pens was born when self-filling pens began hitting the market. These pens used various mechanisms to allow the pens to be filled by sucking ink into the barrel of the pen. These pens quickly became runaway hits with the general population.

However, their years were numbered. There were efforts to come up with what is known now as the ballpoint pen dating all the way back to the late 1880s. However, all the early versions of such a pen had problems with ink flow, reliability, and material choices. These were much the same issues that had plagued the progress in fountain pen development. However, László Bíró and his brother György decided to undertake this problem in the 1930s, and by 1938 they filed for their first patent for the Biro pen. After World War II, the design of the pen was refined, and eventually came down in price to the point where it was easily accessible to the general public, and quickly supplanted the fountain pen.

The first patented typewriter was developed in 1829. Known as the Typographer by William Austin Burt. (There were several machines before this one, but this is the first extensively documented machine.) In the mid-19th century the desire and need for speeding up communications brought the development of the typewriter to the forefront of technology. Typists, stenographers, and telegraphers could take down information at the rate of approximately 130 words per minute, whereas people writing with a pen tended to top out around 30 words per minute.

The first commercially successful typewriter was patented in 1868, and was sold under the name “Shoales and Glidden Typewriter”. In 1873 Remington would bring its first typewriter to market. In the early 1900s the design of typewriters reached a point where the design was somewhat standardized, and there were at least a dozen notable manufacturers of typewriters.

The first electric typewriter began production in 1900. However, the first practical electric typewriter wasn’t produced until 1914, and successfully brought to market in 1920. From the 1920s to the 1940s the main company producing electric typewriters (Northeast Electric Company) changed hands several times, saw its typewriter division spun-off into a separate company, and was eventually acquired by IBM.

IBM would take the technology, and being producing its Electromatic series of typewriters, which introduced the ability to vary the spacing of the characters, producing a typewritten page the appeared more like a typeset document. In 1961 IBM would introduce the Selectric typewriter, which used a typeball, which could be changed, enabling different fonts or type styles to be achieved.

The final step in the development of the typewriter was the electronic (not to be confused with electric typewriters). Electronic typewriter distinctions were the use of the daisy wheel type head, and using circuitry to control the type head, instead of the purely mechanical mechanisms of the previous electric typewriter.

The typewriter market began to recede in the 1990s after the invention of the personal computer. Of course, much of the invention around the typewriter continues on today in the computer keyboards used by many people.

Getting to the Point

Why discuss the invention and progression of pens and typewriters? They are highly relevant to this discussion, as other communication inventions throughout the ages. These were just the two most direct examples that came to my mind.

What is worth considering is how did these technologies impact the work of creating written documents? The progress from using a quill / reed and ink or dip pens to the self filling fountain pens enabled writers to expand on their work. It made it easier for them to write in a continuous flow of thoughts. Writers like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway were known to use fountain pens in composing their works. How much would they have been impacted if they only had a dip pen to work with? The invention of the ballpoint pen took writing to another level altogether, being more portable than fountain pens, and requiring fewer and less messy refills.

The typewriter removed many of the restrictions of the pen in terms of the speed at which a work could be produced, and the accuracy and legibility of the document produced by an author. The penmanship of the author was less of an issue. The speed at which a document could be typed was up to four times the speed of handwriting, and potentially higher with the invention of the electric and electronic typewriters. And, by the time electric and electronic typewriters emerged, the ability to correct the text as it was written was greatly improved.

We can move along and look at what the personal computer and the internet have enabled for authors… That is such a large topic I didn’t even want to start writing about it.

Is AI Next?

Is AI the next fountain pen or typewriter? Is this a technology that will have impact on writing? That seems to be a foregone conclusion at this point as we look at the works that are being produced now.

The question then becomes where will AI fit in? AI is current still in its early stages, not the mature technology that the marketers and AI companies would like us to believe that it is. But, is there a point where it crosses the point of maturity and become a tool that is going to be seen in the same way as earlier tools were?

There were authors that resisted using typewriters. There were authors that resisted using specific brands of pens (there is a humorous story in which H. P. Lovecraft complained bitterly when he was forced to use a Conklin fountain pen after losing his Waterman pen. Meanwhile, Mark Twain was so in love with the Conklin pens that he endorsed them.)

