Anthony Ciccarello

I love reading your blogs

2026-08-31T04:58:00Z

Today is BlogDay, a celebration of blogging and also the end to Blaugust, a challenge to write 31 posts in the month of August. I did not participate in Blaugust myself, but I have enjoyed reading people’s posts. In particular Thomas Vander Wal’s posts were a fun display of both technical and literary skill. But I also enjoyed Tantek and others. There’s lots of noise on the internet, but there is also a lot of cool stuff.

Some samples of my favorite parts of the internet:

Owls in Towels: cute photos and posts about raptor rehab
Island in the Net: great bird photography and personal reflections
UX Brad: thoughtful reflections on user interface design with lots of links
Molly White: crypto reporting tidbits, dog photos, book reviews, and a fantastic newsletter
To Ground: poetry and photography that makes me pause

Exploring the Interwebs

I’ve now amassed a large collection of sites I follow. I’m constantly pruning the list because I can’t read it all. But it feels better to read posts from real people than to consume hours of algorithm optimized video candy. Sometimes feeds go dark because life happens, but prompts like monthly challenges or blog carnivals have often incited some really great posts.

Another format I enjoy reading is weeknotes. Jamie Tanna posts them. It was the subject of one of Thomas Vander Wal’s Blaugust posts. Tracy’s posts are great in that they highlight some unique things from her week along with some fun things for her readers including interesting words, photos, and links. For example, this week featured a video of a recording of Move On Up by Curtis Mayfield, which is a jam. But she actually learned about that recording from Zachary Kai, another blogger.

While most of social media has an incentive to post more and more frequently to game the algorithm and get in front of people’s eyeballs, weeknotes feel like a much more moderate, reflective format. It’s by definition not posted more than once a week. Often people will post less frequently. It is backwards looking rather than chasing the “newest” or most recent.

I also like seeing what people are sharing. I think the post-substack explosion of newsletters recognized this. Before I got tired of keeping up with the noise, Garbage Day always had a “Some Stray Links” section at the end with fun rabbit holes. Because blogging generally doesn’t have an algorithm, people are the curators. I’ve discovered some of my favorite blogs because someone else shared a link.

My Ideal Post Format

I’ve resisted adding “repost” as a kind of post on my site. It’s a format that Twitter and others made popular, but that feels cheap to me. I don’t want to just parrot what others are posting. If I’m sharing it on my main feed, I want to have something to add; a summary, a personal anecdote. Ben Werdmuller does a fantastic job of this, adding his own experience to other articles, to the point that most of his link posts are longer than the average blog posts.

I haven’t written my own weeknotes because I don’t believe I can maintain a decent cadence. But I have a somewhat automated analog with my email newsletter. RSS feeds are the primary way I imagine people follow my posts, but I feed my week’s posts into a weekly MailChimp newsletter. What’s nice about this is it’s automatically sent out if I have posts. If I have one post or five, they all get bundled up and email subscribers don’t get spammed. If there’s nothing, there’s no email.

Recently Joe Crawford started a weekly newsletter in a similar format. What I like about his is that it collects a few different categories together. If you want to see his links, he has those. If you want to see his CSS Battle entries, those are grouped in a section. There’s something about the structure that feels less overwhelming. It’s not a mess of links; it’s a tree and you can follow the branches you want.

Cutting Through the Noise

I have posts on my site that don’t hit the main feed. In my mind, most of my likes and replies aren’t worthy of sharing with followers. Every once in a while I’ll override that for a generally applicable comment. But I try to be more signal than noise.

I hope that someday we have social readers that can better parse through feeds for different types of content. There are probably some RSS readers that already do this, but turning down the noise from a very active feed would go a long way. In particular, I want thoughtful blog posts to be elevated over other forms of chatter, but I still want to follow it all.

Maybe someday I’ll have my own weeknotes or a better structure for weekly emails. But until then, I’ll appreciate the posts of others. Because blogging isn’t just about creating “content”—it’s about sharing part of ourselves. And human connection is in my mind part of what makes life meaningful.

Short Note

2026-08-28T23:26:54Z

Sorry to those I sent multiple webmentions to. But in related news, my webmention sender now (theoretically) knows how to tell how many new posts there were since the last build. Will hopefully publish stable versions of the libraries soon.

Short Note

2026-08-27T05:22:41Z

I’m really satisfied to have fixed a couple IndieWeb libraries and website config issues. Too bad my ideas are far ahead of my ability to get things accomplished…

Short Note

2026-08-27T00:58:39Z

Thanks to some work by Jacob an 8 year bug with posting to wordpress from Omnibear should now be fixed!

