Links
- Blog Voices - Get inspired by reading other bloggers' stories about why they do what they do, how they do it, and how they find inspiration for their blog posts.
- Blogging - Inspiring and encouraging blog posts about blogging, written by experienced bloggers. Great resources to ignite the creative flame, whether you're a newbie or a pro.
- Writing - Great articles about writing in general and crafting blog posts in particular. Inspiring reading, whether you're a novice or an expert.
- Designing - Top-notch resources for creating a personal blog design that is not only visually stunning, but also user-friendly and efficient.
- Accessibility - A collection of essential guidelines, best practices, and tools designed to help you create an accessible blog.
- Optimization - A great set of website optimization tools that will help you enhance your blog’s performance and user experience.
- Add-Ons - A list of add-ons that can be integrated with your current blogging platform to enhance its functionality.
- Discover Blogs - What better way to get inspired than reading other people’s blogs? Here are some good way to explore the blogosphere.
- What to Blog About? - Are you struggling to find topics to write about on your blog? Take a look at these helpful posts to ignite your writing inspiration.
- Tools & Inspiration - Great resources about blogging, whether you've just started a blog or you’re an experienced blogger who wants to level up.
- Webrings - A webring is a network of interconnected blogs. Each blog in the ring features a navigation bar, typically located at the bottom of the site, containing links to the previous and next blog in the webring.
- Blog Challenges - Blog challenges are interactive events with a shared goal or theme over a specific period. They are designed to encourage creativity, develop a consistent posting habit, and foster a sense of community among participants.
- Bear Blog - Tips, tricks and tweaks made specifically for Bear blog, an awesome blogging platform on which this blog is hosted
- BlogBoost - BlogBoost is an Apple shortcut with various ways to get the inspiration flowing, such as daily prompts and random inspiring quotes. It supports a wide range of text editors. Check out the BlogBoost post for more information.
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - JCProbaby's Postroll- Mostly posts written by folks from the IndyWeb
- Murmel.social - a daily email that lets you know about the most popular stories of the day based on what the people you follow on Mastodon are sharing
- Morning Brew - a must-read daily newsletter with a links section
- Links I Would Gchat You If We Were Friends - a Substack newsletter currently on its 772nd edition
- The Weekly Thing by Jamie Thingelstad - a regular newsletter of interesting links, photos and commentary from a smart and friendly guy
- Links at Werd/IO - a collection maintained by Ben Werdmuller who works at ProPublica and is a massively experienced writer and startup founder
- The Installer by David Pierce - a weekly column at The Verge (also available as a newsletter) designed to tell you everything you need to download, watch, read, listen to, and explore that fits in The Verge’s universe.
- Labnotes by Assaf - A weekly collection of tools and products you should know about, tips about UX, management, infosec; random and funny stuff. Tilted towards devs, but enjoyable by everyone
- hiro.report - straight from Austin, TX, - sweet dopamine hits of fresh tech, gear, and apps every week
Enjoyed it? Please upvote 👇 - The only copy of a wedding video
- A master's thesis
- Twelve years of lesson plans by a middle school teacher
- Multiple instances of people's photo libraries
- A free year of a .lol domain - make your own website, hosted anywhere you like. Mine is Linkage.lol
- Membership in Social.lol - a Mastodon community based on respect for all including the LGBT community, POC and the neurodivergent. That's where I have my account and I've met some of the coolest people I've ever encountered on the Internet, and I've been online for a long time. There is also a Discord server.
- An email address - username@omg.lol, which is cool as hell anyway you look at it. Get it forwarded to an existing email account. It's so easy
- A bio page like mine - Amerpie
- A /now page like this - Amerpie/now
- A status log that can cross post to Mastodon and be embedded in a web page
- A photo gallery for sharing photos and embedding them in your web site
- Would you believe there is more? Go have a look!
Blogging Resources Complements of Robert Birming
One of the nicest and most helpful people I've encountered on my blogging journey is a Swedish writer by the name of Robert Birming who blogs in English. Robert posts on a daily basis and he also has a newsletter. A man with considerable technical skills, he is the developer of the Bearming theme on BearBlog. Robert maintains a page that every indy blogger should bookmark. The resources it contains are incredible. Give him a follow on Mastodon @birming@social.lol
Blog Inspiration
I have updated my /now page - What I’m reading and watching, plus links to this week’s blog posts, the week’s best purchase, and the links I added to my personal bookmarks.
