Articles

Long-form posts and essays. (249 total)

  • Optimizing Eleventy Build Performance: From 38s to Under 10s

    My Eleventy site builds 3,400+ pages with data from over a dozen APIs (GitHub, Funkwhale, Last.fm, YouTube, Mastodon, Bluesky, and several Indiekit endpoints). The initial build was taking 38 seconds, and incremental rebuilds — triggered by a single...

    Read more →
  • Dev Log: Hunting OOM kills, fixing CLS, and making Eleventy builds 10x faster

    Three days of performance work on the Indiekit stack — memory optimization, Core Web Vitals, and build-time improvements. This one gets technical. The Problem: OOM Kills in a 3 GB Container The site runs on Cloudron in a container with 3 GB RAM. Elev...

    Read more →
  • Dev Log: 43 commits — design system, accessibility, and 306 bookmarks imported

    A day of polish, performance, and migration cleanup across the Indiekit ecosystem. Eleventy Theme — 24 commits Design System Compliance The theme got a full design system overhaul. Every post type — articles, notes, bookmarks, photos, replies, likes,...

    Read more →
  • Dev Log: 27 commits across 5 plugins to improve my blog

    A busy day of improvements across the Indiekit ecosystem. Here’s what changed. Eleventy Theme — 10 commits The frontend got the most attention: Blog filter navigation — the blog dropdown now shows all posts per type, not just the most recent Interact...

    Read more →
  • Adding AI Usage Metadata to JSON-LD Structured Data

    Every post on this site carries structured AI transparency metadata — visible both to readers (as a disclosure badge) and to machines (as Schema.org JSON-LD). Here’s how I built it, from the post editor to the structured data output. The AI Transpare...

    Read more →
  • The Blog Question Challenge

    This challenge was initiated by Alexandra from wrywriter.ca — thanks for putting this together! Why did you make a blog in the first place? My first blog goes back to the early 2000s — it was called “Make Love Not War” and it was a space where I was...

    Read more →
  • SOTU : Spectacle, Degeneration, and the Weaponization of Language

    TL;DR The recent State of the Union spectacle was not just political theater. It reflects a deeper degeneration of representative democracy, where language is weaponized, institutions are hollowed out, and psychological mechanisms similar to cult dyn...

    Read more →
  • Deep Dive into Wafrn: How One Platform Self-Hosts Both ActivityPub and Bluesky Identities

    The fediverse and Bluesky are often discussed as competing visions of decentralized social media. ActivityPub is a W3C standard implemented by Mastodon, Misskey, Lemmy, and hundreds of other projects. AT Protocol is Bluesky’s foundation — a different...

    Read more →
  • Inside Indiekit: How 30+ Plugins Turn a Node.js Server into a Federated Personal Web Platform

    This post is a guided tour through the architecture of the system that powers this site. It’s built on Indiekit, an open-source Node.js IndieWeb server created by Paul Robert Lloyd. I forked it because I wanted to change fundamental aspects of how it...

    Read more →
  • ActivityPub Federation Tests Fedify 2

    You can easily fork this repo, customize the tests to your usecase and then run the test suite. git clone git@github.com:rmdes/activitypub-tests.git ActivityPub / Fedify Compliance Report Field Value Target rmendes.net (@rick) Date 2026-02-25T10:03:4...

    Read more →
  • Hacking on Indiekit to customize my blog

    Lately, I have been investing a significant part of my free time into extending my Indiekit fork with features I personally needed. What started as a few tweaks progressively evolved into a broader effort to rethink parts of the backend UI and to bui...

    Read more →
  • How to Self-Host FeedLand with Docker Compose

    FeedLand is an open-source feed reader and sharing platform created by Dave Winer, the pioneer behind RSS itself. It describes itself as “an ecosystem of feeds, news and people” — a place to subscribe to RSS feeds, organize them, discover what others...

    Read more →
  • Religion, pouvoir et silence : le mythe bouddhiste occidental

    TL;DR : En Occident, le bouddhisme tibétain bénéficie d’une image d’exception morale, perçu comme la “dernière religion pacifique”. Cette idéalisation rend toute critique suspecte et toute parole de victime inconfortable. Pourtant, comme toute tradit...

    Read more →
  • Deploying Your Own IndieWeb Site with Indiekit + Eleventy (Docker Compose based)

    A complete guide to deploying Indiekit on your own server using Docker Compose. By the end of this guide, you’ll have a fully functional IndieWeb blog with automatic HTTPS, Micropub support, syndication to Mastodon and Bluesky, and a static Eleventy-...

    Read more →
  • The Guru Wears Prada - Sofia May on Surviving Tibetan Buddhism at Tara Mandala

    Recently, a survivor of abuse within Tibetan Buddhism was featured on A Little Bit Culty, the podcast hosted by former NXIVM whistleblowers. In this episode, she speaks openly about her experience of abuse at the hands of Lama Tsultrim at Tara Mandal...

    Read more →
  • Je collectionne des flux RSS et toi ?

    Je n’ai jamais vraiment été collectionneur de quoi que ce soit. Peut être de musique pendant un temps, à l’époque du MP3, il y a une vingtaine d’années. En dehors de cela, il n’y a jamais eu quelque chose pour laquelle je me sentais assez passionné p...

    Read more →
  • When the Law Becomes a Weapon

    ICE, Trump, and the Politics of Exclusion A recent CNN poll asked a deceptively simple question: Should ICE deport people who entered the United States illegally but who now work, pay taxes, and have acquired legal documentation? Presented this way,...

    Read more →
  • My App Defaults

    📬 Mail Client: FairEmail, ProtonMail 📮 Mail Server: Cloudron 🗒️ Notes: Obsidian ✅ To-Do: Nextcloud 🌅 Photo Management: Immich 📆 Calendar: Nextcloud 📦 Cloud File Storage: Nextcloud 📖 RSS: FreshRSS, Indiepass 🌐 Browser: Vivaldi, Firefox 🕵🏻 Se...

    Read more →
  • Deploy Your Own IndieWeb Site on Cloudron with Indiekit

    What You’ll Build By the end of this tutorial, you’ll have: A personal website at your own domain The ability to post from any Micropub client (Quill, Indiepass, iA Writer) Automatic syndication to Mastodon and Bluesky Webmentions showing likes, repl...

    Read more →
  • Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney Speech in Davos

    I don’t often or ever share on my blog Political Speeches from anyone but we’re in dark times and there is more darkness ahead so perhaps this lightning of lucidity can help : Here is the full text of that speech. I urge you to read it in its entiret...

    Read more →