Also posted to: news.indieweb.org

Photo Post

2026-08-26T07:20:30Z

I braved the heat and went and watched the Supergirl Surf Pro Competition again over the weekend. There was some really impressive surfing on both sides of the pier. I’m partial to the flow of the longboarding but of course the short board moves are also impressive. This is a big event that qualifies for the World Surf League with additional events like concerts, skateboarding, volleyball, and more.

It’s fun having so much activity down on the beach. This year I noticed some artist booths with artists working on new pieces while displaying their available works. There are also lots of sponsors. I got some nice free drinks from the vendors which was perfect on a hot day. I was surprised to enjoy a very-chocolatey coconut milk. At one point someone shoved a 6 pack of NA hops tea in my hands so I did end up taking something home.

If you can't see the video, you can download the file.

If you can't see the video, you can download the file instead.

Thought the line of pelicans in the sky really captured the scene (even if blurry)

Short Note

2026-08-24T01:27:50Z

Stares at collection of white border pieces. Welp I underestimated how long this puzzle was going to take by a long shot…

Short Note

2026-08-23T05:17:04Z

I’ve dialed back my TV show consumption recently. There are a lot of shows I want to watch but I feel like I’m busy enough already. It’s kinda nice having less to keep up with but I do still feel the FOMO.

Listen

2026-08-16T00:00:00Z

🎵 Listening to Diagnosis by Noa Bar.

Been really enjoying Noa Bar’s music after hearing the song Diagnosis on NPR. The vocals are funky and the strong bass gets me.

Photo Post

2026-08-14T05:46:05Z

The last church picnic of the summer closed out with an incredible sunset. It seemed like the sky kept getting more and more stunning. Images included in reverse chronological order with no digital editing other than cropping.

Short Note

2026-08-10T04:12:56Z

Thanks Joe for hosting HTML Day San Diego 2026. I had a great time exploring some CSS features I use less frequently while getting fresh air. Plus I met some great new people! It’s not much but I’ve published my HTML page with a few additional edit. As I expected there was a lot more I wanted to do but not enough time. But I really liked the relaxed atmosphere, learning without pressure, seeing what other people were doing, and getting a few zines. I look forward to the next time I can attend!

HTML Day San Diego 2026

2026-08-08T04:45:14Z

Bookmarked “HTML Day San Diego 2026”:

Let's write and celebrate HTML and hang out San Diego!

I’m excited to be attending this event in San Diego writing HTML in the park is tomorrow (Saturday August 8) in San Diego (among other places)! I think I have an idea of what I want to do but we’ll see how it goes. Thanks Joe for sharing a few ideas.

Finished Reading The peregrine by Baker, J. A. - ★★★

2026-08-03T10:00:00Z

This book had some fantastic passages. The detail that Baker captures about the life of a falcon is impressive and offers an interesting window into this bird of prey. But I struggle to see who I can recommend it to. I only see the most bird obsessed people making it to the end. It’s essentially a collection of detailed journal entries. But it’s not a novel. It’s kinda like a bunch of short stories that start to feel repetitive. While I get the sense that watching a peregrine stoop from high ...

Photo Post

2026-08-01T05:50:51Z

Was hanging out on the beach tonight and saw a SpaceX rocket. I’m not sure the world needs more Starlink satellites but it is a cool sight to witness. It’s interesting to see how the rocket changes as it gets higher into the atmosphere. It was already a cool sunset in it’s own right pre-rocket.

Photo Post

2026-07-31T05:49:38Z

Another season of travel is wrapping up. As hard as travel days and flight delays are, there is always something magical about seeing the world from above.

You don’t have to blog like me – Dan Q

2026-07-26T02:19:14Z

Bookmarked “You don’t have to blog like me” by Dan Q

This is your reminder that having a personal website entitles you to blog however you want. There are lots of patterns communities have developed but it’s basically all optional. The internet is yours!

Photo Post

2026-07-24T06:04:43Z

It was really great to be back on the lake in New Hampshire with family. Other than some smoke, the weather was great. The green trees were a welcome contrast to California dry sumer. We swam, kayaked to the island, picked blueberries, played chess, ate ice cream, and slept in. When I wasn’t busy hanging out with my sister’s 3 kids I listened to some audiobooks and worked on fun projects on my website tracking books and posting a bunch of stuff I’d been hoping to get around to. It was also fu...

My May 2026 Birdathon Results

2026-07-20T02:54:15Z

Caspian Tern looking for food in the San Diego River

This May I set some big goals for my birthday month. Coming off of a fun experience at the 2026 San Diego Bird Festival, I decided to share my hobby with my friends and family. Most people know that I’m into birds to an almost comical level. But many people have never gone birding themselves. There are many ways to go birding, and not all of them need to be intense. But for myself, I was planning a lot of birding. And the main event was a “birdathon”. On May 9th, I left the house at 6 AM to ...

