When I’m travelling in another country and meet a fellow Canadian, there is a feeling like we can relax and relate. With anyone else, there is a bit of barrier, even if we’re trying hard to be friendly. Now that I’ve had a chance to spend a few days on Gander, a Canadian social media app just out of private testing,...

So, Cauê Napier has created this nifty little thing you can add to your site called Town Square. Of course, I signed up for it right away and implemented it on Newsonaut. So where is it? Right over here. It's a joy to use. A stickman version of you hangs out with other stick people, tossing out messages that...

In my newfound zeal for the indie web, I joined the IndieWeb Webring. You can see my version of it at the bottom of the page. You get some code to copy and paste into your site, but as I soon discovered, the presentation can be whatever you imagine it to be. I wanted to make mine obvious but also fit in with the...

Those “Buy Me a Coffee” links have upset the anonymous Hakkerblog, who finds them annoying. No, I won’t buy you a coffee Gordon Mclean and Michael Harley have defended them as mostly harmless. Yes, buy me a coffee Re: No, I won’t buy you a coffee I have never monetized Newsonaut and never will, but that’s mainly...

Gordon McLean and Case Duckworth had a good back-and-forth about typography and layout. Gordon says you should make your website uncluttered and easy to read. Case says there are reasons why you might not want to do that. Read for yourself: Gordon: Sort your sites out! Case: Your sites are fine! Gordon: Your sites...

The one easy thing you can do to help surface indie blogs and websites is to link to them. That way, if someone comes across your site, you can help them continue on to similar sites. The best links are the ones in context. If you’re writing about something that a reader finds interesting, a link in your post...

Robert Birming, who has a pretty great blog himself, is running a little thing called Junited, where participants give shoutouts to fellow bloggers they think more people should know about. This post will be updated throughout the month of June. Futility Closet Now with thousands of posts over the years, Greg Ross...

This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. I saw “a11y” recently and it reminded me of my “No way!?” moment when I finally figured out, after years of puzzlement, what it meant. For the longest time, I thought it was a fanciful way of spelling “ally,” but...

I still see many websites where the main content is in a tiny sans serif font. Why do they go out of their way to make their words hard to read? I suspect it is due to outdated ideas from ye olde web. There was a time when people running websites felt compelled to get as much as possible “above the fold”, so a...

No law says your archive has to be boring. You can nerd it up with stats, which I have done with my own archive. First, I figured out how to get Textpattern to automatically keep track of how many blog entries I made each year. I already knew how to do this for the grand total, so it was just a matter of making a...

Of course, there is a subreddit for RSS. Of course, someone there was able to provide me a link to the kind of explainer page I was musing about just a few days ago. To quote myself: I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page website that anyone with RSS could link to. “Welcome to RSS. Here’s why you...

It used to be when you wanted to send an email to Newsonaut, you’d go through gmail.com. I recently switched to a newsonaut.com address, but it didn't take long for bots to scrape it and start spamming me. My solution was to convert all the characters in the address to HTML entities. These are bits of code that are...