I was recording a podcast with my friend John today, and he had some great writing advice: when inspiration strikes, stop and write the first draft immediately. The idea is that your energy comes through in the words you write. When you care about something, people can tell. On the flip side, when writing feels like a chore, your writing suffers.
I was thinking about this after the podcast today, and I agree that you should capture the thought when an idea energizes you. Gerald Weinberg mentioned that technique in his book The Fieldstone Method. But for me, ideas take time to fully develop, and my best writing often comes out in the editing process.
Writing is also a skill that can be perfected, just like any other. Just because I don’t feel like writing doesn’t mean I must write poorly, the same as if I don’t feel like playing the piano, I must play poorly. That said, when I can feel the notes I’m playing, the music sounds better. So maybe John is onto something.
No, I think that’s it. Writing is a skill, and skills take practice to achieve mastery. Mastery—when my technique feels natural—is where I find true enjoyment in anything and do my best work.
I guess what I’m saying—and I’m saying this to myself as much as to anyone else—is just write. Write when you don’t feel like it, and especially write when the mood strikes because those are the moments when you’ll really feel the music.
How I used 1990s technology to avoid writing JavaScript.
Have you heard of webmentions?
They’re similar to pingbacks—but
modern—and allow websites to notify each other about different types of
activity (like replies on social media). As of 2017, the protocol is a W3C
recommendation.
Here’s an example:
When I post a link to this article on
Mastodon, Mastodon sends a
request back to my website every time someone likes, reposts, or replies to it.
I can then display that activity here on my own website (see the bottom of this
article). When I post an article here, I can also send webmentions to any
websites I mention (link to).
In the case of Mastodon, it’s actually a tad more complicated than that; because
Mastodon doesn’t send webmentions natively, there’s a service I use—called
Bridgy—to watch Mastodon and send me webmentions on its behalf.
The problem with webmentions and static sites
I wanted to add webmentions to my blog but had a problem. I use a static site
generator (Jekyll) to build my website. That means I
can’t receive webmentions and process them dynamically without using a 3rd-party
service, like Netlify
Functions. I want my blog to
run forever, though, and I’ve found serverless functions challenging to maintain
(Node.js, gross). Also, I’m not an expert on the Webmention
protocol
and didn’t want to maintain my own implementation.
Fortunately, there is a 3rd-party service specifically for handling
webmentions: Webmention.io. Webmention.io is an
endpoint for receiving webmentions on your behalf, providing an API that returns
well-formatted JSON. There are even plugins for various static site builders,
including Jekyll. Most
of them query the Webmention.io API at build time and bake in the webmentions
for each URL, and/or use client-side JavaScript to grab new webmentions on every
page view.
I like my websites to be fast. That’s why I use a static site generator to
render plain HTML pages in the first place—servers are much quicker when
requesting static pages. I also like the generator to be fast, and querying an
API (like Webmention.io) to fetch the webmentions for each page at build time is
slow, even with caching. Since Jekyll can render JSON files directly from the
file system, I really want to store my webmentions with the rest of my static
files and even push them to my git repository for permanent archiving.
Webmention.io can also send Webhooks.
Instead of querying an API every time I build my blog, I could listen for
incoming webhooks, save the JSON with the rest of my files, and then regenerate
the blog (or, better yet, just the mentioned page). For that, I’d still
need a dynamic endpoint, but a much simpler one—it just had to authenticate an
HTTP POST request and write the JSON data in the request body to disk.
Adding webmentions to this blog
I still didn’t want to use a 3rd-party service to host an HTTP endpoint, and I
didn’t want to manage a server process; I wanted a
cgi-bin. When I
started building websites over 20 years ago, I used Perl and CGI to run simple
scripts, like a guestbook (I wrote my
own). I prefer Ruby these days—and Perl has deprecated
CGI—but could that approach still
work? I thought it would be fun to try. It turns out it does work!
By this point, I was full-on coding like it was 1999, and I needed a web server—so
obviously, I reached for Apache. Apache still
supports mod_cgi, and
although
deprecated, Perl
still supports CGI (and, as a one-time popular legacy
system, will
probably continue to do so for some time.)
Since I was hosting my blog at Netlify (which cannot run Apache
directly), I created a $5/month cloud server at
Hetzner. After some basic security hardening, I
installed Apache and configured it to serve Jekyll’s _site directory (where
it saves the static files). I then added a simple Perl script to Apache’s
cgi-bin directory, and after fiddling with file permissions, I had a working
endpoint for processing webhooks from Webmention.io.
Here’s how the whole thing works:
Apache serves the static _site directory generated by Jekyll.
When Webmention.io receives a new webmention, it sends a webhook to
/cgi-bin/webmention at my website, invoking a process to run my Perl CGI
script.