What It Looks Like

The final question I have been asking myself win regard to AI and writing is: what does it look like? That is, if, and when the technology reaches a point where it is considered to be mature enough to become just another tool for writers and artists?

This is another question that I don’t have an answer for, and I don’t have any predictions on it. I only have some hopes for what will come. What hopes do I have?

My hope is that the technology will not remain under the direction of large corporations. I would rather see the technology becoming something that individuals chose implement for themselves, and have the ability to customize what it does for them, and how they interact with it.

This basically means local LLM implementations. We have machines that are capable of running small local LLM’s right now. (I’m typing this on an AMD Ryzen AI MAX+ system right now). I think there are ways to allow individuals to implement and customize this tool in the same manner that many of us chose to install and customize our Linux systems. I think this could also open the door(s) to ways of correcting the wrongs of the current AI industry in terms of their use of other people’s property. But that’s a whole other thought process that I have been going through, which belongs in a different article.

Conclusion

The future of AI as it stands is uncertain. There are people that are both bullish and bearish on the state of the industry from a business standpoint. I tend to align myself more with the bears. I believe that the financing is a shame, and there will (hopefully) be either some kind of market correction, or day of reckoning where these companies are concerned.

While the things that many people think are tells really aren’t, that doesn’t mean it isn’t possible to identify AI generated writing more accurately given the correct set of linguistic analysis tools. And at this point we should be identifying these works as the technology is really not at a level where it should be so broadly accepted.

When I look at a company like Oxide Computers I am encouraged that they are taking an approach that addresses many of the subtleties of the questions surrounding AI. However, what I am not encouraged by is that the missed the singularly most critical point: how does one quantify the usefulness of this technology? My personal experience showed me that it could quite easily and substantially get in my way, turning a thirty-minute task into two hours of work. That’s not a productivity boon.

But, I am also wondering if we are looking at this form the wrong perspective. Throughout history there have been technologies that have substantially impacted our ability to write and create. Has the impact of those technologies been positive or negative? That’s a question with an unknown answer, and one that should be researched more deeply in order to understand what we should expect as the impact of AI.

I know there have been artists and creators that have resisted the technologies that I brought up in this article. I mentioned that one author couldn’t stand a self-filling fountain pen (Lovecraft), while another (Twain) loved it so much he endorsed the company. There were authors that resisted using the typewriter when it became a reasonably commonplace and affordable tool for writing, despite all of its benefits.

Where does AI fit in for writers? I don’t know, but I do have some hopes for it. The primary hope is that it is a technology that does not remain in the hands of large corporations. I hope that it instead becomes a personal technology that the individual can implement for themselves, and customize it to integrate it into their life.

Webrings & Elsewhere

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 22:58:18 -0500

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Listed On

My Blogs

RSS Feeds

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What Are They Thinking (When the Brain Cells Escape)

Fri, 26 Jun 2026 08:17:16 -0500

Sometimes I cannot, for the life of me, understand what spammers are thinking. For that matter, I am not even certain they have more than a single brain cell left. Take this one for example, sending eight messages in a single minute:

Eight spam messages in a single minute

Now, look, I get it. They are really trying to get attention. But really, do they think this message will actually accomplish anything?

I mean seriously, all of these messages just hit my spam filter and got dumped into a folder for me to double-check.

But, if it was just these eight messages I might have forgiven it as a one-off, drive-by spamming. But no, that was just the spam from tonight. They’ve been at this for two weeks now. Every few days they drop by the site that has that contact form, spam eight messages at me, and move on.

I mean, it would be funny if it weren’t so pathetic: there are fifty-six messages from this spammer in my folder. And they’ve been doing this exact same thing every time: spam eight messages and then move on.

But, they are trying to be a bit strategic… They don’t do it every day. It seems they are on some kind of rotation: doing their spamming once every two-three days. Like that is going to make any kind of difference???

Do they really think this going to work? Does it ever work on anyone? I mean, I just have to wonder: where are their brain cells hiding?

There are a total of one hundred and sixty-six messages in my spam folder. They make up fifty-six of them, that is over one third of the spam messages in that folder. Guess it makes the cleanup all that much easier.

