New Kitten release!

Markdown and general renderer fixes.

Fixed:

• Nested Markdown sections rendering bug.

• Detection of components in Markdown where the opening tag spans multiple lines.

• Support for returning a component as a top-level object in a page.

• Slots in Markdown now work as they should (make sure you add them as block-level items, so with a leading and trailing empty line)

Enjoy!

https://kitten.small-web.org

I just want to say thanks to everyone who has interacted with me lately. It's been so incredibly refreshing to talk to people about life in a normal and kind way. I literally thought this kind of internet had totally died. Who knew it was still possible to talk to people about similar interests and topics without getting bashed, ignored, or spammed?! I just had to express gratitude for everyone who has been kind. Faith restored in (some) humanity. I love the #fediverse and #SmallWeb

New Kitten Release

To GNU tar or not to GNU tar?

• Installing Kitten on Linux should no longer display a screenful of gibberish from the tar command.

You see, macOS, being special, includes BSD tar, not GNU tar, and adds a bunch of Mac-specific metadata and extended header keywords to archives that GNU tar on Linux machines then chokes on and regurgitates onto your screen as warnings.

With this release, Kitten’s packaging script expects GNU tar to be available on macOS and uses that instead of BSD tar.

The latest release of Kitten now installs without any warnings on Linux (at least on my Fedora Silverblue box).

Enjoy!

https://kitten.small-web.org

"…The World Wide Web didn’t leave us

The World Wide Web is still here, we’re just not using it like we were.. It doesn’t need to be complicated to allow us a free and open expression of creativity."

https://www.htmlhobbyist.com

New Kitten¹ Release: A little housekeeping

Today’s release only concerns production servers:

• Kitten no longer counts all *hits* in its stats. You can still see which of your *pages* are most popular, etc., and see stats for missing URLs, etc., as before from either the web interface or the interactive shell, but not every hit is logged. Instead, you can see the latest 25 served routes in Kitten’s Settings (at //settings/state/requests/ via the web on your server).

- Kitten production servers now carry out an automatic daily maintenance restart at some time between 3AM and 5AM local server time. (“Have you tried turning it off and on again?” as a Service™) This is to allow JSDB² tables a chance to compact themselves (especially important for high traffic/high mutation tables like sessions, so they don’t balloon up to take up all available memory on small VPS instances).

I don’t think anyone but us (Small Technology Foundation³) is running Kitten in production at the moment but, still. If you are playing with Kitten and experimenting with it in production, your servers will update to this latest version in a few hours.

Full details: https://codeberg.org/kitten/app/src/branch/main/CHANGELOG.md#2025-07-29

¹ https://kitten.small-web.org
² https://codeberg.org/small-tech/jsdb
³ https://small-tech.org

Some ramblings on "The Small Web"
https://www.nfnitloop.com/blog/2025/07/smallweb/

I've added more items and a search function to my personal website for selling and giving away physical objects.

I was pleased to find pagefind, (pagefind.app) which is a js script that implements search completely locally with no privacy issues and minimal extra bandwidth.

https://epic-attic.co.uk/

I'm thinking I still might want categories though. But that could easily proliferate and I don't want to do it dynamically I want to keep the site static.

At the moment I'm favouring splitting listings into just two categories:
* working finished objects
* things that are parts, salvage, or repair

Opinions and feedback welcome.

There's still lots more to photograph and list!

This will hardly be groundbreaking for seasoned Eleventy folk, but I wrote up my experience shifting to remote builds and scheduling automated deployments with Netlify build hooks and GitHub Actions.

https://damianwalsh.co.uk/posts/scheduled-deployments-for-eleventy-websites/

I wrote a browser for #gemini text that works over #geminiprotocol AND HTTP(S).

It was a great way to learn some #egui in #Rust, but mostly I wanted to demonstrate that you can have nice things on HTTP too.

Let me know what y'all think!

https://github.com/NfNitLoop/egemi

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