I'm looking for my next adventure, any ideas? I do not want a foundation myth, a fifth thing-I-started. To scratch the itch doesn't mean building more. No, the obvious answer is rarely the correct one. Good writing is inevitable, not predictable, and life works similarly. brennan.day/the-itch/

The Itch

Trying to figure out what 'the itch' is—my drive to create and contribute to the digital commons. A review of past projects, current interests in Indigenous data sovereignty and self-hosting, and the…

brennan.day

Right now, there are over 115 million channels on YouTube. But if I had to pick just one out of all of them? My answer comes easy and without hesitation. brennan.day/sbsk-is-the-...

SBSK is The Most Important Channel on YouTube

Special Books by Special Kids is the most important channel on YouTube. Chris Ulmer and Alyssa Porter's decade-long project interviewing neurodiverse individuals and people with disabilities has…

brennan.day

2 billion people only access the Internet through their mobile device. Yet, we're still often designing and creating with the assumption that everyone has a desktop. We need to prioritize mobile UX for longform writing and publishing, particularly for indie platforms. brennan.day/phoneblogging/

Phoneblogging

Around 2 billion people access the internet exclusively via smartphones, yet the IndieWeb community largely neglects mobile-first design and phoneblogging UX. A casual survey of writers reveals three…

brennan.day

A CPU begins as sand. The silicon of the processor begins as ordinary quartzite, purified into metallurgical-grade silicon, then refined again to 99.999999999% purity How do we not have awe towards such a thing? brennan.day/wow-i-love-t...

Wow, I Love the 'Puter!

The desktop computer is a miracle of human ingenuity, from the microscopic precision of Intel's Core Duo processor to the vast possibilities of offline and online computing. On the tragic decline of…

brennan.day

How do we improve the web? The way you improve any web: by adding more connectivity. A web becomes stronger and more durable the more interlinking threads and strands there are. When we link to each other, the ecosystem of the blogosphere improves. brennan.day/knitting-the...

Knitting the Web: We Need Interlinkers!

Responding to Coyote's critique of Bubbles.town and feed aggregators, I argue that the IndieWeb needs more interlinkers—bloggers who meaningfully synthesize and weave together the writing of others.…

brennan.day

I've started a digital garden that also let's me keep track of my daily word count. Full technical write-up here: brennan.day/creating-a-d...

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…

brennan.day

"I added +10,000 lines of code to my project thanks to my LLM MCP Agent!" Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. brennan.day/adding-thous...

Adding Thousands of Lines to Your Codebase Isn't Impressive. It's Actually Bad.

Vibe coders brag about adding thousands of lines of code with AI, but measuring productivity by lines of code is like measuring aircraft progress by weight. Research shows AI-generated code has…

brennan.day

You don't need to be a web developer by trade to have your own website. The Internet was made for everyone, at every skill level, and we need to reclaim it. brennan.day/softcore-fir...

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…

brennan.day

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers and the broader world? I went to look for an answer. brennan.day/what-have-no...

What have note-taking PKMs accomplished, really?

As somebody who writes a lot, I've always been interested in personal knowledge management systems and note-taking apps. But what do these frameworks and methodologies actually give to researchers…

brennan.day

Clown-white greasepaint doesn't come off in one pass. You need cold cream first, then a soft cloth for the corners of the eyes. On whiteface & Auguste, Richard Simmons, DFW's tyranny of irony, Wisakedjak & the Windigoken, and never learning how to come down. brennan.day/clown-burnout/

CLOWN BURNOUT

Clown white doesn't come off in one pass. A personal story about how I can never take myself seriously no matter how hard I try. Notes on the history whiteface and Auguste, the clown egg registry,…

brennan.day

i need to write another perl script. actually pause i should follow @brennan.day's suggestion and make a little CGI script playground docker container so i don't have to waste resources and spin up containers for each script i write

I'm deleting my accounts on the following platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, WhatsApp, Threads, X, Reddit, Discord. It's surprisingly more complicated than I thought, so I wrote a guide: brennan.day/a-full-guide...

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,…

brennan.day

Hello, Bluesky! I just got this set up: brennan.day/publishing-m... Tagging @eve.gd because @adjb.co told me to :D #eleventy #javascript #technical #tutorial #IndieWeb #atproto

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 verificati...

brennan.day

Philosophers have debated consciousness for thousands of years. We cannot be certain genAI isn't conscious, either. blog.brennanbrown.ca/a-case-for-t...

A Case for the Ethical Treatment of AI Chatbots

A Blunt Examination of the Hard Consciousness Problem.

blog.brennanbrown.ca

Land back means land back. Not meaningful dialogue or land acknowledgements. Jurisdiction and unceded territory returned. The treaties were never surrender, they were sharing agreements Canada broke unilaterally. Flags flown today are on stolen and unreturned land. Return it. Happy Canada Day 🇨🇦

My first podcast appearance is out! I was a guest on Episode 8 of Wonders of Web Weaving with James G. We talk about writing routines, building community in the indie web, 'start here' pages, Maple Syrup Heists, and more! web-weaving.jamesg.blog/8

#8: Brennan (brennan.day) - Wonders of Web Weaving

In Episode 8, I chat with Brennan, the author of brennan.day. We talk about, among other things, writing routines, building community in the indie web, 'start here' pages on personal websites, and…

web-weaving.jamesg.blog

git commit message conventions were designed for npm packages and software library authors, not writers and bloggers. so, i decided to try to fix that for myself. brennan.day/every-commit...

