I've done some tweaks to the layout of the site around links, code bits and other things I'm probably forgetting. The /blog page looks a bit more feed-like now as well.

Oh, yeah, and the blog has Webmentions support now! Meaning that if you mention my blog from your website or on social media (Bluesky, Mastodon), it should appear alongside comments on the blog.

Also, if you had my button on your website, and you included the direct link, please update it like so, replacing https://files.damien.zone/88x31_damien.png with https://damien.zone/public/88x31_damien.png. I have set up a redirection on my server, so existing buttons don't break, but ideally that'd be temporary 😅

That's all!
- damien

Here it is, the new year! I can't say I'm especially overjoyed about it, but I'm also fine with leaving 2024 behind, so... you know.

At any rate, as you (maybe) can see, this website got a bit of an overhaul!
I spent a few days during my winter break re-implementing it using Eleventy.

Bearblog served me well for the past few months, but I knew that, at some point, I'd want to control everything... so here we are.

While the goal of this migration was to make a 1:1 copy of the way the site looked on Bear, I couldn't help myself and made a few tweaks here and there.

damien.zone January 2025 Release Notes

new favicon / avatar

Sage drew a lovely pixel-art version of my avatar! We spent a lot of time making sure it looks sharp as hell everywhere. The favicon shows up ~fine~ in RSS readers as well. I'll try to make a post documenting how all of this was done because some of the tricks I used are a little bit silly.

color palette changes

I also changed several aspects of the main design regarding contrast and colors. There are too many to list, so enjoy a comparison below:

Hopefully, these changes make the site a bit nicer to look at and read. I will continue iterating on it over time because these things are never finished.

layout / content changes

The layout is still very much based on the "Terminal" theme that Bearblog provides, but I tweaked the layout of a few pages:

• The homepage now has a shorter description, the list of recent posts, and that's it.
• I might experiment with the homepage a bit…Read more

You know, it always surprises me in the best way possible to see my website's button on other people's websites. I have literally no way of knowing who does it otherwise (because the file is hosted by GitHub so I don't have analytics, and I'm sure some folks re-host it themselves) so every time it happens it's a surprise. It's great.

Always appreciate it <3

- damien

Hello, little blog, it's been a while! The past two weeks have been uncharacteristically busy for me so, huh, I didn't write much here, oops!

I spent a week of vacation in Reno for definitely normal reasons. Turns out, being mostly offline with your friends and other freaks (complimentary) for a whole week is good??? Someone should look into this.

Then, as soon as I came back, my friend Joanna was in town to visit the Internet Archive, so I tagged along. I saw a bunch of very cool shit. Like, look at all this stuff!! Tell me this isn't cool as hell!! Excuse the shoddy photography job lmao.

I had other pictures, but they were all of Just Old Stuff. This is also just Old Stuff, but at least it's Devices! I'm never beating the nerd allegations.

Overall, meeting so many people and seeing so much stuff in the span of three nights was overwhelming but also great. The Internet Archive rules, man.

Finally, literally last night, I met with Nicky to give cohost 2 back to them. We then hung out at the Musée Mécanique. Given the "touristy" status of the place, I feel like I should have heard about it a long time ago, but it was my first time there, and it was super neat! Digital stuff is cool, but there's something just neat about seeing mechanical…Read more

Don't adjust your RSS reader, you're not seeing the same article twice. I just flip-flopped really hard with the whole comments thing. In my (now unpublished) previous article, I said I went with Chirpy for comments... well, I'm not using them anymore! Oops! I am now using Comentario! Comments are enabled on all posts, feel free to leave some!!
Sorry to those who already did 🙈 Read below for the details of what happened here.

Read more

#now playing: Pictures of Purple Skies by Memorex Memories

I have been enjoying the "no frills" aspect of running a blog on bear so far. the one thing I am missing from my previous blog setup, however, is a way to quickly experiment with the CSS of my blog.

while bear's dashboard has been pretty convenient to quickly edit some CSS variables, I feel if I want to do deeper edits the "tweak -> publish -> refresh" loop will feel like a slow to me.

so I did what I usually do in those situations: I write some JavaScript^[1] about it.

