Microblog

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/

social.lol/@bw/117003484935982005

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.

social.lol/@bw/116958998815198395

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/

social.lol/@bw/116944546341267736

RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116909023662989501

SLAP stack blog post in progress...

social.lol/@bw/116919551043877319

I just renewed blakewatson.com for nine years.

social.lol/@bw/116919459705668071

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.

social.lol/@bw/116909013597095337

In the year of our Lord two thousand and twenty six I decided it was time for me to learn how to install PHP and Apache on a VPS. I kind of want to blog about it, but I also am not sure I want people following my instructions in case I've done something horrible.

social.lol/@bw/116908986194009262

I can’t stop thinking about the fact that the difference between a million dollars and a billion dollars is about a billion dollars.

social.lol/@bw/116908552582614268

I was watching the "I'm a Mac, I'm a PC" commercial where PC guy is in a wheelchair with casts on, talking about how he got knocked off a table when someone tripped on the power cord. It was an advertisement for the MagSafe feature.

I'm glad they added that back to MacBooks. And I wonder what the thought process was for those few dark years where they got rid of them.

social.lol/@bw/116896232109200229

I like my developer tools the way I like my chocolate chip cookies: GUI!

social.lol/@bw/116893473892545799

RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116881731101006901

I wanted to experiment on the cheapest machine I could find and I purchased a month of IONOS' cheapest option.

Does anyone have experience with them? Just wondering what the quality is like.

social.lol/@bw/116885173118674845

Does anybody have opinions on VPS providers? I'm a long time shared/managed hosting user who wants to try his hand at running a basic web app on a VPS.

social.lol/@bw/116881731101006901

I just realized I hadn't looked at the hard disk icon in Tahoe yet. For some reason, I thought maybe it hadn't changed. I was wrong. It sucks now.

social.lol/@bw/116879236399874370

I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir on Mastodon, but I really miss the old school Mac OS X icons. Both first party and third party.

One of the first times I ever saw Mac UI was when I saw a professor hook up a laptop and the only thing on the desktop was this beautiful hard disk icon, which he double-clicked and began exploring files on his machine.

For some reason I thought that was so cool.

social.lol/@bw/116879229106057373

Great piece from @ellane:

Before I die I hope to do for someone else what Leila did for me.

It’s part of why I write.

https://ellanew.com/2026/07/01/unsolicited-advice-the-right-way

social.lol/@bw/116852782116605757

Because of my disability, spinal muscular atrophy, I spend a lot of time using a computer. I decided to write about my experience and the internal struggle I have with it.

https://blakewatson.com/journal/if-i-want-more-irl-i-must-go-afk/

social.lol/@bw/116842753450693983

"AI is here to stay: possibly the most upsetting truth that’s arisen in this golden age of slop."

https://aimakesmesad.com/here-to-stay/

social.lol/@bw/116819195297986774

RE: https://social.lol/@bw/116817481492575581

I totally didn't realize that Om died two days ago. RIP

social.lol/@bw/116818499200758923

This whole essay is a poetic, sick burn.

> Every significant deployment of mythos shares the same features. It operates in a domain where evidence is unavailable or inconvenient. It names things so the answer is already inside the word. Manifest. Divine. Destiny. Mythos. It requires an inside and an outside, the trusted and the untrusted, the believers and the skeptics. That is not a security policy. That is a priesthood.

https://om.co/2026/06/07/the-myth-the-mythos-and-the-man/

social.lol/@bw/116817481492575581

Shoot I need to write a blog post this weekend to keep my streak alive. Might have to be a state the obvious post.

https://mastodon.social/@jimniels/116805325258466647

social.lol/@bw/116817382995168801