topology, some notes on

This page talks about how this personal website organizes it artifacts as resources to be consumed, viz. its information architecture; the presentation layer is discussed in /theme; to learn more about the person behind the website, see /who.

the information (the what)

there are many types of website and ways of naming them: corporate; brand; personal; news; information; etc. sometimes it is hard to distinguish between them, for example, a personal website could equally be described as a brand if all it contains are self-centered humblebrags and “week notes” full of superlative-prefixed achievements1.

this site falls into a few categories:

comments-off

because it eschews commenting (discus, webmentions, etc.); if you have anything to say, a rebuttal perhaps, then write something on your website and drop and email to notify me.

personal

because its centered about a person

slowweb

it takes time to write well, so a be grateful for the few posts that appear each year. nobody needs to post frequently.

indieweb-friendly

because it supports some IndieWebOrg building blocks, specifically some microformts data will be emitted using conneg

the proposition

The website is a situation. Not for passive consumption. It is a constructed moment where contradictions are exposed, and spectators are forced to engage critically.

Dada & Playfulness. Because we like to have fun and be whimsical.

Paradox as Critique. Sure, looks weird but is accessible.

Footnotes are a détournement. Not dry, academic, or afterthoughts. Instead, critical or subversive commentary.

Accessibility as Subversion. Making something intentionally weird and accessible is a direct challenge to the idea that radical or complex ideas must be exclusionary

the message (the how)

the message is stored in whatever is the most convenient form for the author and mangled into whatever is convenient for the reader

to get technical: data is stored as text, markdown, html, etc., and varied by the web server into an appropriate format for the user agent using http’s content negotiation (conneg).

the architecture (the where)

/

the index page: gotta start somewhere, and this is it

http’s content negotiation (conneg) is used to vary the response, which opens up a lot of possibilities (not least of which is annoying tantek who is so anti-conneg its worth implementing just to make a point)

/feed.rss

the principal rss feed for the website

/assets/

contains presentation layer assets (style sheets, fonts, etc.)

/assets/theme/<name>

contains a set of assets bundled together as the theme called <name>.

/app/<codename>

for applications that I develop, this contains various landing and associated pages, sometimes hand-wrangled HTML, mostly markdown because hand-wrangling HTML is not my idea of having a good time.

/b/<yyyy>/<slugname>-<id>

blog posts — organized by year then <slugname>-<ID>

/bot/<codename>

for bot and libraries that I develop, the user-agent is set to a resource at /bot/<codename>; this is so any sysadmin who bothers to examine their logs will have someplace to go when their curiosity is piqued2 or something has gone terribly wrong and they’re looking who to blame

/i

object by uuid-based reference; primarily to retrieve Activity Stream objects using ActivityPub

/e

ephemeral bullshit goes here

/my/<thing>

a place to share specific personal resources in a simultaneously memorable and also secure manner. e.g. my thumbnail picture is at “/my/thumbnail”. Thanks to some back-end magic, the actual resource returned will VARY based on who is asking for it (user-agent, peer address, etc.).

/w

writing — many words of wisdom are contained herein

/u

for use with ActivityPub, anything that’s user-oriented is here, i.e. inbox, outbox, etc.

$LastModified: 2026-05-14 14:56:16Z (Thu, 14 May 2026) $

Nobody needs to know about, nor do they care, that you “Had an excellent Asda pizza 😋”. You will be harshly judged: if you think Asda pizza is “excellent”", you either don’t know what the word means, or you have never experienced what a real pizza tastes like. If Brian Sewell were still alive he might pontificate thus: This is not merely misguided, it is a profound misapprehension of what excellence in edible form aspires to be. But to consider it excellent? It is, quite frankly, preposterous. ↩︎

Or “peaked” because, despite how much effort has been made on it, getting autocorrect to be grammer aware instead of being a dumb lookup, is too much to ask. Dammit, s/grammer/grammar. ↩︎