Tag

Technical

Articles and publications tagged Technical across the Atmosphere.

92articles3publications

Articles

Publications

brennan.daySep 25, 2026

A Love Letter to the Super Dimension Fortress

I've finally became an ARPA member of SDF, a non-profit public-access UNIX system running continuously since 1987. I give a history from Ted Uhlemann's 300-baud Apple IIe BBS to today's NetBSD network of DEC Alphas and Opterons; a tour of the shell, gopher, and gemini services; how to join, plus two hands-on bonuses: writing a flat-file Perl CGI guestbook and making a site Dillo-compatible.

technicaltutorial

brennan.daySep 23, 2026

Static Site Generators for Beginners

Written for a 32-bit Café thread asking where to even begin with static-site generators. I go over the free resources I'd learn first (and why hand-rolled HTML beats an SSG for your very first site), a plain-language glossary of the jargon docs never define, a brief history from HSC and Movable Type to Jekyll, why git gets recommended everywhere, my own beginner starters, and tiny alternatives like barf, bashblog, and kiki.

technicaltutorial

brennan.daySep 19, 2026

Creating a Blog in Gemini://

Creating your own corner of Geminispace: why you'd want to blog on a protocol with no JavaScript, no CSS, and no AI slop; where to host a capsule (SmolPub, the Tildeverse, flounder, Gemcities); how the community's gemlog conventions work; and the surprising social life of Gemini BBS, Station, and Astrobotany. Plus ASCII art, CGI scripting, and every gemini:// link I've found worth keeping.

technicalSmall Web

brennan.daySep 10, 2026

Oldnets and Altnets: A Guide to Building a Low-Spec Daily Internet Out of Gemini, Gopher, and Terminal Tools

Reacting to the Omarchy and DigitalOcean news, I set out a curated low-spec, text-first alternative to the modern web: Gemini, Gopher, Spartan, Lynx-friendly sites, terminal readers, public Unix communities, and peer-to-peer networks like Yggdrasil, I2P, and Hyphanet.

technicalSmall Web

brennan.daySep 9, 2026

How the Mysterious ScreenJesus can DDoS You

How a bug in my own CI/CD accidentally uncovered a novel vulnerability in NeoCities: ScreenJesus, the undocumented screenshot bot behind thumbnail previews, has no rate limits and will happily visit thousands of your pages—and anything they embed—in minutes. Notes on accidental DDoS, opaque infrastructure, and a plea for caching and rate limiting.

technicalsecurity

brennan.daySep 8, 2026

More Mindful Web Development

Yet another technical audit of brennan.day, this time using the Safi Studio Scanner, covering fixes for duplicate <h1> headings, meta descriptions, image dimensions, JSON-LD organization data, render-blocking scripts, and a switch from IndieAuth to IndieLogin—plus what I left alone.

eleventyseo

brennan.dayAug 16, 2026

Advanced Webweaving: Auditing Against Specification.Website

I ran brennan.day against The Website Specification's 140-item checklist covering foundations, SEO, accessibility, security, performance, privacy, and resilience. Notes on a broken web manifest I'd never noticed, why I don't have cookie consent banners, CSP debugging with third-party services, service worker CORS issues, a bunch of small improvements, and the list of things I didn't fix.

eleventynetlify

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 24, 2026

Creating a Digital Garden in 11ty: Tracking My Daily Word Count with URLminder

I decided to build brennan.click, a wiki-linked digital commonplace book in Eleventy, with auto-generated stubs created with eleventy-plugin-interlinker, pure-CSS hover transclusion and footnotes with no JavaScript, and a plain-text /urlminder.txt feed that drives a Beeminder goal.

eleventyjavascript

Brennan Kenneth Brown ♾️Jul 20, 2026

Softcore First, Hardcore Eventually: A Ladder for the IndieWeb

Responding to Adam Newbold's 'Hardcore IndieWeb' guide, I argue for a ladder approach to joining the IndieWeb. Rather than choosing between easy platforms and full technical independence, people should climb rungs progressively. Start with BearBlog or Pika, learning hand-coded HTML, then move to static site generators when ready. This applies progressive disclosure to onboarding, avoiding the curse of knowledge that makes experts skip beginner-friendly steps.