The code is on https://github.com/eramdam/files.damien.zone but the logic is pretty straightforward:

• run a web server running on localhost:3000 (I'm using fastify but i'm sure any web server thing for Node would work)
• run an instance of live-server in parallel (this one is key!)
• on every route, take the request's URL, transform the URL such that localhost:3000/foobar becomes damien.zone/foobar
• download the HTML from damien.zone/foobar, parse it, remove every stylesheets from it, and inject my own from the repo
• and lastly, inject a modified version of the injected.html file from the live-server repo, which will make the live reloading of stylesheets work

then the whole thing runs with a simple npm run start, I open localhost:3000 in my browser and.. it just works! I can edit my CSS freely and with instant feedback.

it feels like a very stupid solution but as I often like to say: "If it's stupid and it works, it's not stupid".

see ya,
- damien

---

1. or rather, TypeScript these days, I'm not a fool ↩︎

#now playing: BRAT by Charli XCX_

the past weekend, like the past week before it, has seen me go through a whole gamut of emotions.

the good, the bad, and everything in between, I feel I've gone through it all.

I keep telling myself that I feel very goofy for reacting so strongly about losing a website, and... I do still feel that way, but in the second part of the week, I realized that what I'm reacting to is losing the people I've interacted with, read and met on cohost. a space that truly felt special.

like I said in my previous article, cohost made me realize that I could just... do my little posts, be myself, cringe, sometimes annoying, loud, vocal about my interests and people would show up.^[1]

I think it will warrant a whole section of the article I will write about my "story with cohost" and online in general but I've come to realize that microblogging really, really isn't for me any more dude. or at the very least, not the version of it that Twitter^[2] presents as the "default".

for all its issues^[3], Mastodon has always felt like a "quieter Twitter". but it still had Numbers™️ and was still very much trying to emulate Twitter, despite what its creator might say. so I will definitely keep using it. the fact that I'm now running my own instance is also helping me feel like I have more control over it. but it will be for the "I ate an apple today, it was very juicy" type posts.

for everything else, I had cohost, and now I have damien.zone.

at any rate! the "goals" or at least "guidelines" I want to set for myself in this space are:

• be…Read more

So. cohost, huh?

If you're reading this, you probably know me from that place (or at least have heard about it) so I don't think it's really useful to try to give you the "elevator pitch".

what would a pitch be useful for anyway, right?

I have a lot I want to say about cohost. but I think the shutdown announcement is still too recent for me to be able to form any coherent thoughts yet.

the one thing that I will say about cohost is that it, as a site and "community"^[1], taught me that I can "exist online"^[2] without worrying about being "clean" or "proper" or "right".

most of my existence online was on micro-blogging platforms with short character limits and a high incentive to product the "One Good Take" about everything and anything. and I'm frankly done with that.

or at least I'm done with it being my only outlet for Thoughts online. and I have cohost to thank for for letting me experiment and find this out about myself.

I already have a website that I was planning on using as my new place for long/medium form writing but after trying (and failing) to get anything written there I came to a conclusion. my friend evie is right in that "you gotta make it easy to post".

as far as I can tell bearblog seems to strike a right balance between making it easy and letting me tinker with things while not letting me fall into what some might call "the developer's blog curse". so here I am.

erambert.me will still exist as "the website I give by default" both because I like the separation of "concerns" ('business card type site' versus 'just me writing') and also because so much is…Read more

A testbed page to test my CSS.

What's this page about?

It's an example page meant to show all the different things my website can show/support. Placeholder text from Hipster Ipsum

Cronut cloud bread small batch

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Gochujang veniam man bun waistcoat mukbang. Poke tousled succulents taiyaki schlitz. Lyft praxis biodiesel meh celiac kitsch tacos DIY marxism schlitz velit affogato. In food truck meggings eiusmod sus unicorn copper mug taiyaki photo booth veniam plaid. Aliqua distillery waistcoat edison bulb. Pork belly actually typewriter kickstarter, kombucha meh humblebrag. Ethical truffaut in, id affogato vice jianbing hell of non flexitarian sustainable thundercats…Read more