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.
My web, my writing
by Anton Zuiker on April 2, 2025
Little by little, I’m making progress on a new design for the Zuiker Chronicles. It will use the new brand by Ning but won’t look that much different than the current site: simple that is, with just my blog and its archives.
I’ve spent many hours over the last year comparing CSS offerings—Pico, Bulma, and others listed at State of CSS — but I’ve decided to use Mustard. Mustard is more than 10 years old at this point, and one that I contemplated using when I last designed the site (I’d really like to use the Stepper feature); it’s missing some of the features of more recent systems, like the light-dark theme switching. But I tell myself to just get this project done, and perhaps update to another CSS system later this year. There are easier ways of doing this, I know: just install a theme, replace the logo, and get to the writing. Part of the project, though, is to challenge my brain with the exercise of coding in CSS, HTML, and Textpattern.
I took a break last week to update my personal bio page at antonzuiker.com. That side project was faster because I used the elegant Tufte CSS. Updating my bio meant looking back on my service, my career, my education, even staring at the highs and lows of BlogTogether and ScienceOnline and Talk Story and The Long Table, my various attempts (with others) to foster community and more. There’s so much more than I’ve put on that bio page. I nodded in agreement when I read what Om Malik recently wrote (about a terrible day in his life):
Today, however, I woke up pretty early and somehow knew it was ten years later. The cosmos was reminding me of how far I had come.
On my bio page, I’m still using the sentence I wrote nearly 20 years ago: “I am a writer because my grandfathers wrote to me.” Their regular newsletters—travel chronicles and daily journal entries—to me and the extended family inspired me to want to document my steps, my flights, my meals, these conversations with others, our moments of joy and fear and awe and wonder.
I created Zuiker Chronicles Online (25 years!) to honor my grandparents and uncles and aunts and father and mother. I already was a journalist and magazine editor, now coming home from an unplugged Peace Corps service in the South Pacific, when the Internet offered up a new platform for this family tradition, this urge to share what we write. Immediately we had a reason: Frank the Beachcomber, our patriarch, was gone, and the words of love tumbled out. In the first years of Zuiker Chronicles Online, I experimented with ways to connect the far-flung family; in graduate school, I analyzed how “personal publishing software fosters online family”.
By then I was blogging on my own, for myself. Publicly, yes, but really to keep myself writing, learning, and learning to write. In this 2010 post, I noted my formula: “The more I write, the more I think. The more I think, the more I understand. The more I understand, the more I express.”
Last week, Manton Reece wondered” about why he writes and just how far his own online writing reaches:
That’s okay. The act of writing itself helps us think, helps us learn, helps us discover how we feel about a topic. It’s creative and has value even if no one is reading. It’s a snapshot in time to look back on later.
Dave Winer, always digging, is building WordLand, a writing tool that hooks into Wordpress. I’ve used most of Dave’s previous writing tools but I’m passing on WordLand since Textpattern is still my CMS and MarsEdit my main writing interface. I respect that Dave continues to advocate for a modern writing experience; he asks that we “write a blog post that explains why you believe in The Writer’s Web” and that, in part, is the reason for this post.
After all these years, the writer’s web I want is the one right here at my fingertips: a keyboard, a connection, a server, a site, and a page on which to “leave a record of my activities and losses and joys and interactions, a trace of my existence that will connect me to my loved ones here and now and in the future” (from this 2019 post).