IndieWebtechnical

brennan.dayJul 16, 2026

300 Minutes a Month: Cutting My Eleventy Netlify Build Time in Half

A sequel to my Eleventy build post: this time the bottleneck wasn't the build tool, it was the hosting bill. Notes on caching webmentions and guestbook fetches, killing a dead Discord webhook, nearly breaking my JSON feed, and a git error I still don't have an answer for.

eleventyjavascript

brennan.dayJul 12, 2026

A Full Guide to Properly Delete Corporate Social Media Accounts

Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. Eight platforms, eight different deletion policies. A full technical walkthrough of what 'delete' actually means on each one, the prep work nobody tells you to do first, and the human-side work the documentation doesn't mention.

technicalIndieWeb

brennan.dayJul 6, 2026

Publishing My Eleventy Blog to the ATmosphere with Standard.site

A walkthrough of how I wired up Standard.site AT Protocol lexicons into this 11ty blog: from writing a custom publish script to migrating to Sequoia, with code for the link tags, and handle verification.

eleventyjavascript

brennan.dayJul 5, 2026

A Case for the Ethical Treatment of Generative AI

Are there ethical implications of generative AI consciousness? From von Neumann's self-replicating machines to modern LLMs, we must inventory the problem of other minds, the possibility of AI consciousness, and why we ought to consider the welfare of systems that may experience something like suffering.

personal essayAI

brennan.dayJul 3, 2026

Blogging with Magic Unicode: Simple Doesn't Have to Mean Boring!

You don't need bloat. You can use CSS variables and Unicode symbols to add visual personality to your personal website while keeping it minimal, accessible, and fast-loading. Includes a reference of symbol sets (celestial, elemental, occult, card suits, chess, zodiac, and more) with colour examples using the Gruvbox palette.

technicaltutorial

brennan.dayJul 2, 2026

Fixing Work Imports from Other OTW-based Archives

By default, the OTWArchive codebase blocks all imports from AO3, a problem for every fork. My fix includes removing AO3 from PERMITTED_HOSTS, writing a custom Ruby story parser that extracts only the story content from AO3 work pages, and extending the same parser to support imports from other OTWA-based archives!

technicaltutorial

brennan.dayJun 25, 2026

Every Commit A Sentence: Git Commit Messages for Bloggers

I had 448 `feat:` commits and 417 `fix:` commits. Nearly the same count, for wildly different kinds of work. Here's why conventional commits were never designed for a writer's blog, and the eleven-type system I built to replace them.

gittechnical

brennan.dayJun 20, 2026

How Webmentions Work on brennan.day

A tutorial and walkthrough of how I implemented webmentions on my site, from setup to display, including webmention.io integration, Eleventy filters, CSS styling, and Bridgy for sending.

IndieWebtechnical

brennan.dayJun 18, 2026

Choosing Friction and Clear Skies: I’m No Longer Using Cloudflare

I'm pausing my folk.zone project to completely replace Cloudflare in my stack with more ethical choices after a conversation with Adam Newbold of omg.lol, the site that inspired the project in the first place. For in practice, there is no such thing as neutrality, and convenience is not a virtue.

IndieWebself-hosting

brennan.dayJun 10, 2026

Why Make Your Website Accessible, Anyways?

Web accessibility isn't compliance theatre or checking off a list. It's about designing for everyone. Exploring the curb cut effect, why disability is more common than we think, and practical steps to make your website usable by as many people as possible.

IndieWebaccessibility

brennan.dayJun 4, 2026

I Need To Stop Making Promises I Can't Keep

Building fanfiction.lol taught me that some promises are impossible to keep. I wanted canonical tags for everything and 'write whatever you want' as a tagline, but Canadian obscenity laws and the philosophical complexity of tag wrangling forced me to adjust. Here's what I learned about running a community archive, the legal constraints I face, and the promises I can still keep.

IndieWebfanfiction

brennan.dayMay 30, 2026

Announcing Fanfiction.lol: A Manifesto on Human Creativity and AO3

I deployed my own AO3 fork called fanfiction.lol, an independent fanfiction archive with no invite queue, fandom-agnostic moderation, and expanded content warnings. A manifesto on why fan communities deserve free infrastructure, the history of transformative works from Virgil to AO3, and the challenges of running a volunteer-powered archive at scale.

IndieWebtechnical

brennan.dayMay 28, 2026

Homelab For the Beginner: You Can Self-host Your Own Server on $50 Hardware

A beginner-friendly guide to building your own homelab on inexpensive hardware. Covers finding old computers, setting up Linux, SSH, Docker, and self-hosting services like password managers, RSS readers, and your own Fediverse instance. Digital sovereignty doesn't require expensive equipment.

Self-hostingtechnical

brennan.dayMay 26, 2026

Gemini, Gophers, and Fingers. Oh My! Alternative Internets Beyond HTTPS

Finger from 1971, Gopher from 1991, and Gemini from 2019. These protocols offer decentralized, terminal-based alternatives to the modern web. The small web's is in a renaissance. On the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology, and how these protocols meet you where you are, whether you're on a machine from 2005 or just tired of Chrome's monoculture.

IndiewebSmall Web

brennan.dayMay 24, 2026

Introducing writer-cli: a bash tool I built from scratch to blog in the terminal!

After finding the tildeverse and the Tilde.town feels engine, I decided to build my own simple command-line tool for blogging that handles the full lifecycle of a blog post (creation, editing, building, and git push). A walkthrough of the design decisions, the modular architecture, and the tradeoffs of writing 700 lines of plain bash.

bashtechnical