<delete>

Responding To My Former Web Host, Part Three — The Finale

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 18:30:43 -0500

Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

In part two I stated that I thought that would be the end of this series of posts, and yet here I am with part three. This one will be the absolute final post as I don’t have anything more to say to my web host. However, the response I received just now really should be documented. I said in part two that I respected the people I worked with at this hosting company, and that continues to be the case.

So, with that, here is the last exchange.

My Response To The Support Person

Thank you for the response. You have largely understood the issues that I brought up, and had some insightful feedback.

I would like to clarify something, as I think I didn’t provide a proper context for you.

At no point did I feel that the infrastructure was in my way. That is quite far from the case. I am actually a former IT Server / Infrastructure engineer. My understanding of your underlying design is why I decided to go with your service in the first place. I was tired of working with hosting services that really didn’t understand how to implement a solid infrastructure. Even though there were aspects of the environment I didn’t use, it was good to know they were available if I needed them. (And, if I had migrated one of my other sites, I am quite certain I would have needed them.)

My “using a sledgehammer when all I really need is a screwdriver” is typical of me. I’ve always tended to look at requirements / specs, and design solutions that are overkill.

The “optimization issue” was really only frustrating the first time it happened. Since I didn’t have the familiarity with the codebase to know where to look for the issue I was left in a situation where I couldn’t find the answer on my own. Once support had tracked down the issue, it was mostly just an infrequent annoyance, which is why I didn’t make any noise about it. (If it had been a serious enough issue, I would have pushed the issue to your dev group.)

The only thing that really didn’t fit for me is WordPress. I can tell you understand that level of frustration I am feeling with that. ;)

As to the pricing, while it wasn’t a major issue for me, I did find it annoying. I would think that Enterprise customers would likely find it frustrating too. I know most of the places I worked preferred to be able to have fixed rate contracts for a given term, and then be able to re-negotiate when that term was up. This kind of pricing structure would likely have never flown in any of the environments I worked in. (OTOH — all the companies I worked for had their own infrastructure, and WordPress wasn’t considered an Enterprise class platform.)

Response From My Former Web Host

Thank you for the clarification and for sharing more about your background.

That context definitely helps me better understand where you were coming from.

It’s great to hear that the infrastructure itself was actually one of the reasons you chose our service. I completely understand the “sledgehammer vs screwdriver” approach as well, especially from an engineering perspective where building for flexibility and scalability becomes second nature.

I also appreciate you clarifying the optimization issue. That makes perfect sense, especially when the main frustration was initially not knowing where to look within an unfamiliar codebase rather than the issue itself being critical.

And yes, I completely understand your feelings about WordPress. It can definitely become the limiting factor, particularly for users coming from more traditional infrastructure and engineering environments.

Your feedback regarding the pricing structure is also very valid. Predictability is important, especially in enterprise environments where fixed-term budgeting is often preferred.

Thank you again for the thoughtful feedback and for taking the time to explain your experience in more detail. We genuinely appreciate it.

Wishing you all the best,

What I Didn’t Provide Detail About

When I said above:

And, if I had migrated one of my other sites, I am quite certain I would have needed them.

I was referring to the dev/test environment feature they offer. The site I haven’t migrated relies heavily on a WordPress plugin that is no longer available. The company that produced it completely pulled it from the market, doesn’t offer any support for it, and didn’t bother to make the code available for it.

This left me with 250-350 posts that rely on a plugin that is no longer available or supported, with no clear migration path.

I’ve since dumped the contents of that site. All the information from that plugin is stored in metadata in each post. When I dumped it (into a Jekyll compatible flat-file format), all the metadata came along with the posts. Now I just need to extract that data from the JSON section of each file, and translate into an appropriate format for presentation here.

Along with this, I need to test all the URI’s in the posts. Given the age of the posts, I know there are quite a few that are no longer available… This is going to be true for all ~500 posts on that site.

This is a task that is going to be annoying. I am going to have to find some way to automate it. Manual intervention isn’t an option.

