Showcase Saturday: Ge Ricci

Geri Ricci (Angela “Ge” Ricci) has been shaping the web since the mid 1990s, carrying a genuine love for writing clean markup and making the web accessible to all. She was born in São Paulo in 1966, fell in love with writing and drawing as a child, and later moved to France to build her career in visual communication and web standards. With over 32 years of experience, she still delights in crafting web pages, teaching, and speaking about the web in places like FFConf. Very cool!

Her personal style shines through her homepage where she introduces herself as being “married to HTML,” having “CSS as her sister,” and JavaScript as her “longtime lover.” That quirky phrasing hints at a deep appreciation for the web’s foundations: solid semantics, thoughtful markup, and the clarity that a well-built page can bring.

In her essay “The Web and the Butterfly Effect”, Geri explores how tiny early decisions, like choosing clean HTML, can ripple into massive effects later on. She champions progressive enhancement, reliability, and web performance as more than buzzwords. To her, they represent ethical design, user respect, and future proofing all wrapped up in one.

Her Work section features projects born more of passion than commission: a playful redesign for Open Web Advocacy and imaginative personal web experiments like “A Cuca,” a kind of visual blog mashup that blends design, storytelling, and curiosity. What they all have in common is intention and integrity, not flashy code, but thoughtful, human centered creation.

Geri’s website is full of little gems for anyone curious about design, accessibility, or the soul of the internet. She shares some really great advice on coding for those looking to expand their skills. Take a moment to explore! There’s a lot to learn, reflect on, and enjoy. ♥

Check it out at: gericci.me

@sovereignweb @indieweb @neocities @smallweb @webdev @blog @webdesign

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Mark As Read

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Source: https://sovereignweb.thecozy.cat/blog/showcase-saturday-ge-ricci/

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#Feature #Indieweb #PersonalSites #Personalweb #Personalwebsite #Smallweb #Sovereignweb #Webdesign #Webdev

What are people in the #SmallWeb #IndieWeb using for their self-hosted blogs these days? I want something to do basic thought dumps, but I've never really liked Wordpress due to it being a cumbersome over commercialised beast.

The Small God of the Internet

It was a small announcement on an innocuous page about “spring cleaning”. The herald, some guy with the kind of name that promised he was all yours. Four sentences you only find because you were already looking for a shortcuts through life. A paragraph, tidy as a folded handkerchief, explained that a certain popular reader of feeds was retiring in four months’ time. Somewhere in the draughty back alleys of the web, a small god cleared his throat. Once he had roared every morning in a thousand offices. Now, when people clicked for their daily liturgy, the sound he made was… domesticated.

He is called ArrEsEs by those who enjoy syllables. He wears a round orange halo with three neat ripples in it. Strictly speaking, this is an icon1, but gods are not strict about these things. He presides over the River of Posts, which is less picturesque than it sounds and runs through everyone’s house at once. His priests are librarians and tinkerers and persons who believe in putting things in order so they can be pleasantly disordered later. The temple benches are arranged in feeds. The chief sacrament is “Mark All As Read,” which is the kind of absolution that leaves you lighter and vaguely suspicious you’ve got away with something.

Guide for Constructing the Letter S from Mira Calligraphiae Monumenta or The Model Book of Calligraphy (15611596) by Georg Bocskay and Joris Hoefnagel. Original from The Getty. Digitally enhanced by rawpixel.

There was a time the great city-temples kept a candle lit for him right on their threshold. The Fox of Fire invited him in and called it Live Bookmarks.2 The moldable church, once a suit, then a car, then a journey, in typical style stamped “RSS” beside the address like a house number. The Explorer adopted the little orange beacon with the enthusiasm of someone who has been told there will be cake. The Singers built him a pew and handed out hymnals. You could walk into almost any shrine and find his votive lamp glowing: “The river comes this way.” Later, accountants, the men behind the man who was yours, discovered that candles are unmonetizable and, one by one, the lamps were tidied into drawers that say “More…”.

ArrEsEs has lineage. Long before he knocked on doors with a bundle of headlines, there was Old Mother Press, the iron-fingered goddess of moveable type, patron of ink that bites and paper that complains. Her creed was simple: get the word out. She marched letters into columns and columns into broadsides until villages woke up arguing the same argument.3* ArrEsEs is her great-grandchild—quick-footed, soft-spoken—who learned to carry the broadsheet to each door at once and wait politely on the mat. He still bears her family look: text in tidy rows, dates that mind their place, headlines that know how to stand up straight.**

Four months after the Announcement, the big temple shut its doors with a soft click. The congregation wandered off in small, stubborn knots and started chapels in back rooms with unhelpful names like OGRP4. ArrEsEs took to traveling again, coat collar up, suitcase full of headlines, knocking on back doors at respectable intervals. “No hurry,” he would say, leaving the bundle on the step. “When you’re ready.” The larger gods of the Square ring bells until you come out in your slippers; this one waits with the patience of bread.

