Really enjoyed this guide by @neatnik about making a website on the cheap where you are 100% in control.
https://blakewatson.com/links/2026-08-23-hardcore-indieweb-run-your-own-website/
Microblog
Gorgeous blocky font family. Like I need to purchase another font. It’s free for students, though!
https://blakewatson.com/links/2026-08-21-juncture-an-industrial-font-superfamily-from-lettermatic/
RE: https://mastodon.social/@kottke/117129908192670732
Tired: weird AI music
Wired: Weird Al music
RE: https://mastodon.social/@drrjv/117119500780155481
I wonder if this would have been more damning if it just used the original text.
"Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she
With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
"Yes, and allow all edits this session" will be the last thing humans agree to.
We need to call internet trackers something different because my fat self does not like to reject cookies.
I really love this post from Michelle Barker about the joy of building a website as a human for humans (my words lol).
https://blakewatson.com/links/2026-08-18-little-websites-everywhere/
I mentioned this post by Chris Coyier a little while back but figured I’d make it official and blog it.
https://blakewatson.com/links/2026-08-18-mediocre-ideas-showing-up-and-persistence/
Overjoyed is a cool virtual controller to help people with disabilities play the Switch (and PC games).
It's 91 degrees Fahrenheit at 10:30 in the morning. 💀
I got an email asking me if I would be ok with my site being added to a "Y2K-style portal for people who miss the small web". Has anyone heard of this? https://flamenet.io/
I have a fanfiction crossover idea where Columbo figures out that Jessica Fletcher is a serial killer who gets off on framing people for murder then "solving" the case.
Sometimes JavaScript (that I probably wrote) makes me so irritated that I start non-cursing under my breath Joe-Pesci-Home-Alone style while trying to fix it.
Shared by a coworker:
"If outside was so great we wouldn’t have spent thousands of years making inside."
I appreciate more and more that my otherwise incredibly dumb self in 2005 decided to get a domain name and start hosting a personal website. Every time a platform rises and falls, this becomes a better decision.
If you are on the fence about getting a domain name and creating a personal website, just do it! If you think for some reason that it's too late, it's not. I always think about what @chriscoyier said about starting the CSS-Tricks blog back in the day.
I once had an idea to start a blog about CSS. I sucked at writing. I sucked at designing. The vibe at the time was that everything important about CSS had already been written. Nobody told me.
Even me quoting this after all these years is possible because he put it on his personal website!
https://chriscoyier.net/2013/10/18/mediocre-ideas-showing-up-and-persistence/
Anyone have a recommended CMS that works with static site generators?
I know Build Awesome is coming and I know a little about CloudCannon and Contentful. Anything else?
For my personal sites, I just use markdown files, but if I were setting up a website for a business, I'm curious what my options are.
I blogged about the SLAP stack (SQLite, Linux, Apache, PHP) and about my first time setting up a VPS.
https://blakewatson.com/journal/the-slap-stack-is-the-last-server-stack-youll-ever-need/
RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116909023662989501
SLAP stack blog post in progress...
I just renewed blakewatson.com for nine years.
Also, the stack I'm using is Linux, Apache, SQLite, and PHP, and I would really like to come up with a good name for that if it doesn't already exist. LASP stack sounds dumb.