Conclusion

To summarize everything:

My former web hosts infrastructure was overkill for my needs. But, given my IT Infrastructure background I deliberately chose it.
I did foresee needing part of that infrastructure for migrating one site, which I never worked on.
I only had two actual issues with the hosting service:
- First was an incident with a plugin that caused issues, but that was more of an annoyance once the source of the problem was found.
- Second was the instability of their pricing. In my experience that wouldn’t fly in an enterprise environment. (Then again, WordPress was never accepted in any enterprise environment I worked in.)
Finally, the real issue I had wasn’t with them, but with WordPress. From their implementation of Gutenberg to the addition of AI support in 7.0 Automattic seems to be on the path to complete enshittification of the platform. I consider that process to be complete now.

Responding To My Former Web Host, Part Two

Wed, 24 Jun 2026 07:55:20 -0500

Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

I stated the other day that I was surprised my former web host emailed me asking for feedback after I’d closed out my account. No survey, or feedback form, just a straightforward email.

And now I am surprised again. Why? Yesterday morning I received a response to that email. Only nine or ten hours after I sent it. And, much to my pleasure, the representative largely understood what I was talking about. She had some interesting and relevant comments.

So, here I am, presenting part two of this email exchange. I plan to respond to her email to clear up a minor mis-perception I think she has, but otherwise I feel like she’s really taking my feedback and handling it properly.

(And this is something I have to say… I have respect for all the people I worked with at this host. They were very professional, responsive, and good at resolving issues. This email is further indication of the customer service this hosting service provided.)

First of all, thank you for taking the time to share such thoughtful and detailed feedback. We genuinely appreciate the level of insight you provided, and I can tell this wasn’t a decision you made lightly.

I’m glad to hear that, overall, you found value in the infrastructure and services we built. At the same time, I completely understand the frustrations you experienced, especially with the recurring optimization issue and the feeling of having to repeatedly reapply fixes after updates. I can absolutely see how that would become frustrating over time, particularly when your setup was intentionally kept simple and close to the default WordPress experience.

Your comments regarding testing against default WordPress themes and preserving user-defined optimization settings are especially valuable, and I’ll be sure to pass that feedback along to the relevant team. Even though the underlying issue may have been more nuanced, the impact on your workflow was very real, and that matters.

I also appreciate your honesty about pricing and feature fit. It makes complete sense that a platform designed for agencies, developers, and more complex website management can feel excessive when your primary focus is writing rather than maintaining large-scale web infrastructure. Sometimes the best solution is the one that stays out of the way and lets you focus on the work you actually care about.

And regarding WordPress itself, while experiences and preferences naturally vary, I can certainly understand your perspective on how the platform has evolved over the years. For users whose priority is writing efficiency and simplicity, the shift toward block-based editing and increasingly visual workflows hasn’t always been a welcome change. It’s clear you’ve given a lot of thought to your workflow and the tools that best support it, and it sounds like you’ve found an approach that aligns much more closely with how you prefer to work.

It’s great to hear that you were able to migrate your sites successfully and settle into a solution that better fits both your workflow and your budget.

Thank you again for having been with us and for giving our platform a chance over the years. We truly appreciate your support, your candid feedback, and the professionalism with which you shared your experience.

Wishing you all the best with your writing and your new setup moving forward.

Categories: #Article, #Feature Tags: #Webhosting, #Customer-Service, #email, #rants

Responding To My Former Web Host

Tue, 23 Jun 2026 07:59:16 -0500

Responding To My Former Web Host TOC:

I got an email yesterday that was somewhat unexpected. My former hosting service asked me to send an email about why I had closed out my account. This is something I haven’t experienced before… A company that wants an actual email, they don’t just want some form or survey filled out. They want to actually hear everything that I have to say… Well, I decided that I would take them up on it.

And now, I am presenting this email to document all the gory details. But, let’s be clear: I spend a lot of it talking about their service, and one issue that I had. Most of that was a minor annoyance, not something that pushed me to make the decision to switch. As I document in the second half of this message, the primary reason is the enshittification of WordPress.

Hopefully you enjoy the parts of this where I get completely unhinged when talking about certain topics. ;)

You know the saying: “It’s not you, it’s me?” Typically, it’s a lie, right? Well, in this case it’s about 90% percent true.

There’s very little that I had a problem with from the standpoint of your infrastructure. I think you’ve done an excellent job of designing a system that is well integrated, and provides the services that are needed to manage a professional environment.

