A return to El Mozote
by Anton Zuiker on May 26, 2025
The Truth of El Mozote, in the New Yorker (Dec. 6, 1993)
Throughout its centennial year, the New Yorker is inviting its contributors to revisit notable works from its archive. They didn’t ask me, but I’m offering my take anyway, on the long feature that made up nearly the entire Dec. 6, 1993 issue.
In December 1993, I was a year-and-a-half out of college and living with my father and a brother in Honolulu. I was working two jobs, joining a djembe drum circle under a banyan tree one night a week, surfing on the weekends, and running on my lunch breaks. I was active, overstimulated, exhausted, and lonely—the love of my life was still in college (and studying in Austria for the semester), and I still had hopes of being an accomplished magazine journalist, a Peace Corps Volunteer, a globetrotting pacifist.
One day after my shift as a corporate writer, I walked to nearby Ala Moana Mall and into the Honolulu Book Shop, where I browsed the shelves of magazines. There was the new issue of the New Yorker, with its colorful cover art (In the Field, by Owen Smith) showing Death stalking campesinos in a field of maize, the wrapper blaring “The Massacre at El Mozote.” That’s all the editors were promoting for this issue, which was devoted entirely to the single long feature report, by Mark Danner, about a 1981 massacre at a mountain village in El Salvador.
At John Carroll University, the Jesuit university outside of Cleveland, I had studied liberation theology and narrative nonfiction, learned about the martyrdom of Archbishop Óscar Romero and Cleveland’s own Dorothy Kazel, and read dense, intense novels in a class called Latin American Dictators in Literature. This investigation about El Mozote, naturally, was something I had to read. I purchased the magazine and walked home.
Danner’s report opens as a team of specialists, arriving in El Mozote 11 years after the massacre, carefully excavate the ruined church and its skeletons. “By the next afternoon, the workers had uncovered twenty-five of them, and all but two were the skulls of children.” The murders of the children, and the men and women, too, will be described in horrific detail later. Across 80 pages of the magazine, Danner gives a clear and compelling recounting of the killings, as well as focus on the Salvadoran military personalities and the U.S. political pressures that mixed in this small nation and allowed such an atrocity to occur.
By early 1992, when a peace agreement between the government and the guerrillas was finally signed, Americans had spent more than four billion dollars funding a civil war that had lasted twelve years and left seventy-five thousand Salvadorans dead.
I read The Truth of El Mozote in its entirety that December. Danner’s reporting enlightened me. It saddened me. It inspired me anew to a life of writing and justice. It also hooked me on the New Yorker, and I have read most of the issues of the magazine over the last 30 years, sitting in coffee shops, standing in commuter trains, and swinging in hammocks (I paid the international subscription rate to get the magazine at my Peace Corps village in the South Pacific).
I’ve always remembered the tragedy in that first purchase, which I still have. I found it in a box of saved magazines and I reread it over the last few days, taking notes.
The killings of hundreds of men, women, and children at El Mozote during the El Salvador civil war in 1981, wrote Danner, “represented the climax of the era of the great massacres.”
That’s a line that comes toward the end of the report, and for a moment, sitting on the patio in front of a fire, a gentle rain falling on this Memorial Day, I naively read that as a larger hope for humanity. But I realized that the Rwandan genocide would unfold five months later, then the Srebrenica massacre (July 1995), 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, later the Mariupol theatre airstrike (2022), the October 7 attacks by Hamas on Israel and Israel’s subsequent scorched-earth response in Gaza (2023-2025). Sadly, war and terror and massacres continue.
It was not the last of them—most notably, in August of 1982 the Atlacatl, in an operation similar to that in El Mozote, killed some two hundred people at El Calabozo, in the Department of San Vincente—but after El Mozote the Army relied less and less on search-and-destroy operations that entailed large-scale killings of civilians.
El Salvador survived, and peace prevailed. Sadly, that nation has returned to the pages of the New Yorker as the current administration begins to send money and deportees to a prison there.
Another bite at Feedland
by Anton Zuiker on May 22, 2025
On Micro.blog, I noted that I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running. This is a longer post to explain the why and how of the accomplishment.
As I’ve detailed numerous times over the last 25 years, I read what Dave Winer writes every single day, and even though I’m in a long-term relationship with Textpattern, I try as many of Dave’s writing and publishing tools as possible.