For Linkblog Fans
If you check out this blog regularly or better yet, if you subscribe by RSS, I'm going to imagine that you are a fan of discovering cool new websites, stories, blogs and galleries on the regular. Not only do I post here every day, I also have a weekly post on Micro.blog that I aggregate at Amerpie's Cool Links (there's an original name for you) There are a few really good places where I find links and I though I'd share them with you.
This Week's Bookmarks - Best Horror Movies, Aerial Photos of Junkyards, Digital Decluttering, Chili Recipe, Food Trends for 2025, Fly with One Bag, Messages for Life
The 100 Best Horror Movies of All Time: Critics' Pick
Aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects_
Digital decluttering – alexwlchan
White Chicken Chili (BEST EVER!) - Cooking Classy
Whole Foods predicts the major food and beverage trends of 2025 | Food Dive
How to Fly With Only a Personal Item—Plus Our 3 Favorite Small Bags (2024) | WIRED
Messages for Life are short, inspirational emails that have been brightening my days. They arrive only on weekday mornings and always contain a positive message, like reminders to slow down, relax, celebrate yourself, and play. These messages convey a lot of wisdom in a very natural and relatable way. They feel like love letters from the Universe.
The Wilmington 10 - American Political Prisoners
I have been a dedicated newspaper reader since I was in the first grade in 1971. I did not limit myself to just the comics. I thought Dear Abby was fascinating and I always read the headlines on the front page. In North Carolina in the 1970s an infamous civil rights case was often featured. The Wilmington 10 was the name given to eight high school students, a minister from the United Church of Christ and an anti-poverty worker who had been caught up when the men were arrested for arson, following a bombing during racial unrest in the coastal town of Wilmington. The case was considered by many to be a travesty of justice from the very beginning. The convictions were based on eyewitness testimony from a mentally ill man who recanted during cross-examination and was banished from the courtroom. The other witness was given a motorcycle for his testimony. He too, later recanted.
when the Soviet Union was accused by the United States of human rights violations, the Soviets used the Wilmington 10 as an example of American hypocrisy. After serving nearly a decade in prison, all of the convictions were overturned, and the state declined to re-prosecute. In 2013, over 40 years after their initial convictions, the Wilmington 10 were granted pardons by the governor of North Carolina, although four of them had already passed away. The oldest of them, the Reverend Benjamin Chavis, went on after his incarceration to become the national president of the NAACP.
Generation X Isn't Mad, It's Tired
The dividing line between Generation X and Boomers is New Years Day, 1965, fifty-two days before I was born. Over the next 15 years my cohort, smaller than the one that preceded it and the one that followed it (Millenials), began to reap the meager rewards our parents bequeathed us, single-parent families, careers as latch-key kids, run away inflation and coming of age with Reagan in the White House making it easy on rich folks and kicking off the decline of the middle class by breaking unions and kicking income inequality into high gear.
The oldest Gen X-ers are only five years from retirement. Everything seems to have changed for us. We bought records we traded in for tapes that we traded in for CDs before we downloaded MP3s that we stopped listening to when we had to start paying a subscription fee to listen to music. After graduating from high school, I supported a wife and a baby by cooking at a Shoney's and serving in the National Guard one weekend a month. By the time my youngest reached maturity, two adults working full time at entry level jobs could barely make ends meet.
We experienced a few cool things, like getting to watch MTV when they played music video. We've had some great music. We got to transition out of a world that worried about nuclear holocausts. Unfortunately we got to see AIDS put in an end to the free love we thought we were going to get. I've lost count of the financial crises we've endured.
Generation X | Origin, Years, Characteristics, & Facts | Britannica
Gen X is next up for retirement. Are they in denial?
Gen X Research | Environics Research
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The Gyro is Awesome
Zorba's Gyro is the name of the diner at the end of the street where I've been a regular customer for over 30 years. It's Greek owned, of course , and serves a variety of dishes from American and Italian cuisine as well. The signature dish though, the humble gyro, is a masterpiece. When you walk in, you can see the tower of mixed beef and lamb roasting on a vertical skewer. When I order it, I always get the "all the way" edition complete with red onions, lettuce, crumbled feta and of course authentic Tzatziki sauce.
