on this page (5)
between a snail pace-slow slow health recovery and continuing to work on my site, that was my week in a nutshell!
indieweb
as per my website changelog, there’s been a lot of site changes! a key guiding philosophy has been the IndieWeb principle ‘make what you need’1 https://indieweb.org/make_what_you_need . while I’ve been making constant incremental design changes, what I myself needed most were practical pages:
- a category index and a tag index
- a dedicated photo grid (as well as a /photo slash page, inspired by Roert Birming’s page where you can check out a whole directory’s worth of photo pages), and
- a reading tracker which was, by far, the highlight of my week (not least because it involved creating my first-ever very own Obsidian plugin—now that’s a bucket list item checked!)
for analytics, since I want to steer well away from Google Analytics, I added open-source solution GoatCounter2 https://www.goatcounter.com/ —incredibly light-weight compared to any analytics I’ve ever used, though I am missing some of the more robust options.
I went over why I built my website with two static site generators, and I actually genuinely enjoyed documenting my thinking and experiences for future me. I’ll get into the technical workings next week.
another winner this week has been stream posts, my anti-social social experiment that I’m increasingly delighted with!
once I added the feature last week, I posted four times, of which one was a photo post. this week, by contrast, I made a total of 21 posts, of which eight were photos. that’s way more than I’ve posted on all Big Tech socials put together over at least the past two years. and it’s all me and mine, no social platform to lock me out, no broad content licences to grant or, most importantly, posting as a slave to the algorithm. happy camper over here!
culture
library
this week, of all weeks, it’s not so much what I read, but how I’m tracking that I did 🤩 as an interstitial reader, it’s of high interest how my daily reading habits break down. I read widely—very widely—and since the aim is rarely to finish a book (fiction being the exception), I don’t get the same feeling of satisfied accomplishment one gets from reading a book cover-to-cover.
since creating my interstitial tracker, however, I’m able to track all those stolen moments across a day’s worth, which is very satisfying!
two of the books I did finish actually go remarkably well together (one being A Psalm for the Wild-Built, the selected choice for this month’s IndieWeb book club), so I’ll write about them next week.
as for Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar—which has been on my TBR pile for about 20 years, give or take—that turned out to be a huge disappointment. while I found her prose every bit as brilliant as her poetry, I can’t fathom why it took reading the book myself to learn how unnecessarily racist and ableist (also, fatphobic) some of the content is. the kind where you hold your breath thinking, “ok this is not cool, so it’s definitely leading to some big character arc”, only to get to the end without any of that being touched on again. sign of the times is definitely an argument, but not one I’d run with. hard to walk away with the same respect for its author that I’d had at the start of the book. therefore, cannot recommend.
screen
watched Tenzing this week3 it’s streaming on Apple right now ; an oh-so-lovely biographical film about Tenzing Norgay, the Tibetan-Nepalese-Indian Sherpa mountaineer who, alongside New Zealand’s Sir Edmund Hillary, was one of the first two confirmed climbers ever to have summited Mount Everest. (as a result, in 1999, they were both listed on Time’s 100 most influential people of the 20th century. how I wish Tenzing had lived that see that!)
sherpas, even to this day, very rarely get the recognition they deserve, but all the more so during the 1953 British Mount Everest expedition, when racial and classist inequalities were still an accepted society standard.
the relationship between the two men, demonstrated in the film during the lead-up to the summit, extended to the end of their lives, with their sons—Jamling Tenzing Norgay and Peter Hillary—joining a National Geographic expedition to Everest in 2002 to mark the upcoming 50th anniversary of their dads’ remarkable achievement.
few things in this world are as gratifying as witnessing someone receive the credit they’re due. much has been written about Hillary. (along with Norway’s Roald Amundsen, he was one of the childhood heroes who captured my imagination long before I even entered primary school.) yet I wouldn’t learn about Tenzing’s existence until well into adulthood. the film, directed by the incredible Jennifer Peedom4 Jennifer has also directed Sherpa: Trouble on Everest, Mountain, Deeper, and River—her work (BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated) is simply amazing! , was a beautiful watch—highly recommended!
my world
I’m not firing on all cylinders at the moment. it feels like I’m trying to send a rocket to space using nothing but grey water—space, in this case, being not interplanetary exploration but making the most of getting through the weekly basics, and rocket fuel the bare minimum I need to get from one side of the day to the other 😅
my health took a greater knock recently than I seem to have grasped, judging by how long it’s taking to bounce back. I have to be mindful of extending grace rather than growing increasingly impatient. I know my body is doing the best it can—my mind doesn’t have to agree 🙃
footnotes
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it’s streaming on Apple right now ↩
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Jennifer has also directed Sherpa: Trouble on Everest, Mountain, Deeper, and River—her work (BAFTA- and Emmy-nominated) is simply amazing! ↩