Some nice plantsA sleeping kitty

50 Questions for Webmasters Survey

I was surfing around on the small web recently and found this survey on a personal site. The original poster did not want to be linked directly, and their site seems to be down at the moment anyway, so I won’t share the link from where I got it, but it originated on the Japanese web among their smallweb community, which functions similarly to ours. As a result there may be a little translation weirdness here and there. I’ve tried to clarify where I can, and I’ll put a cut here so that those of you who aren’t as amused by surveys as I am can skip over this one.

Continue reading “50 Questions for Webmasters Survey”

On Long-Term Projects and other things

James’ Coffee Blog has a recent blog post title “The joy of incremental website improvements” that really highlights something I love about having long-term projects: the fact that they’re always there for you to come back and work on, and that wonderful satisfaction you get after looking them over and realizing how much work you’ve put in over the months (or years).

Ok, maybe that’s more than one thing, but those two particular feelings are ones I’ve really been focusing on lately. Maybe it’s because of the point I’m at in my life, getting closer to what the world thinks is the middle of it, but I sometimes find myself craving longer projects that I can add to, little by little, but that add up to something huge over time. It’s a much longer payoff than, say, playing a few puzzle games on my phone in my free time, or watching a new Youtube video. In fact, it’s a bit more akin to reading a long novel: it’s a quiet activity that only takes a few minutes of my time here and there, but when it’s done, it can feel hugely satisfying.

And, like reading a good novel, it’s something I do for myself, but becomes much richer when shared with others. I’ve mentioned in my reading logs that I’m something of a surface reader, at least the first time through a book, and there are so many other viewpoints I’d never pick up on if it weren’t for the discussions that can be had with other people who have read the same literature. Likewise, when it comes to building my website, most of the ideas I’ve had here come from other smallweb folks who either had an idea and shared it on their own site, or gave me feedback on my ideas here. Putting this growing web space together has led me to some wonderful groups of like-minded people that I am so very grateful for. They inspire me more than they can know, and since I’m someone who’s always been solitary for most of my life, I’m happy that I was wrong about the loner I always thought I was.

As I get older, like most people who are much smarter than me, I realize that there are so few things we really know for sure. I’m never absolutely sure of what the right thing to do is, even though I always try my best nonetheless. But one rule that has served me very well is that life is better when you do things. We spend so much time scrolling, hoping, dreaming, complaining, and thinking about where the world is going, and if everything is going to end up being okay. But life is better when we get out and do things. Make that website, go start a friendship with that person, write that novel, reach out to that family member. I can’t promise it will go smoothly, but it certainly won’t get better if you don’t try. And while I’d say I’ve failed at a ton of stuff while growing up and living, I have to say the best things (and relationships, jobs, projects, experiences, etc.) I have now are things that I reached out and worked for.

So, at the risk of sounding too folksy, I’d just like to nudge you to have a little patience and work at what you want. Maybe that will be a website and a small but quickly-growing movement to take back the internet, or maybe it will be something else. But if you keep at it long enough, I bet it’ll be something that you can be proud of.

Blog Changes

I’ve switched over the blog from Serendipity to ClassicPress, so you may notice some changes here and there. Most notably, old links won’t work anymore because of the permalinks scheme, so you’ll have to re-link any you’ve added to your sites. I’ll try to put up redirects for the most popular ones, but if there are any that you want in particular, let me know in the comments.

Speaking of comments, I believe I’m going to have to move them manually, so it will be a little while before they show up again. This shouldn’t affect anything going forward, though, and I’ll now have access to better spam filtering, so the whole experience should be smoother for everyone.

I don’t have anything bad to say about Serendipity in particular; I mainly want to take the blog in a few directions that I’m not able to with that system, since it’s more limited, and I’m not fully comfortable developing plugins for it because of the PHP templating system it uses. I’ve created plugins for WordPress before, and I thought maybe I could get away from that, but no such luck right now. That said, I didn’t really want the bloat that comes with newer WordPress installs, and I don’t care at all for the block editor, so I chose ClassicPress instead.

Either way, check back for more updates in the future.

Making a Custom RSS Feed Reader with Google Sheets

I’ve talked before about how much I like RSS as a concept and as a technology. It allows you to follow your favorite creators without succumbing to the invasive tracking that is found on most creator sites like YouTube, Instagram, etc. For that reason, I’m always looking for new ways to help others engage with RSS, especially if they make things easier and more accessible.

Well I came across some new info recently, and it turns out you can make your own customizable feed reader using the inbuilt functions in Google Sheets. Normally, I try to stay away from proprietary apps like Google’s, but unfortunately I haven’t been able to recreate the functionality in any other office suites just yet, and I know that there are still a lot of you out there who use GDrive regularly. So hopefully this will be useful to some of you out there who either don’t want to or can’t move away from the Google suite of product just yet.

