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).
Eggs
by Anton Zuiker on March 16, 2025
Abi Carter at Cat's Cradle (March 13, 2025)
On Thursday night, Erin and Oliver joined me at Cat’s Cradle Back Room for Abi Carter, winner of Season 22 of American Idol (we three watched this season from start to finish and enjoyed Carter’s beautiful voice). After the show, Erin bought t-shirts and Oliver got Abi’s autograph, telling her he’d just come from playing alto saxophone in the pit orchestra for the Carrboro High School Jag Theatre performance of Something Rotten!
“That’s sick,” she replied.
“Guess who just got on TikTok with a celebrity?” Oliver posted to our family chat on the way home.
I had no idea what Something Rotten! was about. I went to the show last night and laughed throughout at all the wordplay on Shakespeare—Omelette: The Musical (“It’s Eggs!”)—and references to American stagecraft. What a fun show, and the Carrboro kids rocked it. Oliver had solos from underneath, and we were so proud of him.
Eggs—egg prices!—have been in the news as a reference to the state of the economy (and ability of certain politicians to tell the truth). They are a punch line on t.v. and in my Bluesky stream, and the high schoolers last night worked it into the performance. Touché.
At home, our three hens are now laying their eggs in the same small coop but in a different part of our four acres. I’ve spent the last month creating a large fenced run for the chickens, gathering dead juniper trees from around our land to use as posts and hauling hundreds of rocks and small boulders to line the yard as protection from burrowing creatures. My friend Sid came by one Saturday to help with the wire fencing, and I’m spreading wood chips to connect the chick yard to the walking path I’m creating through the woods.
My project was inspired by the DIY instructions in Hentopia: Create a Hassle-Free Habitat for Happy Chickens; 21 Innovative Projects by Frank Hyman. Frank and his wife, Chris, wanted backyard hens and helped lead a successful effort to legalize them in nearby Durham in 2009. I’ve had Hentopia since our previous chicken coop up at the old brick house, and I paged through the book over the winter as I started planning the project. We’ve let the hens range the land but the hawks and owls and foxes and coyote other critters means we’re often running outside to protect them. My goal was to make a space where the hens could move about but be protected and safe. Soon as we add a top screen to the new run, we’ll have achieved the goal.
I also ordered three more Barred Rock pullets from Sunrise Oak Farm (between Durham and Hillsborough); these new chickens are in the garage for the moment but soon will join the hens. I paid $40 per bird back in January, but now the price is up to $54. Eggs!
Promoted
by Anton Zuiker on March 2, 2025
At the Duke Clinical Research Institute, I’ve been promoted to associate director of research communications and engagement.
This step up was one part of the vivid vision I created for myself last summer; I hoped to get this role before 2027, when I will reach my twentieth anniversary at Duke University. I wanted to apply what I’ve learned over the last few years, about being a better leader and coach, to this position in a department in which I have thrived since I joined in 2020. I’m grateful for the promotion.
A Chronicles rebrand
by Anton Zuiker on February 28, 2025
I’m excited to introduce a new brand for the Zuiker Chronicles:
The background
For many decades, my grandfather, Francis C. Zuiker, mailed his typewritten travel essays, which he called The Zuiker Chronicles, to his sons and daughters (and eventually his grandchildren). My father, aunts, and uncles followed with their own Zuiker Chronicles letters.
When I was in college and learning desktop publishing and newspaper layout with Aldus PageMaker on early Apple Macintosh computers, I designed an Anton Edition of the chronicles. Later, Erin and I sent our news from Vanuatu—Frank loved that I was a Peace Corps Volunteer just like my father and an adventure writer like himself.
We returned to the United States as the dotcom bubble was about to burst, but I dove into the web and created a website at zuikerchronicles.com (and zuiker.com) as a tribute to Frank the Beachcomber and to serve as a website community for the extended Zuiker family. Lots of other sites and social media tools made it hard to keep the family active on this website, but since those first days in July 2000, I have written a personal blog first at zuiker.com, then at mistersugar.com, and then again back here.
The first design for the Zuiker Chronicles website used an illustration of aspen trees that referenced the family campground in Wisconsin, which we called Raven’s Roost. From 2005 to 2015, I used a design featuring a raven and a font reminiscent of a vintage typewriter. The mistersugar brand, introduced in 2024, was based on a carved wooden pig that we brought back from Vanuatu.
Time for a new brand
I’ve wanted a new logo for the Zuiker Chronicles for years. As part of my vivid vision, I finally made it happen. At last summer’s Zuiker Family Reunion, two of my cousins got a Zuiker tattoo on their backs—they wanted to honor our grandfather, we found his signature at the bottom of one of his chronicles, and the tattoo artist in Breckenridge arfully recreated it on their skin. Jenny and Kathy almost got me to get the same the next day. I still might.
Home in North Carolina, a state from which many of Frank’s chronicles were written, I went looking for a local designer. But the community on Micro.blog connected me to Ning Kantida, a Thailand-based artist who likes to create letter designs. Ning was eager to help me create a new brand.
Turning to the turtle
For this update, I told Ning, I wanted to replace the raven with an Eastern box turtle to honor the land I live on in and to reflect my passion for recording the turtles I see on my walks in the woods—and to give a nod to my slow writing style. (See my turtle photos here. Uncle Larry sent me photos of tortoises he’d come upon while hiking in the West.)
I’ve written about sea turtles, too, and I have a carved wooden turtle bowl from Vanuatu. Once I shared a photo of that with Ning, we pivoted to using that to inform the logo.
So, we had grandpa’s signature and the sea turtle form. My last request was to have a element about writing: the previous brand referenced the typewriter, but I am constantly writing notes with a pen or pencil.
A professional
Throughout January, Ning methodically and artistically created the layers of the brand, with each emailed update wowing me with thought and detail. In my design brief, I had listed expected deliverables and I got what I hoped for, including the wordmark and logomark, color scheme and typography guide, and favicons.
Importantly, I also got a great partner for this project. I am delighted by the result. Thank you, Ning!
Next steps
I’ve already begun to code an updated Zuiker Chronicles. I hope to launch the new design in a few weeks. I’ll write up an explanation for that, too.
And, stickers.
Coda
Ning has a detailed explanation of her approach to this commission.
Family reality
by Anton Zuiker on February 28, 2025
On my way to and from soccer Wednesday evening, I listened to Alternate Realities, a three-episode report from NPR podcaster Zach Mack about a bet with his father as to which of 10 conspiracy theories would come true in 2024. I found this to be an enlightening story. It’s a sad story, too. And it hit so close to home. Here’s the two-minute series intro: