🕊️ fosdem 2025 and 🌐 gen_site

16 Mar 2025 • 7 min read

🕊️ since 2019 i’ve been going to fosdem, it’s become the part of the year where foss utopia holds a big celebration.

part one 🐃 the importance of yak shaving

😴 it's taken a while to get round to writing this because at the point i attempted to revive 11ty from its long slumber, it did that thing where a frontend technology which has been gathering dust for a while tries to rebuild itself and melts into a flood of errors.

🦘 my patience for jumping through frontend engineering hoops has worn thin, but i initially thought: "oh ok, before i begin to commit some words, let's rebuild this house of cards that turns markdown into markup" … only to find that the beautiful yet fragile 11ty template I'd been using had been deprecated, understandably, by its probably quite bored maintainer.

🐇 after casting around a bit, and briefly trying zola, which turned out to be yet another engineering rabbit hole (albeit a cool rust one), i got chatting on mastodon about a recent post by froos: "you're doing computing wrong" which contains a compelling description of marking up websites by hand as a minimally engineered, direct pathway to the web.`

🧵 during some of these discussions on mastodon, it seemed there might be a way of combining ideas from froos (writing markup) and from static site generators (setting structure, automating repetitive tasks) to create a tiny, friendly, dependency-minimal site generator?

🛠️ as luck would have it, this conversation gained the interest of kartik agaram from merveilles.town who created an amazing "freewheeling app" by distilling requirements down to three neat scripts:

gen_pages: 📃 generate pages from frontmatter and markup
gen_index: 🗓️ generate an index of those pages
gen_feeds: 📩 generate an rss feed; 📩 generate an html feed compatible with journal.miso.town

💾 gen_site - the finished software, has the strapline "extremely simple static site generator" and you are now reading a gen_site blog!

🙅🏻‍♀️ computing is too important to be left to men

12 Feb 2024 • 10 min read

🕊️ since 2019 i’ve been going to fosdem, it’s become part of the year, the part that gives hope for the future. hackers love a tribal gathering, and at around 10K strong, fosdem is the mother of all tribal gatherings. in terms of scale, chaos congress might give it a run for its money, but the fosdem organisers consistently claim the title of world’s biggest foss conference.

🚀 the event has grown beyond the university space over the last quarter-century, and so on arriving in brussels, the first thing myself and my fellow travellers did was visit one of the increasing number of fringe events. our first “ofdem” experience was a matrix gathering held at the brussels hackerspace in a disused medicine factory in anderlecht. there we enjoyed our first taste of club mate (rocketfuel for berliners). as newbies we were recommended to try the granat flavour, and reminded we were enjoying the hospitality of the matrix foundation. We then joined the openDesk huddle where it was announced that matrix was part of the project, with joint support from the french and german governments in building a sovereign workplace for public servants. i was instantly besotted, but better still, they mentioned there was going to be a live demo, and a live demo is the sort of thing that can elevate a plain old presentation to the level of performance art.

👋🏻 hello twenty four

1 Jan 2024 • 4 min read

Hello twenty-four. I last blogged in 2011 during the heady days of london's hyperlocal scene which was a fun self-organised online network of local blogs that eventually gave way to social media.

as a public servant running a public-service website for the neighbourhoods i was discussing online, it was recommended to separate business and friendship, lower the potential for any conflicts of interest, and keep my own counsel online. Having already witnessed a few people getting into difficulties online beginning with friends reunited; this seemed like sage advice. From then on, maintaining an interest in local matters meant frequenting analog networks such as the pub, the school, the community centre.