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#smolweb

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I need some #blog software recommendations: a non-tech friend asked me to help her setup a website. I can host something for her, but I'm only familiar with Hugo and that's not going to work for her.

Her requirements are basically #WriteFreely but with image upload: a mainly text focused blog with the occasional picture. Admin with WYSIWYG, everything lightweight, minimal, clean and responsive. Comments/activitypub not required for now.

After searching (a lot) I think what may be the closest to this, is the open-source version of #Known

Do you have experience with Known, or other self-hostable software for #blogging that fits the bill? Please let me know, boosts are appreciated.

#indieweb #smallweb #smolweb

growing up on the internet story time

when i was 14 years old, i made my first homepage using my mom's university shell/webspace allotment (5 megs) which was supposed to be for posting homework and email storage

there was no such thing as a profile pic in 94, but i decided that i should have a photo of me at the top of the page. i inexplicably decided that instead of scanning in a school photo, it made more sense to post a gif of some kid i found on a bbs with Night Owl cd-roms. today, i found that exact photo - it is uncredited sadly - just "boy eating watermelon"

for my bio, instead of writing about my hobbies and interests, i proceeded to fabricate an entire identity that claimed i was the captain of the volleyball team, a straight-A student, and one of the coolest kids in my school. 0/3 of those things were even close to reality. i figured - hey, who cares? no one's ever gonna see this.

a year later, my junior high school got its first internet connection - a 28.8k modem shared among 20 macintosh LC's in the lab. my computer ("information processing") teacher decided that our class should learn how to make a web page as a unit project.

i told him that i had already made a homepage ages ago, and wanted to submit that as my final assignment so i could go play Bolo instead. he asked me to show him the site.

the entire class crowded around my monitor as it loaded the page a few bytes at a time. i was feeling pretty smug until i saw the straw hat, and realized that the bio was pure bullshit. i tried to turn off the monitor but it was too late - 20 kids and my teacher got to read how this bony kid in front of them was apparently a world class athlete, One Of The Cool Kids, and future valedictorian.

i deleted the entire site the second i got home 😅

Oh snap! `YARR - Yet Another RSS Reader` has a new version and I missed it in March!
github.com/nkanaev/yarr/releas
YARR is like Feedly or NewsBlur, except more like TinyRSS or FreshRSS - you can self-host.

UNLIKE those, you can tell yarr to run at `<ip:port>`, so you can stick it at port 7666 for your reverse #proxy. And its lightweight, I run my own AND 3 other instances for fam. members on the same host accessed via different subdomains re-proxied by #nginx.

GitHubRelease v2.5 · nkanaev/yarr- (new) Fever API support (thanks to @icefed) - (new) editable feed link (thanks to @adaszko) - (new) switch to feed by clicking the title in the article page (thanks to @tarasglek for suggestion) ...

New blog post up: a brief review of Hannah Steenbock's Demonhunters of Terragon series, as it stands so far.

michael.kjorling.se/blog/2025/

Also some print styling improvements, while I was at it. (It's not quite where I want it yet, but it's better than it was before.)

@Firlefanz

Michael Kjörling · Book series review: Demonhunters of Terragon, by Hannah Steenbock

back when i first joined mastodon, one of the many surprising things i learned was that gopher had made a return to the public sphere after decades of obscurity.

i grew up with gopher and archie and veronica and many other www-alt protocols before getting hooked on the world wide web. they taught me how to hunt for things, in a time when web search didn't exist yet.

i've spent every day of the past week adding a new feature to kiki that i'm incredibly proud of, after hearing from several folks - namely @tomjennings and @scott, who (like me) are hungry for an information-dense and cruft-free internet

this works by turning your kiki pages into gopherspace pages through some formatting magic and textmunging. so now, you can host your kiki instance on both the www and in gopherspace, simultaneously.

it will be released in an upcoming version of kiki, available soon here: tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

back in the early 90s my parents brought home an ibm ps/1 with an internal 2400 baud modem. i assumed it was only for sending/receiving faxes.

one day my computer teacher (thank you mr. mckinney!) explained that the modem made my computer capable of dialing out to *other computers* and exchanging data with them. he printed off a five page ream of tractor feed paper titled "The 403 BBS List" and sent me home with it.

i stayed up until 3am that night, dialing every single board on that list using Windows Terminal, creating accounts, and exploring what BBSes were capable of. by the wee hours, i had a new terminal program (Terminate!), knew how to use the z-modem protocol, and had
pirated my first game 😅

one of the little mysteries i came across that night was FILE_ID.DIZ files. every board had them. every zip file had them. they were tiny capsule descriptions of what a program/game was, constrained to 45 cols and 10 rows of ascii. they usually also included some kind of nod to the piracy group that "released" the program.

most BBS software would extract the .DIZ file from the zip, and use that as a file area description for the program, allowing users to understand what they were downloading.

to celebrate this weird little historical curio, today kiki got a FILE_ID.DIZ packed into the zip 😆

in version 1.10 onwards every copy of kiki will now include a FILE_ID.DIZ.

if you haven't heard of kiki yet, check out the project page:
tomo-dashi.itch.io/kiki

and if you're new to the kiki community, please post to the #kiki hashtag so we can start building a little webring of kiki instances

for the past few years, i'm sure many of you have read my many lamentations about the death of the old, small web many of us grew up with.

there are tons of static site generators out there, but none of them did what i wanted: something that could build an entire site without futzing with javascript and library dependencies. i wanted something that we would have had in 2005, but didn't have in 2025.

in january, i decided to do something about it instead of whining. i started gluing together a few php scripts i had been using to build blogs, rss feeds and mini homepages. i even wrote a new mini markup language.

i thought it would take me a week. it took >3 months. 😅

it ran for the past month as globaltalk.network's interactive site, and many of you asked if i'd ever let other people spin up an instance. i can finally say: yes!

today, kiki is officially finished and released for public use. named after my little black house demon, it's small, fast, and sometimes well behaved. and, it's all written in php without a single external dependency. just unzip and go.

it's released as shareware - in the oldest, finest, jankiest meaning of the word: you're free to goof around with and share the unregistered version. build your own little kiki instance, and customize the heck out of it until it feels like your own little home in the world wide web:

tomodashi.com/kiki

Kirjoitin nettiläsnäolon alasajosta ja luopumisesta.

"Luurittomuus nosti esiin myös levottomuuden. En voinut enää paeta rauhallisuutta. Tunnetta voi verrata minkä tahansa uuden asian aloittamiseen, innostutaan, suunnitellaan, tehdään hankintoja ja säädetään varusteet kuntoon. Ollaan ihan täpinöissä. Vihdoinkin jotain uutta, mitä vielä, jotain, ihan mitä tahansa. Kunnes kaikki on valmista ja jäljellä on enää vain aloittaminen ja tekeminen. Uudet tavat kaatuvat usein siihen, toiston vaikeuteen. Kärsivällisyyden puutteeseen. Rauhattomuuteen. Digitaalisessa luopumisessa tekeminen ja toisto tarkoittaa sitä, että ei tehdä mitään. Mitä nyt, kun perusluuri, kamera ja bussikortti on hankittu? Ei mitään. Elät kuten ennenkin. Ei enää mitään uutta jokaisella sormen sipaisulla, vain rauha. Kännyköillä paetaan rauhaa, ajatuksia, painetta paeta rauhaa, ei mitään."

Lue Geminissä:

gemini://sampsa.smol.pub/digia