Monthly Recap: December 2023
Hello web surfers, Happy New Year and welcome to December’s recap. I’m writing this on our last day on the beautiful island of Waiheke, where we spent the last week on Onetangi Beach.
This month, I continued to be inspired by and continue writing about the Web and podcasts!
- Build Personal Websites: This one resulted from a discussion in the 32 Bit Cafe about building more personal websites. I need to take my own advice and get these projects out the door!
- My Podcast Rotation: Keeping It At Four: Where I read a post from Brain Baking and just had to reply with my perspective and asked for your podcast recommendations.
- Podcasts Worth Exploring: Recommendations Received: The community responded, and I shared the podcast recommendations.
- My Year In Bear 2023: I’ve been tracking unique beers since 2013 with Untappd. I jacked my end of year report and posted it here!
- Spring 2023: Automated post with the books I read, songs I listened to and pages I bookmarked this Spring!
- Relics Of The Web: Another post about the Web. This results from a few abandoned pages that I had drafted but wanted to change their direction. This post turned out much better.
- My Year In Books 2023: Reading stats from the past year and a few of the standouts.
I added two vinyls to the collection over on the Recordshelf page:
- Mac Miller Swimming: I Shouldn’t have to say anything about this. Go listen if you haven’t
- Home Brew Run It Back: A local Aotearoa hip-hop group that last released music eleven years ago. A fantastic album.
I’ve talked about Webmentions frequently in these monthly recaps. This month, I’m happy to report that I’ve finally got them working in a state I’m happy with. Thanks to Chris Burnell’s handy plugin, eleventy-cache-webmentions. The plugin handles the difficult configuration by caching Webmentions using Eleventy-fetch and making them available in collections, templates, pages, etc., in Eleventy. All I had to do was create the Nunjucks loops. You can check the commit and follow up to see how it works.
Another improvement to the website is the contact form now uses Riku Forms rather than Netlify Forms. Riku is a small indie project by m15o. As well as Riku, m15o has many other great projects. I’ll put together a quick post on how I got Riku working with Eleventy; it was really easy!
One of my besties, Xandra, has also started blogging in anticipation of the 32 Bit Blog Club; go check out her writing on libraryOS. This reminds me that I better sit down and finish that project 😱
Speaking of blogging, I’ve been getting into Mastodon recently. Not as a tool for building a brand or self-promotion, but discovery. Okay, I can’t help but share a new post when I’ve published one. There’s been so many people posting great things about the Web recently. Let’s hope 2024 continues the trend. Some of my favourites recently are:
- omg.lol: an oasis on the internet by Blake shared a love letter to omg.lol. The post talks about the beauty of the Web, where lovingly handcrafted services like omg.lol exist. Omg.lol provides various services through custom subdomains like email forwarding, web pages, blogging, and image hosting. Omg.lol is the result of a single developer, Adam. He is praised for his responsiveness to feedback and constant work improving the service. Like me, Blake enjoys exploring personal websites and the small, personal corner of the internet it enables.
- The Web Is Fantastic by Robb talks about themes familiar to readers of this website. The Open Web of links, blogs and RSS feeds is better than social media platforms for discovering new content. The joy of discovering an interesting blog post by following links from one website blog to another, the independent, link-based nature of the real Web, makes discovering new ideas and information more enjoyable.
I still have a few drafts to carry over and can’t wait to finish them to share with everyone.
I hope you had a great end to the year and had a break of some sort, and I can’t wait to see what 2024 brings.