The Perl script authenticates the request; if valid, it saves a new file
in Jekyll’s _data directory.
I also run jekyll build --watch on the server, which regenerates the site
when the file system changes.
I periodically commit those new files and push them to GitHub for archiving.
That’s it. Now that I had new webmentions saved in my Jekyll project, I could
display them using Jekyll’s Liquid
templates. You can see all the webmentions
for this article below the closing paragraph—and if you like or repost it on
Mastodon,
Reddit, or
Bluesky, you’ll also appear here.
What about monitoring and reliability? My Perl script had a bug when I first
tested this, meaning incoming webmentions were lost. Webmention.io doesn’t retry
webhooks; even if they do, it’s nice to know when things are failing. For that,
I use a product we built at work—Hook Relay. Hook
Relay sits between Webmention.io and my site and retries webhooks if my script
fails or my site is down. I can also see all of the sent requests, which is
handy!
Following a long break (too long!), we’re back in the studio. I give you FounderQuest episode 100 🎙️
FounderQuest is a weekly(ish) podcast from the founders of Honeybadger.
We’re Josh and Ben — two founders with one foot in engineering and the other in business. About ten years ago, we we joined forces with Starr to create an error monitoring product called Honeybadger. The product was very successful, but we decided to stick to our bootstrapping roots and stay tiny. Although Starr has moved on, Josh and Ben continue to share their journey — both the past and the future.
This is the 2023 annual update for the journalism-focused Mastodon
server that I started on a whim last year. It was originally published at open
collective.
It’s been a wild year for social media, with Twitter in turmoil and myriad
upstarts competing to be the alternative. I launched
federated.press in November 2022 as a refuge for
journalists and supporting folks during the largest-ever Twitter exodus—back
when X was still Twitter. Since then, we’ve grown to over 2,300 users, with
roughly 200-300 active every month. Our members include freelance and
independent journalists, congressional
correspondents, news
organizations, trade
unions, and plenty of regular folks like myself.
Here’s a recap of our first year.
In January, we joined the Open Collective
Foundation, a 501(c)(3) fiscal
host. Being sponsored by OCF
means we can accept tax-deductible donations—which is important since servers
aren’t cheap! (To help us keep the lights on, please become a monthly
supporter.) OCF
has been an invaluable partner and has saved me a lot of time in administrative
work.
In March, we announced a community partnership with a fact-checking project,
News Detective. News Detective is part of
MIT’s Sandbox Innovation Fund Program, and they’re working with journalism
students and the public to promote media literacy. We worked together to test a
custom Mastodon
integration that
integrated federated.press with their fact-checking
platform, making it easier to crowdsource
fact-checking of content on Mastodon.
Throughout the year, I also struggled with our hosting provider in a futile
attempt to keep costs down. Without getting too technical, when we started, we
were hosted by Amazon Web Services (AWS), a popular cloud hosting provider. AWS
is great for high-availability services (like Mastodon) that need to scale up
quickly, and they provide redundancy in case of unexpected failures. That’s
great for solo operators like myself, who are working (very) part-time.
Unfortunately, AWS is also quite expensive. Early on, it became clear that we
needed extra resources to guarantee a reliable service to our users. Still, I
was already spending much more than we were bringing in: monthly donations were
~$12/month, but our total operating costs were ~$250/month and growing. As the
person who took the initiative to launch federated.press, I was paying the
difference (and still am).
Since I was already well over my budget for funding this project, I couldn’t
justify adding additional resources; instead, I paid personally by responding to
intermittent outages, often during my work days and evenings. I won’t lie—it was
stressful. I knew I’d burn out if I didn’t find a more sustainable option. So, I
began to research other hosting providers. I didn’t want to be the only person
on-call for the server anymore, so I needed to find a managed hosting
provider—someone who knew how to run Mastodon.
Enter Jeff Brown of Fourth
Estate and Honeytree
Technologies. Jeff is a technologist like myself,
and in addition to already running Newsie.social (one
of the largest news/media Mastodon servers) and recently taking over management
of Journa.host (a server for verified journalists), he
owns a web services company that offers managed Mastodon
hosting. With Jeff’s expertise in
technology and journalism and with Mastodon in particular, Honeytree seemed like
a good fit for federated.press.
In October, Jeff and I discussed the technical requirements and logistics of
migrating federated.press from AWS to a new dedicated server provided by
Honeytree. We set a date for the migration—October 13, 2023. I scheduled a few
hours of downtime for that day via our status
page, and we were all set.
When Friday the 13th rolled around (a date that didn’t escape
me), Jeff and his team worked
to move our database and file storage to the new server. Everything went well,
and we were back up within the scheduled maintenance window with a new, faster,
cheaper server.