Each solution of Dave’s seems to evolve into his next project, and it’s been fascinating to see the threads woven through his decades of innovation—I had no idea until this week’s post that he had created his first static site generator, called Autoweb, in 1995. As Dave ‘keeps diggin’ I try to keep up, and I try to remember to gather the results. I recently created a one-page archive of the posts I published with my self-hosted installation of the now-defunct 1999 blogging program. After 1999, Dave developed Drummer, and I’m still using that (albeit less frequently) to blog at Yumi Stap Storian.
Currently, Dave is developing WordLand, an interface for writing and publishing to WordPress. I haven’t tested this yet.
In March, Dave forecasted the end of Feedland (at both feedland.org and feedland.com). Feedland is a “web service for managing lists of feeds, sharing them with other users.” Like its precursors (River5, River4, River3), Feedland has been a valuable way for me to subscribe to newsfeeds and share the ‘river of news’ that brings me new information and insights every day. In Feedland, the presentation of these rivers is called a “news product.” I’ve had one of these dedicated to feeds from across Duke University (where I work) at dukeriver.news.
There are a lot of good feedreader apps and services available today, but I like the challenge of running my own tools. (I don’t do crosswords or Spelling Bee or Wordle to keep my neurons elastic.) There’s a way to self-host Feedland, detailed here. I first tested that in January 2023 but stepped back to use the hosted version. Now that that’s going away, I’m happy to say I’ve got my own instance of Feedland running now on a server with my web host, OpalStack. This took a couple of nights of fumbling with the terminal, remembering how to set a PATH and get Forever to run, learning how to tell the OpalStack server to use version 20 of node.js, and closely reading the Feedland server install setup instructions.
One small delineation for me on the “Create your database” step: In OpalStack, I created a database through the control panel and then logged into this new database with OpalStack’s web-based database administration tool called Adminer, then pasted the setup.sql commands. First time, no good; second time, I realized I had to take out the first command to create the database (duh, I was already in the database).
Success! I now had my own install of Feedland. I imported the feeds I’d saved out of Feedland.org and I was immediately able to pick up reading where I left off.
The next night, I tried to tackle the extra features, which will give a user (me!) a way to have a linkblog, not unlike the Radio linkblogs I used to run using Dave’s software. (I archived my Radio3 linkblog and Radio2 linkblog.) This step in the Feedland configuration relies on the Amazon AWS S3 service. A long time ago, I used S3 for another of Dave’s tools (World Outline, I think), but I’ve since lost whatever small bit of competence I had with AWS. After a night of bumbling about, I decided to cut my losses and pause on these features.
So that left one last important part of Feedland—the news products.
In the config file, I set flNewsProducts to true, and after some testing of the menu link to “My news product…”, I determined that in the config file urlNewsProducts needed to be set to “https://feed.stor.im/newsproduct?username=” and now the link from within Feedland sends me to my news product. I did the same for a new dukeriver account, and then I updated PagePark (another Dave software!) to feed these news products using the urlSiteContents config settings in news.mistersugar.com and dukeriver.news.
So, a second layer of success. I now run my own installation of Feedland and I can continue to offer the Duke River of News (alas, I’m not sure anyone uses it, but I try).
The Chronicles at 25
by Anton Zuiker on May 12, 2025
This coming July, the Zuiker Chronicles will have been online for 25 years.
I last updated the look in 2015, so clearly the site needed a refresh. Over the last year, I’ve been reviewing CSS frameworks, testing new fonts, studying the ways Textpattern has evolved, and deciding which parts of the site to keep and which to change.
Logo
First up was the logo, and in February I unveiled a new brand. The Zuiker Family totem, the raven, has served this site well for 25 years, but I wanted to focus on an animal that has been meaningful to me and my children: the sea turtles of St. Croix and the Eastern box turtles here on our own property inspired our new brand. They love it.
CSS
My next decision was which CSS package to use. The State of CSS annual developer survey was a great resource and I looked at a dozen of the options. I really like Pico. However, years ago I found Mustard and liked the look and feel of that—especially the Steppers component. The developer who created Mustard lives in Raleigh although he’s not actively changed the framework. Turns out it was fine just as he left it. I even learned how to compile with Sass so my stylesheet has only the components I need for the site.
Then, fonts
Ning, the designer for the brand, recommended I move away from Concourse and Equity (thanks for a decade of service, Matthew Butterick!). I’d become a member of the SimpleBits Secret Type Club so I had use of all the cool typefaces by Dan Cederholm. Ning and I decided Paint Factory would be good for page and post headlines, but when I started to code the site, Wilco Loft Sans felt better (and its Chicago connection matched the family history, too). Secondary headlines are in Bitter (I also bought the super fun Robots font from that Argentine studio). Body text is Figtree.
