Good timezone once again, my fellow webcrafters. How's the Sun treating you during this summer (or winter, if you're in the oft-forgotten southern hemisphere) heat?

"If you write one story, it may be bad; if you write a hundred, you have the odds in your favor."
— Edgar Rice Burroughs

Yesterday, I worked quite a lot on Brennan.day, adding functionality that had been on my back burner for quite some time. I feel as though these additions are too specific and niche to my site to get any worth out of a technical write-up, but if you think differently then please let me know.

Honestly, what I should do is write a tutorial on how I get my OpenGraph preview images working on my blog, because I get comments on that more often than anything else! My solution involves only ever adding a simple featured_image property associated with a URL to a page/post's YAML front matter and I have code that takes care of the rest.

Anyways, I did that quite awhile ago. What I did recently was add favicons to my /blogroll using https://www.google.com/s2/favicons?domain=${domain}&sz=16, which seems to work around 60% of the time. Good enough for me!

I also finally got around to curating and organizing my blog posts into what I like to call collections, which some other blogs may call categories. I figured this would be a great way to help newcomers to my site parse and wade through my ever-increasing amount of posts.

I've tried to use a more ubiquitous tagging system since I started blogging, but I am so bad at it! It is so hard for me to figure out what level of granular specificity makes the most sense, and there are just too many possibilities, hence why I have more unique tags than I do posts.

That said, I'm still going to keep tagging, if only because I get automatically boosted by certain tag-finding accounts on the fediverse when my post is syndicated via EchoFeed (wonderful tool, btw) and also for other functionality such as Octothorpes (which, now that I think about it, I'm unsure if I implemented).

The act of going through my blog posts and making specific collections makes you realize what you write (and think) about often! These are the collections I've decided to make for myself. These don't count all my posts (this post isn't in a collection itself), and there is overlap, as I allow a post to be in a maximum of two collections:

• My personal favourites (40)
• The craft of writing (30)
• The IndieWeb (35)
• Community (14)
• Technical Tutorials and Write-ups (26)
• Politics and Activism (18)
• Culture and Media (28)
• Lyric Essays (14)
• Generative AI (12)
• French (language) (3)
• History (7)
• Science (11)
• Indigenous Issues (6)
• Religion and Spirituality (5)

On one hand, it's really helpful in letting me see the forest for the trees! If people ask me "what do you write about for a living?" I now actually know the answer and can provide them charts and graphs upon request.

This also lets me pause and ask: what do (you) my readers want? Now, as you might be able to tell, I write whatever the hell I want, but I do think it would be useful to audit my readers and understand what they come to my blog to read and why.

I could set up a form survey and be boring and get a couple results, but I'm hoping that taking a more casual, conversational approach will be more effective! Don't be shy, I love hearing from folks, regardless of if it's kind or absolutely deranged.

You can reach me by email, or on one of the many platforms I still partake in (that's a thorn worth an entire blog post itself, isn't it?).

I can also see what I'm writing a lot of and what I want to be writing more of. It isn't surprising that the IndieWeb and the craft of writing itself are my bread and butter, but I do think it would be good to figure out how to write more posts about history and science while being a layperson, and definitely more essays on religion and Indigeneity. Much more valuable than these silly little navel-gazing musings!

It also helps me figure out the shape of a book, if I were to ever make a book out of this blog. It's funny how I managed to publish seven or so books during my undergrad career, but now that I have all the free time in the world I haven't published one since. I would have to figure out the logistics of citation and references (my preferred method of using inline links doesn't really work for books, as you might have guessed) as well as figuring out what's evergreen enough to be in a book. But with my blog nearing half a million words, certainly I have enough material for one. Would you, dear reader, be interested in such a thing yourself as well?

Let me know!