Like all small gods, he thrives on little rites. He smiles when you put his name plainly on your door: a link that says feed without a blush. He approves of bogrolls blogrolls, because they are how villages point at one another and remember they are villages. He warms to OPML, which is a pilgrim’s list people swap like seed packets. He’s indulgent about the details—/rss.xml, /atom.xml, /feed, he will answer to all of them—but he purrs (quietly; dignified creature) for a cleanly formed offering and a sensible update cadence5.

His miracles are modest and cannot be tallied on a quarterly slide. He brings things in the order they happened. He does silence properly. The river arrives in the morning with twenty-seven items; you read two, save three, and let the rest drift by with the calm certainty that rivers do not take offense. He remembers what you finished. He promises tomorrow will come with its own bundle, and if you happen to be away, he will keep the stack neat and not wedge a “You Might Also Like” leaflet between your socks.

These days, though, ArrEsEs is lean at the ribs. The big estates threw dams across his tributaries and called them platforms. Good water disappeared behind walls; the rest was coaxed into ornamental channels that loop the palace and reflect only the palace. Where streams once argued cheerfully, they now mutter through sluices and churn a Gloomwheel that turns and turns without making flour—an endless thumb-crank that insists there is more, and worse, if you’ll just keep scrolling. He can drink from it, but it leaves a taste of tin and yesterday’s news.

A god’s displeasure tells you more than his blessings. His is mild. If you hide the feed, he grows thin around the edges. If you build a house that is only a façade until seven JSters haul in the furniture, he coughs and brings you only the headline and a smell of varnish6. If you replace paragraphs with an endless corridor, he develops the kind of seasickness that keeps old sailors ashore. He does not smite. He sulks, which is worse, because you may not notice until you wonder where everyone went.

Still, belief has a way of pooling in low places. In the quiet hours, the little chapels hum: home pages with kettles on, personal sites that remember how to wave, gardeners who publish their lists of other gardeners. Somewhere, a reader you’ve never met presses a small, homely button that says subscribe. The god straightens, just a touch. He is gentler than his grandmother who rattled windows with every edition, but the family gift endures. If you invite him, tomorrow he will be there, on your step, with a bundle of fresh pages and a polite cough. You can let him in, or make tea first. He’ll wait. He always has.

Heavily edited sloptraption.

  1. He maintains it’s saffron, which is what halos say when they are trying to be practical ↩︎
  2. The sort of feature named by a librarian, which is to say, both accurate and doomed. ↩︎
  3. Not to be confused with the software that borrowed her title and a fair chunk of her patience. ↩︎
  4. Old Google Reader People ↩︎
  5. On festival days he will accept serif, sans-serif, or whatever the village printer has not yet thrown at a cat.
    ↩︎
  6. He can drink JSON when pressed; stew remains his preference. ↩︎

#AI #algorithmicFeeds #blogging #blogrolls #Discworld #doomscrolling #feedReaders #GoogleReader #history #IndieWeb #internetFolklore #openWeb #OPML #personalWebsites #philosophy #POSSE #printingPress #quietWeb #RSS #smallGods #TerryPratchett #webStandards #writing

Dear #IndieWeb people

When using h-entry (or, honestly, #RSS even), is there anything people have been coalescing towards that’s kind of a push that says “hey have another look?”

For example, imagine the concept of an RSS reader but you don’t want the reader to have to poll.

I only know of #webmentions and #micropub here but idk if either of those is appropriate for this use case?

Make websites look like this again.

#indieweb

My #commit messages at the outset:
-m "Adding first post. Switching to PaperMod theme."

An hour later, in folder `quickstart3`...:
-m "please god will you work now,,,"

#hugo #ssg #IndieWeb #smallWeb

3/x

Told y'all we were cooking.

Say hello to Conjured Ink ( https://conjured.ink ): an #IndieWeb-based, #decentralized ecosystem of shops networked together to resist the kind of nonsense Itch and Steam have been dealing with.

We're a collective designing and building the software needed for folks who aren't techies to basically self host without feeling like they're self-hosting. Because you shouldn't need to be a sysadmin to free yourself from this yoke.

Join us!

#ConjuredInk

If you were to make your first website, would you prefer to:

#PersonalWebsite #indieweb #poll

Write a bit of code
Use a drag-and-drop interface
Something else?
Not interested in having a website
I already have a website
Something else entirely

Apparently nobody uses RSS any more? I still do on my #indieweb site-- https://cidney.org/feed.xml . It's a mixture of work and personal stuff, but do gamedev blogs and things.

Here’s an early submission for @immarisabel’s #IndieWeb carnival this month on ‘colours’ ~ https://vhbelvadi.com/threads-paints-hex-codes

I need a section on my website to link to cool blog posts on other people's websites

I also still need to wrap my head around stuff like webmentions. Like, independent websites have been federating for ages, and I want mine to as well (without me stubbornly implementing full-blown ActivityPub)

#IndieWeb #PersonalSites

Tenho dividido a Internet em duas:

- Internet pequena: mídias sociais e plataformas comerciais cujo negócio é servir ao capitalismo de vigilância e influência de vieses e desejos. Essa não é aberta a tudo. Nela links são restritos e o conteúdo é homogeneizado com morangos do amor;

- Internet grande: redes sociais como Fediverso e fóruns, revistas e jornais, blogs, podcasts, malas diretas, IRC e uma vastidão de regiões

#Internet #IndieWeb #SociaMedia #RedesSocias

If you’re using this on your own website, please send me a link to your page and I’ll link to it.

