thank you #kiki users for your gracious patience over the past few months

kiki v1.1.0 is now available on itch. it includes many new requested features, including preliminary support for the gopher protocol.

if you haven't heard of kiki before: it's a tiny home page construction set written to be fast and easy to modify. it's my response to 20 years of dealing with the bloated, frustrating, and exhausting world of wordpress and other heavyweight CMSes.

if you're into writing things with just a text editor, then uploading your document over ftp - then kiki is for you.

(conversely, if you're into dragging and dropping widgets in a massive javascript interface - kiki is *not* for you )

https://tomodashi.com/kiki

truth be told, gopher support may or may not survive the year. it's an absolutely gnarly protocol that barely deserves to be called one - there are SO many different implementations and revisions. i tried to implement only what made sense to me, and it's basic at best.

This would be nice. Wonder if Small Technology Foundation would finally get some EU funding for our Small Web work if this were to happen.

One can hope.

https://small-tech.org/fund-us/

#SmallTech #SmallWeb #EU https://mastodon.cloud/@OpenForumEurope/114902018130916368

Here is day 100 of #100DaysToOffload.

The fourth time I've completed the challenge!

https://joelchrono.xyz/blog/400-days-to-offload

New #TIL post on #BurgeonLab

https://www.burgeonlab.com/blog/my-first-github-pull-request/

My beginner's guide on how to make a pull request on github.com. It's my first try at it and I'm pleased to say the dev of the repo I'm contributing to accepted my PRs and merged them swiftly! Will tackle a larger #pullrequest this week regarding #retext.

I'm trying something scary.

I've been stuck in my #writing (again).

I've been stuck in my #art (again).

I've been creatively backed up (again).

I've gotten too deep into my head (again and always and forever, amen).

So I'm trying something: I'm releasing this weird #creative experiment into the world. To challenge myself. To (hopefully? maybe?) help others get "unstuck."

I'd love if anyone out there gave it a look. And I’d be utterly thrilled if you told me about it.

https://fromemily.com/creative-ex-lax-experiment/

@actuallyautistic

New Kitten Release

• Improved Markdown parser

Kitten’s JavaScript tagged template strings (`kitten.html`) no longer fail to render as expected when interpolated values are used inside of Markdown where the Markdown render changes source order.

So, for example, the following will now work correctly, whereas, previously, the link source and link text would have been erroneously flipped:

kitten.html`
<markdown>
[${linkText}](${linkSource})
</markdown>
`

To implement the fix, I’ve moved Markdown rendering outside of the main render loop and into a pre-render stage and implemented a simple Markdown render tree that non-recursively handles all Markdown region renders.

More details: https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#2025-07-21

Run `kitten update` to update your dev machines. Your deployment servers will automatically update in the next few hours.

You can learn more about and install Kitten from the Kitten web site:
https://kitten.small-web.org/

Enjoy!

Cool Tools Around the Indie Web

Lately, I have stumbled across some pretty cool tools focused on the indie web. So, I thought I would try out a few.

https://readbeanicecream.surge.sh/2025/07/20/cool-tools-around-the-indie-web/

So I'm having a very large, very slow clearout.

I want to get rid of my stuff with minimal use of evil corporate platforms so I'm trying out listing it on my own website.

My sale site is here: https://epic-attic.co.uk

I've got about 35 items listed so far, maybe 100 or so more to come, once I've taken photos and so on.

This is a real #smallweb project! You have to email me to buy/claim stuff there's no checkout and no tracking or scripts of any sort. EDIT( I just remembered there is one js script to run the image gallery, but it is entirely local and doesn't send or request data anywhere.)

I think we need a hashtag for selling and giving away stuff in the UK (for non business stuff)

What about #SecondHandUK ?

I thought ukForSale initially but that sounds like a political statement.

Is anyone else selling off their excess stuff in the UK? Should we start a #webring?

Kagi's algorithms prioritize organic, non-commercial sources over ad-heavy or tracker-riddled sites. This really helps to surface unique, human-generated content from smaller blogs, authentic sites and forums.

New #blog on #BurgeonLab

https://www.burgeonlab.com/blog/customize-retext-markdown-editor/

My full guide on how to customize the look and feel of ReText (Python Markdown Editor)! I'm quite happy with this post—one of those "learning while doing" type scenarios.

I've written about #ReText before, so if you're interested in trying a new #markdowneditor, read the first post too on how to install it on macOS.

https://github.com/retext-project/retext

https://www.burgeonlab.com/blogroll/

Added a /blogroll page to my blog... Will be adding more soon like /uses, /junk(sale), /now, /postroll, /self-hosting, and /sitemap.

Inspired by https://slashpages.net! What other slash pages do you use for your blog? Let me know!

Shoutout to some of the cool people I've discovered/connected with on Mastodon in the last few months!

@joel
@kev
@jbaty
@shellsharks
@adamsdesk

#slashpage #slashpages
#blog #blogging #blogs #personalsite #smallweb #hugo

Now I have half a mind to create a minimal fediverse server implementation with a Gemini protocol frontend. Good thing I've got a migraine, otherwise I would've started working on it as well.

I just think such a thing should exist. Who knows, if that sabbatical ever becomes a reality...

Is there a hashtag out there for “look at my cool personal website that I made?” Or some good approximates for that?

Looking to see people’s neat work and also maybe put my own updates out there.
#AskFedi #SmallWeb #IndieWeb