“This paper lays out a unified framework of the ergodic animage, the rule-based and interaction driven part of visual representation in video games”

I do sometimes wonder if other people browse the web in the same way that I do.

I was following a thread by gilest on mastodon about making publishing on the web easy, fast and non-technical, following his post about a mac-only tool for making web pages, Palm and came across Publii which is a great cross-platform desktop application for making websites – having looked at a load of other tools in this category (including web hosted) I wasn’t expecting to be impressed, but I was, it’s a brilliant tool.

In the process of doing that I found a collection of other personal content management (or manipulation) systems that I’d never heard of, or only in passing. Each of these has the novelty of being unique or interesting in some way – there is so much variety!

• tilde.club – “one tiny totally standard unix computer that people respectfully use together in their shared quest to build awesome web pages”
• The absolutely wild HotGlue (which has been around for over a decade!)
• micro.blog which is a more traditional blog host using Hugo behind the scenes
• CHATONS – a “Collective of Hosters Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidarity” (via Adele’s site hosting offer on pages.casa – and her equivalent for Gemini)
• HamsterCMS – “the world’s smallest and very simple content management system”
• “A curated list of awesome small web publishing tools and frameworks.” – the quote at the top of this post is from the bibliography of this list author’s PhD, which is in the same repo
• Smolweb – not tooling, but a positional take on simplifying the markup language we use to bridge the gap to Gemini
• A gemini-based proposal for blog formats and some tooling
• Nekoweb – “a free static website hosting service, created in … 2024 by a group of coders, programmers and artists, passionate for the old web and personal websites.”

Although I understand a desire to organise and form communities, I’ve never liked the “Indieweb” framing of so much around self-publishing – it makes it seem like people need to understand something new; maybe it has initiation rites? Maybe it’s complex and technical in the way that Giles was raging against above? It feels like digging an artificial moat, or applying a purity check – are you in or are you out?

Just publish and be damned. Use whatever tool you like, just write.