A presentation Hidde de Vries gave at Smashing Conference yesterday. Very interesting points throughout, also very entertaining, even if we only have the slides to look at online so far. He touched many topics I work on and I could especially relate to this chart …

talks.hiddedevries.nl/6qLmAh

Overnight hiking trip. 🗻☀️🏕️

Knot, our little microblogging system, can now crosspost to Bluesky and Mastodon. I admit this is more news for me than for anybody else — but in the long run you can expect more quality content from my side on these platforms!

Another step towards a more solid POSSE strategy: post to my own site first, then syndicate as well as possible to where the audience still lingers. Testing it in real life conditions now. If that holds up, it goes into the Knot repo next week.

If you want to see what's possible on the web if you have some time, some dev skills and a huge amount of daring creativity, look here!

Eleven sites are on this year's shortlist, and voting is open until September 25th. Go click! tinyawards.net

Jim Mitchell's IndieWeb Is Punk Manifesto: eight theses reading the personal site as DIY culture. I hope new perspectives like this can help getting new audiences interested in independent web publishing!

indiewebispunk.net

This is what I packed for the holiday in Milan and Corsica this year. Not that I ever thought I would it read it ALL …

Robin Sloan, “The Writer & the Witch” – On top sits the smallest and by far the most beautiful object of the pile: Robin Sloan’s short story The Writer & the Witch, printed, folded, stapled and trimmed by Sloan himself in his Penumbra Print Shop. Italian paper with a gritty tooth, endpapers made from radish leaves by the Awagami Factory — you can see the speckled green sheet peeking out in the photo. Sloan claims the paper smells amazing. It does.

The story is a modern fairy tale: a young writer in a hurry, an old woman by a bridge, a curse that turns out to be something else entirely. I read it in one sitting, because of course I did — it’s about 4,000 words. I liked it a lot.

“Korsika” – The obligatory travel guide for our destination. So we know which road is technically a road.

Alastair Reynolds, “Eversion” (German: “Das Schiff der flüsternden Träume”) – My perfect hard-SF summer novel, and I flew through it.

The premise is wonderful: a ship’s doctor on a 19th-century sailing expedition to a mysterious structure in a Norwegian fjord. Then the same crew, the same doctor, the same structure — aboard a steam ship before Patagonia. Then again, elsewhere, elsewhen. Each iteration ends in catastrophe. For a long stretch you have no idea what you are reading, and Reynolds is entirely comfortable letting you sit with that.

It resolves. And it resolves well — into an explanation that is, three years after the book first appeared in English in 2022, considerably more thinkable than it must have been at the time. I won’t say more. Absolutely recommended.

Adrian Tchaikovsky, “Children of Time” (German: “Die Kinder der Zeit”) – Just started. The first pages are already very good. Report to follow.

Manuel Garand, “Murdoku” – The pool-and-beach puzzle book. You solve murder cases by deducing where each character was standing on a room-plan grid. It borrows the constraint logic of Sudoku but is far less abstract and considerably less complex. It is about people, not numbers. You can try it at murdoku.com.

At the moment there are two initiatives running in the world of weblogs and blogging: Blaugust and 100 Days to Offload. They differ in the details. The first is about a month of posting, the other about a hundred posts in a year. But the aim is the same: to get people writing on their personal weblogs more. Quality is explicitly not the point. Neither is spell-checking, nor depth of thought. It is more important to just write.

Are we really looking for more people chatting away online? Without a clear aim or an eye for quality?

I think we are, yes — but that answer only works because the initiatives look for something different here. Nobody is claiming a hundred hasty posts beat one careful essay. What they are after is not quality, but to get more people to use their freedom to run their own website. Turning consumers into creators matters more today than ever, when the web seems taken over by commercial interests (and AI slop). And every writer has to practise, and write a lot of rubbish, before they get the chance to write something worthwhile.

The web is a vast place and has room for everybody. If nobody comes to visit and read what was written, no problem — by then the writing has already done its work.

It’s holiday time! Spend our first day in Milan. There might be more travel photography here in the next days. Or maybe not. Because I’m on holiday!

Read here: tilman.me/garden/How+can+creative+practitioners+publish+on+the+web+today%3F

Geoffrey Litt has a great new perspective on how we work with AI-generated code. We're not bound to prompting and moving on. We can have the AI explain what it built — teaching the background, building intuition before showing code, even ending with an interactive quiz so we don't fool ourselves into thinking we understood. His sharp point: we do this not to *verify* the agent (it's getting good at that itself) but to *participate* — to keep enough fluency to grow ourselves and to come up with the next idea.

Geoffrey is talking about code, but I feel like this transfers to concept work, texts, and imagery. But I don't think it transfers *easily*: his techniques work because code is a formal, executable system. What's the steppable micro-world for a generated concept, text or an image? The quiz travels, at least. The rest I'd like to keep thinking about.

Read it: www.geoffreylitt.com/2026/07/02/understanding-is-the-new-bottleneck.html

Web feeds are a quiet, open way to follow people online — no ads, no engagement bait, just posts showing up when they're published. If you've never tried a feed reader, this is meant as a gentle on-ramp — a glimpse of some worthwhile blogging. If you like it, you might build your own subscription list with something like NetNewsWire or blogsareback.com.

The web feed roll is just one static HTML file. When you click on "Update feeds" a PHP script refreshes the content from the actual feeds.

This was my work day result at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg 2026 — built in a short day among a room full of people doing the similar things for their own corners of the web. That's the IndieWeb spirit in a nutshell.

→ tilman.me/feedroll

I spent the weekend at IndieWebCamp Nuremberg, the fifth edition in this city — two days at the tollwerkstatt as part of Nürnberg Digital Festival, in good company with a bunch of IndieWeb folks.

The highlight of Day 1 was René's session, “Make the web great again.” It gloriously derailed into everyone trying to out-do each other with the silliest, most gleefully useless links the web has to offer. I hope there is a blog post soon, but for a starter: esd-systeme.de. A reminder that the indie web isn't only specs and Webmentions — it's also delight.

Day 2 was Create Day and I built a Web Feed Roll for this site. It deserves its own post, so more on that very soon.

Everything is documented in detail on the IndieWeb Wiki: indieweb.org/2026/Nuremberg

I love Daniel Eatock’s website! The way he publishes his art and ideas for decades on this beautifully simple website is a tremendous accomplishment. And very inspiring. That is why I wrote a page on my digital garden about it. Already part three of a series on inspiring websites.