Ten years ago today, I rebooted, as part of a global event and a chance to get this site humming again.

That attempt didn’t last.

Not the design.

Not the regular posting.

So consider this another go at it.

Nothing grandiose, just me trying to get back to what I enjoyed about this all those years ago when making webstuff was fun.

If you’re reading this, feel free to say hi (my email is the same as it’s always been: my name at this domain) and let me know what kind of things are keeping you motivated to create and explore.

Worth a watch if you are interested in politics, especially if you remember the 1990s, and maybe start with this part of the conversation where Avi Lewis begins talking about surveillance capitalism.

Yesterday I found myself watching a video from about the 25th anniversary of the Quebec City demonstration against globalization. The video was watchable in part because George Stroumboulopoulos has spent, himself, nearly 25 years in front of a camera telling a stories directly to an audience. But it’s also because it’s a snapshot of a time just before things changed.

When photos were on film.

When broadcast and cable TV still were the dominant media.

When the World Trade Center towers still stood.

In his video essay, George tells a story about that moment in time that today is hard to imagine. Not just the protests against capitalism, but also how the symbol the protestors rallied around distinct meanings for both sides. One saw it as protection, the other saw it as an insult.

The three-metre high concrete and wire fence also served as a provocation in a way that may have been harder to tell in the moment. Sure it was a barrier, but this generation also knew walls come down, and with it entire systems of oppression. Those on both sides of this fence had seen it happen a dozen years earlier. This barrier’s mere presence arguably helped empower them, even through aggressive and violent efforts to suppress people’s fundamental rights.

Months later, of course, the “temporary” suspension of many of these rights became an accepted norm.

Now an entire generation has grown up in an environment which has enforced a level conformity to such a degree, protests are labelled insurrections, and the protestors are charged as a terrorists. (Just take a look a very similar event and protest in Toronto nine years after the events in Quebec City.)

All this brings me back to today.

While reading an article about a podcast I found myself highlighting more phrases (“anarchist calisthenics“ and “micro-looting“) and sentences while scribbling increasingly longer marginalia. I was frustrated by the arrogance of the article, but didn’t disagree with his annoyance at the flippancy the “shoplifting as protest” theme was discussed and presented.

As the writer, Graeme Wood, winds down the piece, he offers:

Getting clubbed because you refused to use the bathroom designated for your race—that is something your grandchildren will brag that you did. I wonder what is wrong with people who feel like they are on an odyssey against a comparable injustice but who evade responsibility for shoplifting produce.

But then it struck me: It’s the same as it’s always been.

It’s not that the people are wrong, the fault instead lies in the very system they are operating in.

Mass protests feels abstract or token because they have been effectively outlawed, and any progress made by those increasingly rare contemporary efforts has been crushed and dismantled.

Maybe these “mirco-looters” have never encountered true oppression. Maybe they have never experienced the pain of crowd suppression weapons because the system has diffused their plans before they even knew they even wanted to protest.

Maybe they don’t know what it’s like to agree on values, while disagreeing on issues because opinions are weaponized and amplified to generate passive money for people who don’t even care enough to have a perspective.

Maybe now the only way to put your body upon the gears is to find those small ways to actively not participate in the system. To take down the sign in the window. To feel what it’s like to steal an avocado and give it away to the person marching down the street toward the new fence holding us in.

Or maybe people really don’t care and are just doing it kicks and clicks.

But I doubt it.

Great site design, meaty stories (a bunch of which I want to read out of the gate).

Just wish they had an RSS feed.

Subscribed to the email for now, tho, and hoping it become a regular read.

Although I’ve not been active here for a long time, I have been lately considering how this new technology shift has created an opportunity for designers to return to code — to play with the raw material of UX design.

This vibedesigning is what also gave me an excuse to do what I’ve long wanted to do: Create a CMS enabling me to write without out worrying about the spaghetti code behind the scenes needed to make my words more visible. For almost 20 years, the pressure to create a dynamic website has inhibited my desire to have fun with the Web while staying essence to the spirit of the orignal intent: Sharing documents, not building software. But it’s been harder to do that, and too make the documents look good, without dealing with a level of coding I was never comfortable with.

But now it is possible.

Vibedesigning is allowing me to play again.

Much like I did nearly thirty years ago.

The result is this “reboot” — built on a Markdown repository (thank you John Gruber, thank you Shida Li and Erica Xu) and turned into a simple node.js CMS thanks to Claude.

While the design is nothing to brag about, I expect it will evolve and change as I learn how to play again. And maybe it will even inspire me to write more.

Who knows.

Until then, it’s fun to be back, viewing source, and seeing how close anonymous pages can reflect the ideas I have in my head.

I know this because I vibecoded a solution to an annual annoyances triggered by New York’s slightly early growing season.

In March, New York Times Cooking starts highlighting their asparagus recipes teasing me with tasty suggestions for something too soon to harvest locally. In Seattle, I relied on useful seasonal fruit and veggie calendar to know what was in season, but I’ve long struggled to find an accurate one for Toronto specifically (often they are generic to Southern Ontario).

A few weeks ago, I decided to do something about it.

With a handful of Claude prompts, some careful design nudges, and a few feature suggestions, I now have an interactive calendar for Toronto’s seasonal produce just in time for when farmers market season kicks into high gear next month.

Data is sourced from a few trustworthy references, with Claude handling the code and design execution. The whole thing is built to be a standalone HTML file, too.

So: Meet Spotless a one page web app with tips on the best way to solve common stains without resorting to a Tide to Go stick.

This is handy resource for me as I have a tendency to alway get a stain on my white shirts within an hour of putting them one (which is almost every working day).

Most of the time their use is overkill, but sometimes you really do need something more than a donut chart to explain what’s happening.

DropLeaf, which is a nice, simple little app Narain Jashanmal built to sharing Markdown-formatted¹ files on the web for free.

(Via Sidebar)

And sure, I could have done it, but, I’m rusty on modern web techniques (even in my prime I got frustrated by complex object-oriented programming because, well, I’m not a programmer!). I tried a bunch of years ago, but then gave up.

Then, vibecoding.

And after a couple of hours during the weekday mornings and a full day today, I’ve got something I’m almost happy with. Almost because there are gaps in the functionality, and errors constantly introduced, and protections (tho understandable) that make it slower going than it could (even tho it’s faster than I’ve been able to do!).

I’ve also osked to generate update CSS files to make it more contemporary, because, as much as I once owned this space, I very much don’t now.

It’s been a fun experiment and humble example of how old dogs may not learn new tricks, they can learn to help new dogs learn how to do those new tricks.

I’m asking #AI to create an aspiration of what I want (ideally) my site to be, but unless I compromise my values, I’ve got work to do…