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…

brennan.day

I've been writing publicly almost every day for 7 months, 430k+ words. Other writers? Chesterton dictating past midnight, Simenon sweating through the same shirt for 11 days straight, and Chinese web novelists hitting 10k words/day. brennan.day/compulsion-t...

COMPULSION: The Writers Who Wrote The Most in History

I've been writing publicly every day for seven months, and I wanted to know what that looked like for other compulsive writers. From Chesterton dictating past midnight, to Chinese web fiction authors…

brennan.day

I've written thousands of words about the state of the Internet and ways to improve it. But at some point you have to stop blogging and actually build. I registered folk.zone. collection of free, community-run internet services. All self-hosted on hardware in my house. All open source. All free.

folk.zone — for the common folk

folk.zone is an IndieWeb commons: free, open-source internet services run on real hardware by one person. Federated social, writing, git, wiki, IRC, and more.

folk.zone

Accessibility isn't compliance theatre or a checklist. It's about making what you create usable by as many people as possible. Designing for disability often improves the experience for everyone. Disability is also more common than most people think. brennan.day/why-make-you...

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…

brennan.day

launched a silly web project. it blew up on tumblr. people were mad, then kind, then both. it got me thinking about org theory, boundary spanners, and why the indie web only survives if we're willing to be the weird person who shows up at the other table. blog.brennanbrown.ca/the-internet...

The Internet Needs More Cross-Pollinators

We need people who move between different online subcultures to seed ideas and build bridges.

blog.brennanbrown.ca

WHOOPS, didn't realize my IFTTT was still syncing my Tumblr to here, sorry!!

I'm super excited to announce that I'm launching fanfiction.lol, a fun and discourse-agnostic alternative to AO3! It is still under active development, but registration is open. <3

Home | fanfiction.lol

fanfiction.lol — an independent fan archive. A small, open-source archive for fanfiction and fanworks.

fanfiction.lol

the small web is having a renaissance. finger:// from 1971. gopher:// from 1991. gemini:// from 2019. three protocols with their own communities. No JavaScript, or Chrome's monopoly. a gemini capsule runs on anything. a chromium browser needs 2GB of RAM. blog.brennanbrown.ca/gemini-gophe...

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

There are different ways to explore and create on the Internet, with the solarpunk philosophy of intentional technology.

blog.brennanbrown.ca

There are a lot of steps for making a post on your own server. You need to SSH, navigate to the right directly, manually create a file, date format, open an editor, write, save, build, git, etc. so, I created a CLI tool that does all of this with a single command. brennan.day/introducing-...

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,…

brennan.day

The culture around genAI reveals something dark. There's /r/SlopcoreCirclejerk, the gender gap in AI enthusiasm, the history of the Luddites, and why pro-genAI culture is rooted in contempt for artistic labour and introspection. blog.brennanbrown.ca/r-slopcoreci...

/r/SlopcoreCirclejerk and the Men who are pro-AI

With the AI bubble finally deflating, what can we learn from the gender gap in genAI enthusiasm?

blog.brennanbrown.ca

my first ever IndieWeb Carnival entry. The theme is love letters, and I couldn't pick just one thing. so I wrote to all of it: the infrastructure, the open-source, friends I've made, and to curiosity itself. The embarrassing willingness to fall in love. blog.brennanbrown.ca/a-love-lette...

A Love Letter to Everything

To the infrastructure that holds my corner of the internet together, the strangers who maintain the open-source tools I depend on every…

blog.brennanbrown.ca

A man cannot step into the same river twice. The river cannot be stepped into by the same man twice. On Orpheus, Pandora, cellular biology, and what it means to be a watershed. blog.brennanbrown.ca/on-being-a-r...

On Being a River

Civilization is birthed beside rivers because we are rivers. Always in motion, never stepping into the same current twice.

blog.brennanbrown.ca

In 1995, China abducted the six-year-old Panchen Lama and broke the chain of mutual recognition of Tibetan Buddhism. My great-grandmother spoke Michif and my father never learned it. Both are the same: colonialism's weaponization of continuity. blog.brennanbrown.ca/what-we-lose...

What We Lose with Cultural Extinction: the Red Thread Cut

What the Panchen Lama of Tibet and my own People’s Language in Manitoba have in common.

blog.brennanbrown.ca

You boot up your old Xbox 360 and hover over a gamertag. Last Online: 640 Weeks Ago. 12 years, and you hadn't thought of him in 11. On the heartbreak of digital disappearance. Why I'm committed to staying findable. blog.brennanbrown.ca/last-online-...

Last Online: 640 Weeks Ago

the heartbreak of digital disappearance.

blog.brennanbrown.ca