colophon

• My Tweets Have Come Home to Roost

  The Twitter archiver that @darius made is really neat.

  It takes the zip file of your archive from that site and it spits out a fully searchable static website of all your public tweets (that aren’t replies to someone else).

  It was super easy to integrate right into this Hugo-powered website, right here.

  Most of my tweets are shite, going right back to 2007, but there’s some gold in there and I’m glad to have them at my fingertips in a space I own.

  Dec 21, 2022 - 1 min read
• Like the legend of the phoenix

  I used to be a prolific blogger, back in the very early days of the form. Had a few things “go viral” before that was a thing, meaning they were seen and talked about by dozens of people, but I was comfortably C-list in that small world.

  As my online time got eaten up by other things, like farming and starting a family, my posts became shorter and less frequent and eventually just … stopped. Instead of using my own space to keep my words, I unconsciously switched over almost exclusively to a hot new microblogging platform started by some podcasting tooling developers called Twttr.

  Twitter’s very short character limit made it ideal for the short bits I was writing anyway, and it was easy to write them more often. This only increased the ephemeral quality of them and I didn’t even notice really that I was just creating a gap in my once exhaustively documented life. I’ve got all my tweets downloaded and stored away, but they’re not something I can really go back and read. Those years are essentially lost to me.

  But now an egomaniacal billionaire troll has taken over and is systematically destroying Twitter and that has shocked me awake. It’s well past time to start owning my words again and, more importantly, treating them like they matter and kept and displayed and shared.

  So, here’s Kestrel’s Nest back from the dead.

  I’m using Hugo to power it, displayed using the m10c theme. I might charge all that, and this is certainly a rough draft, but it’s a good place to start.

  For a laugh, I used a page from February 2001 from my old blog here as a placeholder. I thought about making this style match that exactly, but if I go that route I’ll do it another day. It’s here if you want to have a laugh too.

  Nov 28, 2022 - 2 min read