There seems to be some confusion that this requires JavaScript. It does not. It uses the default behavior of the browser so if you have a full page of links it’ll jump to the part of the page with the link.

#indieweb #opensource #html

Preview of my new profile page. Coming soon along with my new website/blog.

#ProfilePage #IndieWeb

What my AI fiction writing experiment taught me about my creative process

In my last post, I wrote about my experiment using AI to write fiction.

The whole exercise was born out of curiosity and frustration. The story, Forever, at last, was just one of many that I could not finish, but it refused to leave me, literally haunting me when I try to sleep.

What I discovered

This experiment has made me realise a few things about my creative writing process:

Reading a story generated by AI, even it I had written the story beats and dialogue, was unsatisfying to read.

I enjoy writing a large part of my fiction, like 90%. Taking that away from me would make writing fiction a truly passion-less and boring exercise.

I am far too territorial with my writing to use AI copy wholesale.

I have a Hemmingway-ish style of writing, thin on description, minimalist and economical. And there’s nothing wrong with that. (I ended up cutting away a lot of the content AI generated.)

Most of the enjoyment I have when writing fiction comes from writing the dialogue. In fact, I think I am more of a scriptwriter by nature than a prose writer.

Understanding my process

I have come to the conclusion based on my experiment with fiction is that I need to write the dialogue (which I enjoy), detailed storybeats with a light description of the scene (which I don’t enjoy) before even using AI.

I will then dialogue with AI to find ways to improve my description which I am weak at.

I seem to love chatting with the AI on how I can improve the existing descriptions or the descriptions it generated. The act of learning is very enjoyable to me.

I do not judge anyone who wants to generate first drafts and rewrite them – some people are satisfied with just rewriting, but I realize I want a lot more ownership, and that I need to vividly visualise the scene and create the dialogue. That is the only way I can use AI without sacrificing my enjoyment of writing fiction.

However, I don’t mind asking AI for help in improving my sparse descriptions of settings.

Understanding what parts of the writing process I like or don’t like

What I love:

  • Imagining and visualising the scenes vividly in my head, and then writing the storybeats
  • Writing dialogue (I’m especially territorial about this!)
  • Creating character arcs (This is my second most territorial thing)
  • Creating the entire plot
  • Learning how to improve my fiction prose writing

What I don’t enjoy:

  • Writing detailed outlines
  • Writing descriptions of characters, settings and action scenes (only because I take too long thinking how to do them. I have a feeling once I master this, I’d enjoy it too.)
  • Creating story bibles
  • Proofreading
  • General admin work related to creating the ebook and uploading it to websites
  • Marketing the damn book

To me, writing fiction is all about the craft – writing sentences that convey emotion, story flow, character arcs …

I have very little interest in marketing the book or even distributing it for others to read. I have a very interesting approach to my creations. Once I create a novel or piece a fiction, I tend to forget about them and move on to the next. I don’t check up on them, read the reviews, or see how they perform. To me, the piece of art is done, and it’s time to create another.

So, it’s no wonder that I find the latter half of the process incredibly tedious and unfun.

Outsourcing what you don’t enjoy

Here’s what I tell authors: Identify your pain points — the parts of the process that are most annoying and aggravating. Then let AI handle the majority of the work in those areas. – SJ Pajonas, “The Joy Factor: How to Use AI Without Losing What You Love About Writing”

“AI-positive” indie writer SJ Pajonas wrote in her Substack recently that we need to find the parts of our writing process that we loved, and the parts where we didn’t. The parts that we don’t, we can outsource to AI.

It was an intriguing idea. So, I’ll be exploring this idea in the next post.

#AI #BeingAWriter #ChatGPT #Fiction #indieweb #Internet

New month, new blog post: The one where I throw out another of my strong opinions. This time about the use of "AI" output.

https://theresmiling.eu/blog/2025/08/i-feel-offended-by-ai

#blog #personalBlog #personalWebsite #personalWeb #smallWeb #indieWeb

What a sweet discovery this was!
Good Internet is back in Switzerland, just in time for the 1st of August and a well-deserved dessert. 🇨🇭

This issue #1 truly is a thing of beauty. So much so that I already have subscribed and am very much looking forward to future issues 😊 and if you love the Internet I'd warmly recommend you to do the same.

Thank you for the good moments @xandra and all its authors!

#goodinternet #goodinternetmagazine #indieweb #goodinternetontour

https://indieweb.social/@skk/114947915925193860

Looking for a Movie Club in August and / or you want an excuse to watch (or rewatch) Local Hero?

I have the pleasure to host the August 2025 IndieWeb Movie Club. The introduction is here - https://www.vanderwal.net/random/entrysel.php?blog=2128

More background about the IndieWeb Movie Club is at - https://indieweb.org/IndieWeb_Movie_Club#2025

#indieweb #indiewebmovieclub