Latest notes from Perpetual Beta
So it’s been a while. I thought I was going to publish on the regular. Two things got in the way. First, there was a pretty bad npm hack about six months ago. I wanted to wait until that blew over before updating, since npm is at the core of 11ty, which I’m using to publish the site. And then I got distracted with other stuff. The second reason is that with All This Going On I havent felt much…
Pressure from the FCC has resulted in the indefinite suspension of Jimmy Kimmel from late night television, because he dared to criticize Charlie Kirk. I’ll skip the legal analysis because Kimmel has his own lawyers who can handle that. But the “obey in advance” streak we’re seeing from corporate America, desperate for lucre at the whim of the Grifter In Chief, makes it more important than ever…
Judge Judy was on the screen, making the kind of faces you imagine Judge Judy making. I don’t watch her by choice, but it was lunch, and the TV was on, and I didn’t have the remote control. What struck me this time was how hard they try to make her look like she has the right to talk to people like she does. Her studio looks a lot like a real courtroom. Her bench has a sign with her name and the…
This post by Ellane made me think about text formatting and why I like Markdown so much lately. Mainly, it’s because I don’t really do much formatting at all if I can help it. Ellane says: There are two ways to format digital text: let an app do it for you (e.g. select the text, then choose Bold from a menu), or do it yourself. How about… neither? My formatting rules For my own notes, you won’t…
I’ve also manually updated the .htaccess file on the site so that all the old broken links—for the content I’ve removed—now permanently redirect to the index page (at least for now) using a 301 Redirect. I may update the file later to do something more sophisticated (like redirect anything archive-related to the Notes collection page) but this should work for now.
Sitemap successfully added. This was a lot less drama than the RSS feed: I added the layout: sitemap.xml.njk which included some basic code to retreive every page in any 11ty “collection” and then output its attirbutes into the sitemap. I added site data at in a site.json file. The only thing in there right now is the root URL. Apparently, the sitemap craves JSON data. And it works! Check it…
More under the hood tweaks. This time, I’ve added an RSS feed. I had to install eleventy-plugin-rss and then tweak a new layout, feed.njk. There was a lot of back-and-forth trying to get everything to work together. First, it’s important that there is not a single space or line befor ethe start of the XML content in the feed layout—any items that breaks this renders the feed invalid, apparently.…
Update March 21, 2026: She never responded. We didn’t attend any of today’s No Kings protests. Instead, I’ve written this letter to my Congressional representative. I hope she reads it. I hope she responds. June 14, 2025 U.S. Representative Laurel Lee 2464 Rayburn House Office Building Washington, DC 20515 Dear Representative Lee: You have served as a lawyer, judge, Florida Secretary of State,…
No.
Fiddling with the site relaunch, pushing buttons and tweaking dials. It’s starting to resemble an actual website again, not just a random collision of html tags tossed out like some early version of ChatGPT. I finally pushed it to the server so everyone else could see what’s coming. I like it—more than I expected to. And there’s still so much more I want to do around here.
Some of the things that have my attention now: Relaunching and updating this site. Hiring and working with an editor to produce more and better videos for the YouTube channel. Getting back to resistance training - just dumbells for now.
As a professional writer of legal stuff—and the spouse of a former newspaper editor—I’ve used em dashes as long as I can remember. They’re handy way to go down a mental rabbit trail in the middle of a sentence while still maintaining a professional level of typography. Use it when a comma is too weak, but a colon, semicolon, or pair of parentheses is too strong. The em dash puts a nice pause in…
It used to be, a “redesign” was mostly cosmetic around here. New colors, new layout, new typefaces. But this is a bottom-up re-imagining of everything I want to do here. Timeline-ordered blogging is gone, replaced with a more digital-garden style of approach consistent with the Perpetual Beta. And gone, too, is the overkill of PHP-driven, database-pumping dynamic page generation, replaced with…
Perpetual Beta: An even more radical position… in which the product is developed in the open, with new features slipstreamed in on a monthly, weekly, or even daily basis. Tim O’Reilly
I can’t even remember what started it. This site was decomposing, slowly at first, then rapidly. The software driving the site—WordPress, for something more than a decade—automatically updated past the non-automatic and largely ignored update demands of its dependencies. What version of PHP does it require? What version of MySQL? Some number far higher than was here. The old blog posts, the old…