The history of the gyro is a little mysterious, but some form of shaved meat served on bread has been served in the Mediterranean region since the time of Alexander. The Turks call it doner kebab. Arabs call it shawarma. I call it delicious. Estimates of when it first came to America, or indeed, when it became popular as a Greek street food vary, depending on who is doing the talking.
Ode to Zorba's | Living Out Loud
History of Gyro, an Ancient Greek Street Food
The History of the Gyro, With a Dollop of Serendipity - The New York Times
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Should You Eat at Chick-fil-A?
LGBT Activist # 1
If a restaurant was taking the money they make and giving it to organizations trying to dissolve your marriage and take your kids away from you, you wouldn't give a shit if they"have really good lemonade."You wouldn't eat there. - FAITH NAFF
LGBT Activist # 2
"If gay rights advocates permanently withhold our business from Chick-fil-A, we'll send the message that stepping away from hateful causes was a mistake, and companies will be less likely to listen to our demands in the future."Nate Morris (CAS '27)
I don't eat at Chick-fil-A. I like chicken sandwiches OK, but I prefer the ones from Bojangles. Hell, I eat the ones they sell in gas stations. Every Chick-fil-A I come across is always super crowded. They have a reputation for dealing well with crowds, but you have to go be part of a crowd to find out if that's true. No thanks.
The biggest reason I don't eat there though is their reputation for being homophobic. Someone in my area had a Chik-fil-A Support Day a couple of years ago and lots of ostentatious Christians that I know made a big deal out of going their and posting it on social media just in case they hadn't done enough in their lives to be shitty to LGBT people.
In doing some basic research for this post, I found that the hate-chicken people quit giving money to homophobic organizations a few years ago. The owner doesn't even use his personal fortune that way any more. Most people think the motivation behind that is to stave off boycotts and bad press and they are probably right. Right-wing organizations accused Chik-fil-A of caving the the Gay Agenda, if you can believe that.
I know some principled leftists who patronize them now, partially because out of all the fast food chains, they offer more for people with celiacs. Since I don't personally have celiacs, I'll keep on eating at Bojangles though.
VIEWPOINT: Stop Asking Us to Boycott Chick-fil-A – The Hoya
Chick-fil-A and LGBT people - Wikipedia
Chick-fil-A “woke” controversy: Why conservatives are calling for boycotts | Vox
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Online Communities of the Past and Present
Although I used a local BBS and AOL chat rooms back in the day, the first online community I ever found a home in was at Epinions, a dotcom company that paid you to write reviews of commercial goods, including books and albums. You could use HTML to dress up what you wrote, so there was a small but satisfying thrill in learning how to be good at that. As usual, they had an off-topic category too, where you could write about whatever you wanted, and I contributed there all the time. People could follow you and send you private messages. I eventually outgrew it, but I tried to find a guy from there recently, after 27 years, and I succeeded because he's still using the same unique username.
When I had a Geocities website, part of it was dedicated to Vietnam veterans and their kids. I corresponded with quite a few men and women who were eager to have someone to talk with about their experiences. I live near a giant army base, so all the vets I know have comrades-in-arms everywhere they go, but the 18-year-old who got drafted from Iowa in 1967 and did his year in hell didn't always have that, and I was glad to hear them out, publish their stories, and generally just be as supportive as I could.
I was in some great bicycling forums around the turn of the century, one of which still sends me birthday greetings every year. I went as far as Georgia to meet folks from there for an organized ride.
For a few years, believe it or not, I took part in the local newspaper's community forum, which was mostly a cesspool of name-calling and ad hominem attacks on liberals. I'd write outrageously provocative stuff about W. Bush and his wars just to stir up the flag wavers. They doxed me regularly, and the woman I was married to absolutely hated me going on there. After a while, it wasn't fun anymore, so I stopped.
When I hiked the Appalachian Trail, I kept an online journal every single day and posted to a website called Trail Journals. As a result, I had people up and down the East Coast who wrote to us and visited us on the trail. It wasn't unusual to meet trail groupies who knew all kinds of our fellow hikers from reading their journals. More than a decade later, I am still in touch with people I first met through that journal.