Textpattern, of course
Zuiker Chronicles Online has been on the Textpattern content management system since 2005. There was no doubt that I would keep using it. I am indebted to the volunteer developers who have improved and expanded the CMS through the years (building on Dean Allen’s initial gift to us). On top of that, the Txp Forum is one of the most civil, positive, affirming places on the Web, and I salute the Txp community.
I’m especially grateful for the developer preview that’s now built into Textpattern. Without this design-and-test functionality (and Nova, the code editor I used to test my initial page layout ideas), I’d surely still be working on this relaunch well past the July anniversary.
The result
Yesterday I flipped the site over to the new design. I feel incredibly proud of this, satisfied with the focus and dedication and learning it took for me to accomplish this, grateful for the resources I have to do this, and humbled by the talented and caring people in my family, my community, and all around me.
In addition to the new look, there are a few changes to the site I want to mention.
Zuiker Chronicles Online long ago became my personal blog. I wanted to keep the page structure simple. I struggled to find a good way to include site navigation, and so I decided to emulate Jim Nielsen, who offered a creative way to present the navigation. Nielsen uses flat files, and Txp is dynamic, but I found a way to make a Menu for my site. It does force an extra click or two, but it keeps the rest of the site cleaner. We’ll see how it ages.
On mobile devices, the brand at the top of the page is just the turtle logo. That means there’s no visible name to the site. That’s ok; just start reading.
I used to have a Now page to reflect my main activities each month—family, work, house, soccer, writing—but I have moved that over to my personal page at antonzuiker.com, which serves as my brief bio and resume.
The About page is shorter but still honors Frank the Beachcomber.
I updated the Books page to better highlight my dad’s memoir, my grandpa’s autobiographical novel, an uncle’s book about hiking in Arizona, and, I hope, others to come.
There’s now a proper footer to the page. Note the link to the offsite family tree, which will be a next project to get that looking better and with more genealogy.
That Steppers component? I used it for the Changelog page, a new feature to give a timeline of key changes to this site and to recognize the artists and others who have helped me make this site unique through this last quarter century. To make that timeline complete, I dug up the original files for the very first web pages I had uploaded to the small Internet service provider in Northern Ohio.
And with that full circle, I thank each and every one of you who have come to this site, whether once or twice or over and over, to read about the Zuiker Family and how we chronicle our time on this amazing planet.
A new design
by Anton Zuiker on May 11, 2025
The Zuiker Chronicles Online is sporting a new look. I’ll write a longer post in the next day or two to explain what I’ve done. Until then, see the Changelog with a brief history of this site.
Double vision
by Anton Zuiker on April 17, 2025
Anna arrived home in North Carolina yesterday after a three-week visit to her grandfather in Honolulu and her nine-month volunteer experience in Sacramento. I picked her up at the airport (RDU), where the yellow cabs were lined up waiting for visitors needing a ride. The sides of those cabs are emblazoned taxi taxi.
That’s funny, I thought, because the airport Anna had departed from, Daniel K. Inouye International Airport (HNL), is famous for its shuttle bus called Wiki Wiki, which inspired Ward Cunningham as he created the first wiki, or user-editable website, which he called the WikiWikiWeb. I was a rider of the Wiki Wiki shuttle when I lived in Honolulu from 1992 to 1995.
Meanwhile, the day before taxi taxi and wiki wiki, a group of Carrboro and Chapel Hill residents marked the third anniversary of their group news site, which they call Triangle Blog Blog (tag line: ‘silly name, smart ideas’). I wanted to drop in on the party—beer, pierogis, and cake!—to cheer on Jon and Melody and the others and thank them for their community advocacy, but I was already feeling a scratchy throat and didn’t want to have them feeling like I’m feeling today (sneeze, sneeze).
Here at home, we’ve just celebrated Anna’s birthday with tuna, carrot cake, gifts, and conversation. Anna reported that she had enjoyed her time with Abu Joseph and Abu Dot, and even got to hike with our friends Blaine and Rebecca—long ago, Blaine and I and Anna went hiking here in the sandhills of North Carolina before she’d even turned one! Tonight Anna said some of her best times in California over the last year were hiking Pt. Reyes seashore with me and Erin and in Yosemite National Park with her fellow volunteers.