newsonaut
newsonaut
Mark Rogers
The newsonaut is Mark Rogers, a writer, designer and web coder living in beautiful British Columbia.
Latest Posts
There’s a steep hill at the end of the block that goes through a park with a nice view of the city. It’s the equivalent of about six blocks long. At one time, I would be huffing and puffing by the time I got to the top. If my wife was...
I took another stab at creating an 11ty site, and this time succeeded. Not only that, but I’ve decided to grow the Neocities blog I made into a work of fiction complete with story and character arc. There are many 11ty tutorials, but the...
When I’m travelling in another country and meet a fellow Canadian, there is a feeling like we can relax and relate. With anyone else, there is a bit of barrier, even if we’re trying hard to be friendly. Now that I’ve had a chance to...
So, Cauê Napier has created this nifty little thing you can add to your site called Town Square. Of course, I signed up for it right away and implemented it on Newsonaut. So where is it? Right over here. It's a joy to use. A stickman...
In my newfound zeal for the indie web, I joined the IndieWeb Webring. You can see my version of it at the bottom of the page. You get some code to copy and paste into your site, but as I soon discovered, the presentation can be whatever...
Those “Buy Me a Coffee” links have upset the anonymous Hakkerblog, who finds them annoying. No, I won’t buy you a coffee Gordon Mclean and Michael Harley have defended them as mostly harmless. Yes, buy me a coffee Re: No, I won’t buy you...
Gordon McLean and Case Duckworth had a good back-and-forth about typography and layout. Gordon says you should make your website uncluttered and easy to read. Case says there are reasons why you might not want to do that. Read for...
The one easy thing you can do to help surface indie blogs and websites is to link to them. That way, if someone comes across your site, you can help them continue on to similar sites. The best links are the ones in context. If you’re...
Robert Birming, who has a pretty great blog himself, is running a little thing called Junited, where participants give shoutouts to fellow bloggers they think more people should know about. This post will be updated throughout the month...
This is my submission for the June 2026 IndieWeb Carnival. The theme is “No way!?”, hosted by Alex Hsu. I saw “a11y” recently and it reminded me of my “No way!?” moment when I finally figured out, after years of puzzlement, what it...
I still see many websites where the main content is in a tiny sans serif font. Why do they go out of their way to make their words hard to read? I suspect it is due to outdated ideas from ye olde web. There was a time when people running...
No law says your archive has to be boring. You can nerd it up with stats, which I have done with my own archive. First, I figured out how to get Textpattern to automatically keep track of how many blog entries I made each year. I already...
Of course, there is a subreddit for RSS. Of course, someone there was able to provide me a link to the kind of explainer page I was musing about just a few days ago. To quote myself: I almost think it might be worth creating a one-page...
It used to be when you wanted to send an email to Newsonaut, you’d go through gmail.com. I recently switched to a newsonaut.com address, but it didn't take long for bots to scrape it and start spamming me. My solution was to convert all...
I’ve been trying to think of a better experience for people who click on an RSS link or button. It currently seems like gate-keeping. If you know what RSS is, you’ll figure it out. Everyone else will be baffled. Chrome shows you code,...