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).
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.