However, where I did run into some friction centered around one of the plugins that you provide. I don’t recall which one it was, but almost every time it was updated it kept breaking the image rendering on my site’s home page. One of your support people found the issue: it was the JS optimization one of your plugins that was breaking things. The annoyance was every time the plugin would update, I would have to go back into my site and fix the issue. It was only recently I found the feature that allowed me to snapshot the settings so I could apply them quickly without having to look up the support issue to remember how to fix the problem.

The real reason this was quite annoying: I was always using the current default WordPress template. I didn’t need anything too fancy that the default theme didn’t offer. Personally, I really think that your Q&A process should be testing against several configurations of the default template to make certain that it isn’t breaking things. (Although, in this case, that might not have worked… IIRC the problem was the plugin overwriting the settings the user had implemented, instead of preserving them.)

The pricing was more than I really want to invest. When I looked at things, your service was running me over $800/yr. When I add the additional services I required, that expense jumped to somewhere between $1000-1200/yr. There’s no way I can justify spending $300-400 per website, that’s excessive for me. This wasn’t helped by the changes in your pricing structure over the years.

My replacement solution has my expenses down to $200-250/yr to run five websites. It’s not the same as having a full infrastructure setup such as yours, however, it will meet my needs better (which I’ll explain more about later.)

The other thing about your environment was: it’s like using a sledgehammer when all I really require is a screwdriver. I’m not in the business of website design. I’m in the “business” of writing.

This means that features like having a staging environment are, mostly, non-features for me. If anything I just require a test environment for making changes to the layout of my sites… I don’t need a full mirror of my site, there’s nothing so complicated that I have to be concerned about major side effects. (Honestly, the whole staging environment was one of the most attractive features that sold me on your service initially. It was surprising to me that I never used it because it wasn’t necessary.) There are several other features of your environment that were like that.

But the single biggest issue has nothing to do with you. It is the fact that Automattic has done everything they possibly could to turn WordPress into a steaming pile of horse manure over the last eight or so years. And now, with the addition of AI integration, the enshittification process is complete. WordPress is no longer a tool for writers. It’s a tool for visual web development, and the spreading of as much slop as possible.

I tried to give WordPress a chance with the Gutenberg editor. But block editors are just not for writing, they are for page design / layout. Look at the tools that writers use: Google Docs, Microsoft Word, LibreOffice Write. Hell, George R. R. Martin is still using a copy of WordStar from the 1980s, and there are other authors that are still using WordPerfect from the 1990s.

The thing is, the editor is getting in the way of the writing process. It puts things in the path of the writing process that just shouldn’t be there. I shouldn’t have to think about inserting a heading, I should just be able to hit a quick shortcut and have it done. And, if I want to select text across two paragraphs to join / edit a couple of sentences, it shouldn’t be a five-step process (try selecting the last word in one paragraph and keep selecting into the next paragraph see what happens… One of the most annoying things to have been forced on writers in the last decade.)

But it’s not limited to the editor itself. It’s the whole block based website layout. It just gets in the way, and it makes things a lot less efficient and quite a bit more annoying. I just went and looked at one of my other websites that is still using a pre-Gutenberg and pre-Block layout configuration, and I couldn’t believe my eyes: this site that I hadn’t looked at for over a year was a lot more responsive than anything I’ve worked on with any current theme. And this is still a current installation of WordPress: the host that site is on is performing similar services to yours: providing automatic updates to the current versions of WordPress and any plugins, full backups, etc. While there are still a lot of differences (from the plugin stack that it’s running, to the network infrastructure itself), the fact is that the older theme was just a lot easier to render.

And then, over time, the whole block and patterns system in WordPress has just made things even worse. I tried recently to reconfigure my home page to make it into a minimalist layout: simple image, title, and date for each post, with the title being the link to the article. Would you believe that I spent two days trying to get the layout that I wanted, and failed? Why? I don’t know, I’m still baffled. I just moved things around in the homepage template to make a simple list. Furthermore, I found there were things that should have been extremely simple that I couldn’t get it to do, like make smaller, thumbnail sized versions of the featured images. And for some reason the date for all the articles on the homepage were the current date – despite me not moving the date element outside the query loop.

So now, things I had been able to do in previous versions of WordPress were breaking in the latest version. And then I found this fucking bullshit:

WordPress AI Connectors screen.