André Staltz — From coder to curator

2026-07-16T02:22:28Z

Bookmarked “From coder to curator” by André Staltz

I don’t claim to know what the future holds for AI software. But I this post aligns most with where I see the industry going in the short term. As a senior engineer I spend a lot of my time reviewing code, questioning assumptions, and ensuring quality. The current AI models are really good at spotting out lines of code and agents can be configured to be better at writing tests. But they fall short at holistic quality. They can refactor code and get it working but they often make a mess that b...

Short Note

2026-07-10T15:37:35Z

Omnibear v2.3.0 has been release with some improvements to the login flow. But more importantly, it is now available in the Chrome Web Store! If you have a website that supports Micropub, check it out.

Short Note

2026-07-08T05:46:49Z

Had some fun with the site recently and added some new pages/functionality: added animations between pages (when opening posts) improved caching to faster page loads updated search page components added more hats

Photo Post

2026-06-15T07:00:44Z

Raptors are so cool. I had a great time watching and interacting with this Harris Hawk and Lanner Falcon with Total Raptor eXperience in La Jolla. Such amazing birds with unique abilities that fit unique niches in ecology. It takes a lot of dedication to raise one of these birds but it was fun to spend a few hours with them.

Short Note

2026-06-13T06:36:41Z

I now have bird stats on my website pulled from my ebird profile!

How I converted my Instagram export to Markdown

2026-06-11T03:02:16Z

2026 Preface Back in 2022 I imported my photos from Instagram to my site. I started with Instagram’s official export file and converted to markdown files which is the format my site uses. While I worked on the import I started documenting my process. But my draft post lagged and sat unpublished for years. Tonight at Homebrew Website Club, Joe referenced working on importing Instagram posts to his site. There are a few projects similar projects (e.g. memento-mori and Instaloader) but they have...

Photo Post

2026-06-03T16:11:49Z

Spangled Cotinga

Had lots of fun with the camera at the San Diego Safari Park with my sister. So many cool animals and fun scenes. It’s not every day you see a man walking an aardvark or a zookeeper named Fern. I finally caught a (poorly lit) glimpse of the platypus. I also saw the Sand Cat for the first time (very cute). Of course I loved the aviaries; one even reminded me of birding in Costa Rica. Fern with a Eurasian Eagle Owl The Burrowing Owl eventually came out to say hi A unique view of an Aardvark Sci...

Photo Post

2026-06-01T05:43:00Z

One of my favorite annual events in oceanside is the Beach Soccer Championship. It’s a unique variation of soccer and really fun to watch. The field and teams are small, it is faster pace, you can get close to the action, there are lots of bicycle kicks, and the atmosphere is relaxed like a surf competition. I’ve now been able to bring a sibling 2 years in a row too. Players from the Tahiti team performing a dance before the men’s pro championship

Photo Post

2026-05-27T06:33:00Z

Hooded oriole

Thanks to everyone who came out to my birding birthday walk yesterday. I had a great time hosting and sharing my love of birds with you all. And the group spotted quite a few birds themselves and had great questions. The full list of species is posted on ebird if you are interested. I didn’t take a ton of photos but here are some of the fun ones. Song sparrow House wren butt. This parent was busy feeding a nest full of noisy chicks.

Photo Post

2026-05-25T07:36:00Z

Caught this wild view on my last flight home from the east coast. I’ve never seen the last glows of sunset from above. Was even more wild in motion with a slight parallax effect.

Photo Post

2026-05-17T02:54:31Z

Thanks to my family for coming out this morning. It was fun sharing the birds with both the kids and adults. The indigo buntings and orioles were a big hit and it was really cool having the bald eagles to fly over for us. Even with the big group we still encountered 32 species! Also, thanks to my cousin Jude for capturing some photos.

Photo Post

2026-05-16T19:54:31Z

It’s nice to be on the east coast in May. I love seeing all the spring growth.

Short Note

2026-05-15T04:00:00Z

Okay, I’ve set the times for my open birthday bird walk. If you are in the San Diego area and want to come birding with me, you’re welcome to join! Date: Monday May 25 (Memorial Day) Time: 5:00 PM Location: Batiquitos Lagoon (7380 Gabbiano Ln, Carlsbad, CA 92011) Kids are welcome as are any bird-curious friends! If you have a pair of binoculars, bring them. If not there will still be plenty to see and hear. I’ll have a couple extra pairs. If you have an extra pair of binoculars you’re willi...

Short Note

2026-05-10T07:23:43Z

Okay, I’m calling it there. After wandering around town in the dark for an hour, I did eventually find a Great Horned Owl hooting. After reviewing my photos I realized…I’m not cut out for reviewing photos. Well, at least I’m only adding one more species. There’s a pretty clear a Brandt’s Cormorant with a bright blue throat in a picture on the bait barge so I’m confident I can add that. I still need to review the terns but I got some decent sound ID down in Imperial Beach so those have already...