In the post below, I’ll be outlining how I put this sheet together, and there’s also a download at the bottom for a template sheet in case you’d just like to plug your own feeds in and go.
Continue reading “Making a Custom RSS Feed Reader with Google Sheets”

2023 Music Tracking and Review

I stopped doing New Year’s resolutions a while ago; if I want to make a change in my life, I’d rather do it now than the end of the year, so waiting until Jan 1st doesn’t really work for me. But I do enjoy looking back on the previous 12 months at the beginning of the year, seeing what has changed, and hopefully seeing how I’ve grown. Today I’m going to use my Last.fm stats to go over the music I’ve listened to and talk about my thoughts concerning the albums it highlighted for me.

Last.fm used to be a lot bigger back in the days when everyone used Winamp, but you can still track, or “scrobble,” your music on all sorts of platforms today using plugins for your phone as well as your desktop, both official and third party. And if nothing else works, you can always use the Universal Scrobbler. I’ve always enjoyed looking back on what I listened to in the past, and I also kind of use it to gauge my mental health in some ways, so I still use and enjoy the site a lot. If you’re interested in reading about the details, click the cut below.
Continue reading “2023 Music Tracking and Review”

RSS Is the Answer to Enshittification

Okay, that might sound like hyperbole, but hear me out: I think RSS needs to make a mainstream comeback, and doing so would kill off a lot of the tracking and data-gathering that powers the enshittification of your favorite websites. Not all of it, but certainly the bits of it that are tied to your user accounts. The primary reason (I’m guessing here) for why people sign up for places like Youtube, Twitter, etc., is to keep up with their favorite folks. RSS does so anonymously and can be customized to your own liking, and can be checked anywhere you like, depending on which service you go with.
Continue reading “RSS Is the Answer to Enshittification”

Various Updates and Stuff

Well the website has been a little quiet lately, due to real-life reasons. Believe it or not, the life event that caused me to step away was…a vacation! I take a vacation around this time every year, and I had initially thought that I would be super-productive and get all sorts of personal projects done. When the time came, though, I found myself relaxing and just enjoying being at home. And that was great, I’m not complaining! But it was also weird because I honestly don’t think of my website and game/programming work as being “work,” since I enjoy it so much, but I guess part of my unconscious mind still does.

So I haven’t done a whole lot or written up any reviews lately. I’ll be getting back into that shortly, but for now I figured I would make a post explaining why I’ve been gone and what sorts of things I have planned.

PeerTube Instance

My PeerTube instance over at video.thefrugalgamer.net has been throwing up certificate errors for a while now, because I’m having some trouble with the back end. You’ll laugh when you find out what it is, I promise: I’ve managed to misplace my admin password for the VPS. Yes, I feel like an idiot. But basically that means my cert expired and since I didn’t set up the renewal as an automatic process, I haven’t been able to get in to request it manually.

For viewers, this means you can click through the warning and nothing bad will happen, though I do understand it’s annoying and not great. I’m planning on fixing this once I have some time to sit down with it, but it will be non-trivial, so it’s not something I can do quickly.

New Pages

If you’re into crafty stuff, check out the new Printables page over under my Resources section. It’s mostly things from my old printables Etsy shop, meant for collage work, scrapbooking, etc., but there are some new things too. I have more planned for this page, and I’m always putting together things for my own crafts, so I’ll probably add to it over time.

If you follow me on the Fediverse, you probably saw my post about my Free Image Database. It’s a collection of clipart made from public domain materials that I’ve been collecting for a personal art project. They’re all free to use and it’s fully tagged and searchable, and includes citations for everything if you want to explore some more. This is another project that will grow over time as I come back to it.

Other Site Updates

I’m working on a suuuuper secret new page, but I can let you look at it a bit early 🙂 It’s called The Arcade! It’s a separate page for the games I’ve made, and it works pretty much the same as the section on my Games page, but it’s a lot more fun to look at. I’m doing a lot of custom graphics for it, though, so it’s taking a little while.


I tend to work in cycles, and will lose interest in some of my ongoing projects, but I usually always come back to them eventually. I work until I feel like I’m losing ideas or enthusiasm, and then move on temporarily. My main philosophy behind putting most of my projects online was to make them available for the long run, which is why I don’t bother to chase trends for their own sake. This can sometimes mean that things will sit still for a long time, but don’t worry, I haven’t abandoned them!

Lode Runner 2 1998 Review

For this review, I’m digging up an old game from my childhood that I’ve missed for a long time. See, I grew up playing on a color Apple Macintosh running Mac OS 8, and one of my favorite games was Lode Runner: The Legend Returns (I’ll review this one eventually also, because it’s a great game). So when they released a new, 3D version of the game in 1998, I was psyched to get it up and running. As it turned out, this one was quite a different game from the one I had been familiar with, but I ended up loving it for entirely different reasons.

Intro level from Mona World
Continue reading “Lode Runner 2 1998 Review”

Making a portable phone stand from cardboard

I’ve actually got a few phone stands around my place that I’ve purchased pretty cheap, but for a while I’ve wanted one that I can fold up and put in my bag, and I figured it can’t possibly be that complicated to make one. So I sat down with some materials and ideas, and I’ve made some instructions so that you can make your own.

A finished one with a phone on it

Click below to see the full instructions and get the downloadable template.
Continue reading “Making a portable phone stand from cardboard”