Digital Gardening via Chris Armstrong

the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending. This is not the actual purpose of DOGE, and it's worth explaining what's going on here, but first we have to cover a...

Jon Udell is blogging less. Gosh, so am I. There are loads of ways to talk to the world, new alternatives every day it seems. Is this thing, you know, over?

You are not blogging enough. You are pouring your words into increasingly closed and often walled gardens. You are giving control - and sometimes ownership - of your content to social media companies that will SURELY fail. These companies are profoundly overvalued, don't care about permalinks, don't make your content portable, and have terms of...

A few years back, back when I was rebuilding the Science On a Sphere website, I had the idea that you could use a static site generator (SSG) like Eleventy to write out PHP instead of HTML. I had been eying Eleventy’s edge plugin and wishing it was available for hosts other than Netlify when it occurred to me that the edge plugin really isn’t...

More than twenty years ago, Web feeds were all the rage. Not proprietary news feeds on Facebook or ‘X’ – openly defined, direct producer-to-user feeds of information that you had total control over. Without ads. ‘Syndication’ meant that publishers could reach wider audiences without intermediaries; ‘aggregation’ meant that you could get updates...