How much cheaper? So far, we’re paying Honeytree roughly half of what we paid
AWS and other managed services in September. Our September hosting expenses were
$298.79, and we’re paying Honeytree a flat $149/month for a fully-provisioned
server. Best of all, performance has been significantly better and more stable
since the migration. Thanks, Jeff and team!
That brings us to today, November 3, 2023—one year after I first registered the
federated.press domain name. Has it all been worth it? If you’d asked me a few
months ago, my answer may have been different, but today it’s yes—definitely
worth it. I’ve learned a ton, met some really exciting people, and have had
the opportunity to support the journalism community—something that has become
increasingly important to me over the past few years. I’m also grateful to our
members, especially those who have offered encouragement or contributed
financially to help keep federated.press up and running. There is much work to
do, but I still believe that ActivityPub and Mastodon are important
contributions to the World Wide
Web, and I’m glad that we’re a
small part of that.
I recently used the phrase “aggressively part-time” to describe the culture and
work ethic at Honeybadger. We typically work on Honeybadger for 20-30 hours a
week. To get things done, we have to be focused and efficient.
This approach allows us to maximize the time we spend on life outside of
work.
I’ve been thinking about applying this concept to the rest of my life. Work is
just one area where I desire progress. I want my relationships, interests, and
hobbies to improve too.
In family life, I want to become a better partner to my wife and father to my
children and to enjoy meaningful experiences together.
I want to expand my knowledge and improve my thinking to grow intellectually and
solve problems.
I don’t want to have hobbies—I want to be good at them. I want to develop
skill and experience success in each area.
These areas encompass my life goals.
Each area demands focus to improve. But, like work, I can’t pursue everything at
once—I need to prioritize.
Aggressively part-time leaves room for your other endeavors—whatever they may
be.
The thought haunted me at night. Like Billy was about to do, I’d said the
sinner’s prayer as a young child—probably three or four years old—and I’d meant
it, too. I didn’t want to go to hell. A few years later, it turned out that
going to hell was kid’s stuff. Don’t get me wrong, I still feared the Devil. But
now I also feared the guillotine.
The guillotine—that shining death implement from the French Revolution. That
chopper of heads. I hadn’t learned about France or the revolution yet, though. I
was too young. To me, the guillotine was something to look forward to if you
didn’t get taken in the rapture.
Billy was unlucky enough to live during the seven-year period known as the Great
Tribulation, after God called the true believers to heaven in an event known as
“the rapture.” Following the rapture, the remaining Christians—and those who
hadn’t converted—were left to endure God’s wrath on the earth. They would
ultimately face the Antichrist, a world ruler who would force humanity to
renounce Christ and take the “mark of the beast”—a physical mark on the hand or
forehead. Those who refused would be killed. So for Billy, the only path to
salvation was a literal, physical death by execution—but only after asking Jesus
into his heart.
The story of Billy’s conversion and subsequent death was from a film called
Image of the Beast—the third in a four-part film series from the 1970s-80s
called A Thief in the Night. The films tell the story of the biblical rapture
and tribulation foretold by the book of Revelation. Events unfold on a
pretribulationist timeline, where all true Christians are taken bodily into
heaven before the tribulation begins—leaving a remnant behind.
A Thief in the Night was my first encounter with apocalyptic Bible prophecy. It
was also my first encounter with anti-government conspiracy theories—themes that
had already consumed my parents when I was born in the early 1980s. They’d both
converted to evangelical Christianity in the decade that saw Nixon resign
following the Watergate scandal, the end of the Vietnam War, and the birth of
the Religious Right in the wake of the social movements of the 1960s.
For the past decade, my dad had researched and written a newsletter and two
books on the Trilateral Commission—a nongovernmental international organization
founded by David Rockefeller in 1973. The group’s stated purpose was to foster
closer cooperation between the United States and its allies in Asia, Western
Europe, and North America. Some people (like my dad) sensed nefarious plans,
however. They said that the group was a conspiracy of a globalist elite working
across governments to bring about a new world order.
In the first film—titled eponymously, A Thief in the Night—the United Nations
uses the crisis following the rapture to establish a one-world government. Those
who don’t pledge loyalty to the new government by receiving the Mark of the
Beast are quickly arrested, except for those who escape to form a militant
underground resistance. A series of escalating conflicts follow, leading to
insurgent warfare and the systematic execution of dissidents by the UN-backed
government.
The films are poorly made. The goal is not to entertain, but to save souls by
scaring the audience into repentance and salvation. For many, the story should
seem more silly than terrifying. The fear comes from believing that it’s
true—that the same events will soon play out in the real world. Little is left
to the imagination; the second film—A Distant Thunder—opens with a message
scrolling up the screen like an FBI warning:
The motion picture you are about to experience is fiction. The prophecy is
not. The producers of this film are not prophets. They are drawing to your
attention what God has said in his own word.