And I lost it. I had been considering moving off WordPress for years, and now (as I previously stated) seeing that the enshittification was complete, I decided that I needed to dump WordPress. (And don’t even get me started on emDash.)

I had been thinking for a long time about moving my sites to a static website generator. However, I wasn’t completely happy with what it would take to integrate one into my tool chain / working environment. However, a little over a week ago I tested out a couple of really simple platforms that offer a middle ground between a static generator and an online environment. After a little testing and evaluation, I ran the numbers and determined that it would be very effective at reducing my expenses. And, because it integrates into my working environment, I can ensure backups are handled properly (I have a triple-backup system, that includes offsite physical backups).

So, I migrated all three sites that were hosted with you over a period of three-four days, and shut down everything last weekend.

No looking back now. Thanks for the service you provided.

George

The Chairman Is Slurring?

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 08:03:36 -0500

Frank Sinatra circa 1958

The other day I found a clip of a VTuber talking about expanding beyond their typical music taste. In this case they had heard a small snippet of a song by Frank Sinatra somewhere, and decided to check it out. The song? It’s Nice To Go Trav’ling from the Come Fly With Album. The clip took a turn that I found a bit surprising.

The VTuber stated that they really liked the song… It was basically a silly piece of music, one they even had a thought of covering. Until they heard one verse, a verse that changed everything. Why? Well, as they stated, Frank said a slur word. And he didn’t just say it once, he said it three times!

Frank Sinatra uttering a slur? In a song? A song on a record from a major recording label? A recording from 1958? I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, and I had to understand what has going on. So I looked up the song lyrics, and what I encountered was quite a bit more complicated than I would have initially thought.

The lyric in question is:

It’s quite the life to play gypsy And roam as gypsies will roam It’s quite the life to play gypsy But your heart starts singin' when your homeward wingin' ‘cross the foam

This wasn’t my first time encountering the interpretation of this term for the Romani people as a slur. But, as with many situations there is more to this than one might expect, or at least I expected from the context.

On The Surface

If you search the web for the phrase “is [redacted] word a slur”, you will likely find articles like Why It’s Time to Stop Saying “Gypsy”, which claim:

To answer your question about this frequently Googled term, the short answer is yes, absolutely. The word is as a racial slur against the Roma people, the PC term for gypsy.

Reading this article, I was immediately put on alert. Anytime someone decides to take an absolute position, it seems more likely they will have reached a conclusion that is, at best, dismissive of part of the information that is available.

The Etymology

This was where I took a look at the word from an etymological standpoint. Why? Because our language has history. Contextual use of language based in history is frequently ignored when people take a stand, especially an absolute stand.

Enter Grammarphobia with the article: Is ‘Gypsy’ a slur?. This article very clearly documents that the origins of the word were used in a pejorative manner:

The earliest form of the word in English, which the Oxford English Dictionary dates to the 1530s, was “Gipcyan,” an abbreviated version of “Egyptian.” […] And many early appearances of “Gypsy” in English were highly pejorative because, as OED citations show, these itinerant foreigners were often viewed with contempt and mistrust, suspected of crimes, and driven away.

But, then there are some turns and twists in the story:

In later use, Oxford adds, “gypsy” (by this time lowercased) was used playfully rather than contemptuously for a woman, “and applied esp. to a brunette.” All those uses have died out.

But since then “gypsy” (also spelled “gipsy”) has acquired several more meanings, none of them pejorative. Most date from around the mid-20th century, […]

And it’s these meanings that many of us are more familiar, and are likely the origin of the verse in the Frank Sinatra song:

Someone who’s free-spirited or doesn’t live in one place for long.

A person with a career or way of life that’s itinerant or unconventional, especially a part-time or temporary college faculty member or a performer in the chorus line of a theatrical production.

So, there it is, the likely reason the song contains (the Sammy Cahn penned) lyric that is interpreted as containing slurs. These definitions are the likely reason Frank Sinatra sang them: they were understood as meaning carefree and free-spirited.