Then we enter the long dark winter of the soul—Facebook was all there was. I never really used Twitter for anything other than news, so I didn't find much social about it. My Facebook experience is much the same as many folks. In 2008, it was a place to keep up with friends and family and to reconnect with people from the past. Today, it's the same toxic hellscape for me as it is for everyone else. I mostly stay there to see pictures of my grandkids. In 2017, I had a viral post that caused me to get literally thousands of friend requests, many of which I accepted for the hell of it. I met plenty of cool people, including a friend I eventually met in Derry, Northern Ireland.
My experience on the IndieWeb since I joined micro.blog in January has been my favorite experience out of all of them. In 10 months, I've posted more on Mastodon than I did on Twitter in 15 years. I have three accounts on different servers. I closed my Twitter account too, not wanting to send any traffic to what is essentially the Nazi Bar of the Internet. I am a happy customer of OMG.LOL, 500.social, and Onephoto.club. Aside from Micro.blog, I also use Scribbles and BearBlog.
I have accounts on Instagram, Threads, BlueSky, Pinterest, Nostr, Pixelfed, Farcaster, and Tumblr, but I use them mostly to syndicate what I write on my blogs.
I do love Reddit, where I've had an account for nearly 19 years, despite its checkered past. Syndicating AppAddict there has driven lots of traffic to my website. Earlier this year, I volunteered to become a moderator of r/macOS, a subreddit with over 300K members. That's been interesting. I get a chance to help out newbies and to stamp out some toxicity, so what it lacks in actual fun, it makes up in satisfaction.
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Visiting Colonial Virginia
Virginia, just north of my home state of North Carolina, is a wonderful place to visit. Although I am partial to the mountains, there is something to be said for visiting the colonial historical sites closer to the coast. Whether it's Jamestown, one of the first settlements in the new world, Yorktown, site of the American victory in the Revolutionary War or the extensive and richly restored town of Colonial Williamsburg, you won't be disappointed. Thankfully, the exhibits in Williamsburg include ones dedicated to Native American and African American history. It's quite an experience to walk the streets and see people in colonial dress, gardening with period tools and making the same type of crafts that were common in the 1700s. It's a fun and affordable way to spend a day. If you are a cyclist, bring your bike. The 23-mile Colonial Parkway between Yorktown and Jamestown is a road you'll want to add to the miles you've traveled while pedaling.
History of Colonial Williamsburg
Colonial Parkway - Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
Plan Your Visit | Historic Jamestowne
Plan Your Visit - Yorktown Battlefield Part of Colonial National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service)
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Make Your Internet Better Today
Make Your Internet Better Today - A free service can block ads and malware before it ever gets to your computer. Start using it today. I did. - linkage.lol/make-your…
Make Your Internet Better Today
I'm going to be that guy who finds something cool and then wants everyone to join in. The ad blocker that I use, Ublock Origin, is in danger of being neutered by Microsoft, the company that makes my browser, Edge, which I use for some very specific reasons. If you use Google Chrome (and most of you do), your ad-blocking capabilities have been seriously dampened by Google's decision to implement new standards for browser extensions. Don't panic though. There is a solution that is free and will make your computer more private and your browsing faster. That solution is NextDNS, a free service that blocks ads and malware from ever loading on your computer in the first place. If you set this up, you can even stop whole domains from ever loading. Imagine having Twitter never polluting your presence ever again. Not only that, but you can be protected from all kids of Internet bad guys, like those who use domain name typos to trick you, or from known bad actors, over 100,000 known domains are blocked by default.
You con't have to be super technical to get this set up. There is plenty of documentation and help available. Go sign up today!
NextDNS - The new firewall for the modern Internet
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For the Sake of All that is Holy - Back Up Your Computer
In my 30 years in the IT business, I have been approached by people with tears in their eyes many times, always because of lost data. The things I have been asked to restore include:
I have been successful in a few cases and I've struck out in others. I preach backing up your stuff to everyone I care about. In this day and age, doing so is relatively easy and straight forward.
If you have a Mac, you should be using Time Machine, even if you have a laptop. All you need is a cheap external drive. Everything else is built in to you computer.
Back up your Mac with Time Machine - Apple Support
If you have a PC, you can back up your data and settings to the cloud (but not your whole hard drive) with built in tools.
