IndieWeb Carnival

V.H. Belvadi’s theme for the January 2025 IndieWeb Carnival, On the importance of friction, is an invitation for me to gather various threads that I have found in my reading in the last few weeks, and indeed to practise that friction in writing this post.1 As I slowed down over the New Year and spent more time on slow and deep reading, I saw that other bloggers were also developing more intentional reading practices. Jeremy Friesen customised his Mastodon and Emacs setup, ...

I’m not going to pretend for a moment that building a personal website is easier than posting to a platform that someone else has already built. I know that updating content for a static site generator in a git repository from the command line introduces a whole lot of friction (and jargon) to the blogging/publishing process, when I could easily post elsewhere with a mobile app from the comfort of my couch or while commuting on a tram. But there are enough development and automation tools available for iOS that I can use my iPad or phone as a portable development lab. Here’s how I write and publish away from a computer. ...

I have experienced constant stress, anxiety, and associated neck and shoulder pain for most of my adult life. The events of the last four years – moving in and out of pandemic mode, watching my world collectively take on more stress, anxiety, and rage in response to wars of all kinds – brought with them a flare-up of my own physical and mental pain. At the start of March I took stock of the habits and routines I had developed and started experimenting with various ways of turning down the noise of the external world. ...