For a couple years now, maxwelljoslyn.com has been sorely in need of a facelift and some new functionality for user-friendliness. Over the last few weeks I've finally gotten around to that, and if you're reading this, you're on the new version of the site.
The rest of this post is a showcase comparing what the site looked like before and after mid-September 2026, for the sake of future visitors (including me).
A Better Homepage
The homepage is a better experience for new and returning readers alike. "Greatest Hits" comes first, is updated for 2026, and is slimmed down to make room for a photo gallery! After that, we segue cleanly into new posts.
I've imported my old blog, 21st Century D&D, into this website, tagging the posts with "21stcenturydnd".
I wrote that blog during the second half of undergrad, give or take. While doing QA on the import program, I reread all the posts to gauge how I've changed since 2016-2018.
I've improved as a programmer and game designer, and there are ideas in those posts that turned out to be dead ends, or which are chiefly of historical interest as signposts for how far I've come. Yet there's a reassuring and comforting continuity between what I was thinking then, and what I've accomplished since.
If you spend time in IndieWeb discussion circles, such as chat.indieweb.org or the get-togethers listed on events.indieweb.org, or if you spend time wandering through the indieweb.org wiki, you will find evidence that many of us share the view that UX must come first.
There are one-click-setup IndieWeb entry points. The most prominent is micro.blog which gives you a personal blog/site with all the latest IndieWeb goodness and costs $5/month.
But most people interested in the IndieWeb these days are devs, i.e. nerds, and want to roll things themselves, which is why IndieWeb-related blog posts can feel like tech soup.
I hosted July's IndieWeb blog carnival; for the subject, I chose "totems." Five drongos heeded my call. Thank you, one and all. I am dreadfully late to posting this roundup, but late beats never.
My Support Character - Albert James Moriarty
Sara shows us that a totem need not be physical. She has spent an enormous amount of time thinking about a particular anime character, and uses him as a point of reference to understand things going on in her head and in her life.
I have written 114 works [of fanfiction] spanning 189,837 words involving him.
When I analysed all my blog posts for a regex talk I was doing, he was the third most frequent 5-or-more letter word over all my blog posts spanning decade of my writing.
I'm the host for this month's IndieWeb Carnival, and the theme is totems: items of great personal, spiritual, or religious meaning, which may serve as the emblem or symbol of a group of people.
The IndieWeb itself is a living totem that we indie-website-havers create with every post. What's your totem? What does it mean to you? How did you acquire it: purchase, creation, trade, gifting, theft? Is your totem connected to the Internet, perhaps? Is it something you look at every day?
One of the best things about Homebrew Website Club is meeting new nerds. Sometimes it feels like each new club meeting brings in someone new!
River, as far as I can tell you don't have a site yet, but good luck getting started in th IndieWeb. We're all here to help.
Joe, I'm happy to sign your guestbook, and I'm looking forward to exploring your site (specially your comics.) You've got a long history to spelunk! (UPDATE: having checked out some of the comics, I'm just jealous that someone can manage to be an artist, a writer, a surfer, and a programmer all at once!)
It's been a long time since I've written here. In 2022, I was fairly busy with my master's studies and attending Recurse Center. Then, from fall of 2022 all the way through to the end of 2023, the lion's share of my time went to writing my master's thesis. Because I'm still dealing the hand injuries I sustained in 2019 and 2020, I often had to limit my time spent at the computer to just what I needed for working on my thesis. Writing for recreation was a no-go zone.
Welcome, each and every drongo, to The Drongo's first interview since our summer hiatus. We've got a real rock star for our guest today!
The Drongo: Our guest for this round of The Drongo is Jacob Hall. He's provided us the following third-person biography.
Jacob Hall: "You'd likely recognize Jacob Hall pretty quickly if you ran into him on the street: he's always barefoot, he's either wearing his pants or either of his two shorts, and his hair keeps changing colors.
He currently lives in Williamsburg, VA, studying geology at William & Mary, producing educational media for the on-campus Studio for Teaching and Learning Innovation, and co-managing a student-run house/venue/coffee shop called The Meridian. In his free time (read: procrastinatory sprees) he develops websites for himself and friends, cooks for anyone in earshot, and goes on very long walks."
Please telepathically assist me in wishing Dave Shanske (alias "GWG") a very happy birthdave.
Dave is a pillar of the IndieWeb community. Most notably, he's helped organize several of our largest in-person social events, including our yearly IndieWeb Summit conferences, and he's always willing to help run A/V or monitor the chat for attendee questions.
Here comes another Homebrew Website Club. Join us for discussion of websites, blogging, owning your personal data, open protocols, and more!
EDIT: An after-action report.
HWC is always scheduled to run for 90 minutes; in practice, we typically run to about two hours of discussion.
Tonight, though? We broke two hours. We broke three hours. We broke four hours.
By the time Angelo, Kartik, Ben, and I called it quits -- the last four stragglers from a peak of 11 participants -- this evening's club ran to five hours and forty-five minutes. Surely that's a record! And we loved every bit of it.
How can we encourage tool/solution reuse between individual IndieWeb sites, without building more hosted services?
It seems to me that many IndieWeb participants, especially those starting out, end up either (a) relying on Single Point of Aaron services or (b) building their own solutions for every aspect of the IndieWeb "stack" (Webmention, Micropub, a posting interface, etc.) This problem could be addressed with a stronger culture of developing reusable libraries for IW tasks, but turning your own code into a library usable by others isn't always easy.
What are the pros, cons, use cases, and UX considerations of doing real-time chat on your web site (such as communicating with visitors) or via your web site (such as with a hypothetical "chat-message" post type that syndicates to IRC or Discord?)
I wanted to differentiate them from the "new" labels. Since "new" was the odd one out (expressing recency rather than a topic), I changed its shape and color scheme. Here's how looked before.
What do you get when you put 10 website geeks in a room? Exactly what you might expect: lively conversation about unconventional uses for RSS feeds, "retro grouching" about old-school UNIX tools, and spitballing of potential session topics for IndieWebCamp 2020 East, coming up on November 14th and 15th. Here are the collaborative public notes we took during our discussion.
Indie Web Camp East 2020 will be taking place on November 14-15. I'll be there, and I hope you'll join me.
The magic of any special-interest social gathering will mostly be destroyed by the need for a virtual conference -- but, having attended Indie Web Camp West 2020, I can verify that the remaining 10% of the magic is enough to enjoy oneself.
Come make your first-ever website, or tinker with the one you've got. Come share what you've learned as a website enthusiast, or listen to others as you decide what to implement next. Come fall in love with personal websites, or storm off after two hours to take up fishing. There's so little downside: register today!