Back up your Windows PC - Microsoft Support
To back up your entire hard drive, you need a third party tool. Here are some options.
Best Windows backup software 2024: Free and paid options reviewed | PCWorld
Everyone should use some sort of cloud solution like One Drive, iCloud, Google Drive or Dropbox to back up anything that wouldn't want to lose if their house burnt down. If you don't know how to sign up for these solutions, all of which have a free tier, get some help or pay some one. It's that important. I have been able to keep track oof some of my files since the 1990s, through multiple computers, jobs and houses. Don't lose your important information or memories because you didn't back them up properly.
(Note - if you aren't 100% sure that your photos on your phone are backed up, get someone you trust to verify it for you.)
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Cool Tools and New Skills for Bloggers
When I first started blogging again in January of 2024, I had a few distant memories of making web pages in the 90s, but I had no clue about anything related to CSS or javascript because we didn't use that back in our Geocities day. In the intervening 10 months that I have been back creating things on the IndyWeb on Micro.blog, Scribbles, OMG.LOL and BearBlog, I have learned a lot about how to make my web pages do what I want and how to include certain elements. The learning process is ongoing, and I am always on the lookout for use tools. Here a few recent finds for you to explore.
HTML for People - a whole book just for you on using HTML to make web pages. It starts at the beginning and takes you through everything you would ever need to know.
Weblog Custom · Adding meta tags, manifest, and favicons. - lots of info on how to do some neat customization by Annie Sturdivant AKA @anniegreens@social.lol - a great resource for all kids of development info
The IndieWeb Carnival - every month someone on the IndyWeb hosts pages written by independent bloggers on a previously announced theme. Anyone can join in and you all should!
The Whimsical Web - want some inspiration? Here is a collection of websites that spark joy.
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This Week's Bookmarks - Grocery Prices Worldwide, Wildlife Photo Winners, The Truth about Media Lies, Stranger's Project, Content Creators vs. Journalists, 2004 the 1st Year of the Future, Great Talk from XOXO Conference
📝 Procrastinator’s Anonymous - My favorite time to do anything is “not right now.” - louplummer.lol/procrasti…
Some Links for Music Lovers
One of the benefits of having broadband is the ability to hear just about any song you want to, whenever you want to Apple Music, Spotify and a host of other services let you listen on demand. Lots of time you can find live performances on YouTube. There are a couple of sites that give you a collection of links for just about any album or song that you can think of.
The free website Odesli.com will create a shareable web page for you containing links to album art, websites to listen, websites to make a purchase and to YouTube for just about any album or song. You can create a page with a custom URL or make an embed for what you searched for. Here are a couple I made.
Nebraska - Bruce Springsteen - https://album.link/Boss_Nebraska
Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison (Live) - https://song.link/jcatfolsom
A website to help you make lists of albums, complete with album art, to share with friends or on your blog is Album Whale. It's free.
Check out my album list, Alt Country Classics, on Album Whale! https://albumwhale.com/lou-plummer/alt-country-classics
If you're doing research into a favorite band or artist, there is no better site on the internet than AllMusic.com It's been around forever, and you can spend hours reading album reviews and making playlists.
Check out their page on The Beatles
The last resource is Last.fm, a site that let's you upload the songs you've listened to so that it can recommend other artists you might like. I have over 76K plays uploaded and have discovered many, many bands through their recommendations.
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet - The community at OMG.LOL along with the services offered are the best thing on the Internet. - linkage.lol/omglol-is…
OMG.LOL is the Best Thing on the Internet
When I first started investigating blogging, I was heavily influenced by a British fellow by the name of Robb Knight. One of the many things he recommended for folks looking to involve themselves in this thing called the IndyWeb was a $20 a year membership in the web community found at OMG.LOL Describing what you get for that is kind of hard, but I'll give it a shot:
I have four blogs on three different platforms and I use elements of OMG.LOL in conjunction with all of them. If all this sounds cool to you but you simply can't afford it, message Adam, the guy who runs the place, and you might qualify for a scholarship sponsored By a caring member of the community. If you can afford it, great, sign up using my referral link, and I promise to use the benefits to help someone come onboard.
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📝 Doing the Best We Can - For once, pop psychology gets it right. We are doing the best we can do with what we have to work with. - louplummer.lol/doing-the…