I think it’s safe to say the conclusion that Grammarphobia states, was likely the prevailing thought in the 1950s-1960s:

Our conclusions are that that “Gypsy” (with a capital “G”) is offensive to some people, and should be used with caution if at all. It should be avoided entirely if any ethnic connection is implied; instead, the words “Roma” or “Romani” should be used. Meanwhile, the non-ethnic uses of “gypsy” (with a lowercase “g”) should not be condemned.

Final Twist

So, if I were to take Grammarphobia’s conclusion that should be the end of the discussion, right? Not exactly, there was still another piece of context to consider. And, it’s the context that the VTuber was most likely having the strongest reaction to when they condemned Frank for using a slur.

The VTuber in question is British, and their understanding of the Romani people is likely very different from the majority of people in North America. We have long prided ourselves on being open and welcoming to immigrants and itinerant peoples (despite what our current government would have you believe).

This is not to say that we are in any way perfect. There are plenty of examples of distressing things that have happened to immigrants in this country (no example is louder than the imprisonment of Japanese Americans during World War II). There is no debate on this topic. However, on the whole, we have a better track record compared to many countries.

The Romani in Europe, however, have had to endure what appears to have been a ceaseless stream of racism, and distrust. One of the worst cases was the Romani Holocaust (aka Porajmos) by Germany in World War II. But, there are systemic biases and racism that remain throughout Europe to this day.

While there are efforts underway to try to establish the Romani in Europe, there is a very long path ahead for tensions to be reduced. I would likely say that it is going to take several more generations.

Which is where this VTuber comes back in to the picture. They are part of a generation that is being more sensitive to these issues. And for that they are to be applauded. Seeing that this particular song would likely be seen as being incredibly insensitive to the Romani, they are right to take a pass on it.

Although, maybe there’s a way to change the verse to remove the stigma? Perhaps this would work?

It’s quite the life to play carefree And roam as nomads will roam It’s quite the life to be at ease But your heart starts singin’ when your homeward wingin' ‘cross the foam

Category: #Essay Tags: #music, #vtuber, #history, #romani, #sinatra,

Unattributed

Let's Talk About Hosted Blogs

Introduction

Blogs We’re Not Talking About

What We Are Talking About

My Ultimate Decision

AI and Cognitive Dissonance

Update: RSS Feed Readers

Kagi News

Miniflux

Feedgrab

Conclusion

RE: Mea Culpa, When Somebody Writes Your Wrongs

RE: Why I Stopped “Creating Content”

Industry Speak

The Rise of Influencers

Getting off the Roller Coaster

The Difference

Conclusion

How I Write Blog Posts with Obsidian

Planning

New Post Drafts

Writing In Obsidian

Obsidian Plugins

Conclusion

Note-Taking and Personal Knowledge Management

What Was the Purpose

Personal Knowledge Management Systems

The Questions

Where Did Brennan’s Article Go Wrong?

Conclusion

RE: Bye bye Gravatar

Accessibility Rant: Reader Mode

Poor Contrast Color Schemes

Neo-cities Style Sites

Tiny and / or Thin Fonts

Audience Vision Differences

Finishing My Rant

The State of RSS Feed Readers

Introduction

This Isn’t a Roundup Article

Tech of a Bygone Era?

What Is RSS?

Why Use an RSS Reader?

RSS Feed Reader Options

Browser Extensions

Self Hosted

Cloud Readers

Desktop Applications

iOS and Android Applications

Conclusion

Three Water Songs

Before Angine and King Gizzard there was Harry Partch

Harry Who?

Rejection of Equal Temperament

Partch’s Journey

Partch’s Influence

Closing

Clickbait Lists Are Not Good

The Problems

The Fixes

Conclusion

On Getting Older: I Never Wanted This

On the Blogging and Writing Metas

A House Fifty Years Ago, A House Tomorrow

The Summer of Angine de Poitrine

Are They The Answer to AI?

Are They A Fad?

[Edit: 2026-07-03: fix mistakenly calling Montreal the hometown of Angine de Poitrine. It’s actually Saguenay, Quebec.]

Am I Becoming a Neo-Luddite?

No, I *Put* That (Em)Dash There…

Introduction

I Am the Author

Simple Tell-Tales Are a Lie

There Are Indicators of LLM Writing

The Author’s Social Contract

Does AI Fit?

Pens

Getting to the Point

Is AI Next?

No, I Put That (Em)Dash There…