The disclaimer continues:
The film is based upon many references in the books of Daniel and Revelation
and upon the following Biblical prophecy:
“For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice
of an archangel, and the dead in Christ shall rise first: then they which are
alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet
the lord in the air.” 1 Thessalonians 4:16,17
And from Matthew 24:21:
“For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of
the world to this time, no nor ever shall be.”
It still might seem silly to many people, but to a seven or eight-year-old—who
has been repeatedly assured by adults of its inevitability—it’s the stuff of
nightmares. The intersecting themes of shame, isolation, and physical violence
combine to form a cocktail of fear and self-doubt. The fear of being left
behind, alone, without your family—the only chance of rejoining them being a
violent death and your severed head in a basket on the ground. Dying bravely
will prove your worth once and for all.
Death by execution is scary, but the real horror is in the waiting. Waiting for
the rapture to see if you’ll be left. Waiting in a jail cell to see if you have
the courage to resist taking the mark. Waiting for the chopping block as it cuts
down the saints in front of you. Always waiting for the next terrible test of
faith.
I’d lie awake in bed, standing in that line of martyrs snaking its way to the
execution stage. My family had been taken, and I’d been left behind. I’d prayed
the sinner’s prayer before—since I could barely speak—but I wasn’t good enough.
I didn’t truly believe. Would I be brave enough to join them now? Would I
happily give this life for a new life in eternity, even as every fiber of my
being screamed no? And then—after everything—would I finally be accepted, or
would I still find myself in hell, tortured for all eternity?
“I’ll pray again, just to be sure.”
Alone, in the dark—I probably gave my life to Christ hundreds of times.
An estimated 300 million people have seen a Thief in the Night. It’s been
screened primarily in homes and churches, where the righteous gather the lost to
give them the good news: you can avoid all of this—all it costs is your life. In
1995, Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins published the first of a new series—Left
Behind—which sold so well that it became a multimedia franchise by the
mid-2000s.
In Billy’s final moments, David—the only friendly adult he has left—refuses to
give information to the UN soldiers to save Billy’s life, knowing he recently
prayed the sinner’s prayer:
“Billy, you’re free. They’re gonna take you outside and lay you down. Now you
close your eyes, and tell ’em you love Jesus no matter what.”
Turning to the soldiers:
“Now I ask you, what can you do now? The boy’s free. He belongs to Jesus
Christ.”
Like a detox fad diet, it’s not helpful to cut out everything–that’s why this isn’t an information detox.
The goal isn’t to stop thinking; it’s to chill out and start thinking for yourself.
With that in mind, replace those salty, processed, high-fructose opinions with clean, whole sources of information:
Books
Research papers
Academic studies
Other well-researched content (essays, articles, podcasts, documentaries, etc.—but not too much! When in doubt, cut it out.)
“But wait, what should I do with my own opinions?”
You’re free to share your opinions, but there’s a problem: people will want to reciprocate. So here’s a better approach: use a notepad. Any notepad will do. Write down your passing thoughts, and let them go.
Once your thoughts have had time to cool, you can shape them into something permanent. Wait to share them until your detox is over.
If you consume too many opinions, try an opinion detox.
If someone immediately comes to mind, they probably qualify. ↩
Let’s suspend disbelief for a moment, and imagine that you are a customer of
my cable company. Your bill just arrived, and it’s $50 more than it should
be.
You probably know what happens next: you call my 1-800 number and speak to a
very frustrating robot that I purchased to waste your time. Eventually, you get
through to a person (not me) who has the power to help you, and after some
back-and-forth, you’ll convince them to fix your bill. Afterward, you’ll wonder:
why do I put up with this?
I’ll tell you why.
You see, in corporate parlance, the point at which you are frustrated enough to
stop being my customer is called your “breakpoint,”1 and—fortunately for me—you
didn’t reach it.
Modern customer service employs artificial intelligence to find your
breakpoint and allow you to reach that limit but not cross it. At scale, this
is much more efficient than ensuring that each customer is individually
satisfied.
Isn’t technology grand?
If you run a business, it’s helpful to remember that this is what your
customers are dealing with regularly.
Granted, it’s not always such a nightmare scenario. Nowadays, many
companies are trying to “personalize” the support experience—but by and large,
customer support is a metric to be optimized, and the bar is LOW.
When your competitors view customer support in this way, make it your
competitive advantage.
When your next support ticket comes in, ask yourself: how can I surprise this
customer with delightful customer support?
If you run a business and aren’t personally handling support, maybe you should
be—it’s a great way to talk to your customers.
I’ve made a tradition of reading these historical documents every July, highlighting some of the great turning points in American history. The list is far from complete; I am slowly adding to it each year. If you have a suggestion, send me an email.
