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....

I have updated the book shortcode1 used on my Reading page to link to the Internet Archive’s Open Library, which provides crowd-sourced book metadata – you can also look for these books in your local library! I’ve used the Open Library identifier for a Work rather than a specific edition. I used the Open Library API to take the ISBN of a specific (physical or digital) book and return the Work ID; publishing and documenting that code might have to wait for another day....

I say I’m an archivist but I’ve been rather blasé about archiving my own web presence. I can’t find an archive of my GeoCities site and the Wayback Machine only has a single capture from my university undergraduate page (I had already graduated a couple of years before that). But I started collecting my own domains around the early 2000s and the Wayback Machine is a reminder of the many iterations of my personal website,1 the different hand-coded templates, CMSes, and static site generators that I used, and all the text that I published and abandoned over the years....

It’s 365 days, give or take a day or two, since I had my last alcoholic drink.1 This is the longest streak since I started paying attention in 2021 or 2022. I don’t have a deeply personal, tragic or inspirational story to tel here. It’s just a commitment that I’ve made to myself, which I find easy enough to follow as long as I remember why I have made it....

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....