#meta posts — Ben Crowder https://bencrowder.net/blog/tag/meta/ Feed for blog posts tagged with #meta. Sat, 04 Apr 2026 05:22:16 GMT en-US https://bencrowder.net/ I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/3.29/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/3.29/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used to be and what I worried about when I was young and single. And goodness, I had forgotten just how much I used to blog back then. Perhaps to excess (and by “perhaps” I mean “without a doubt”), but it was fun and I made lots of friends and I find myself missing it. [He says on his blog, where he has posted twenty-three times this year so far.] [He wants to point out, though, that the booknotes and the link posts of late feel qualitatively different — at least on his end — from the everything-goes type of blogging he used to do, and perhaps that’s what he’s missing and what he now — in what smells like a midlife crisis but probably does not actually count as one, not like the time when he impulse-bought a Nintendo Switch for his kids while his wife was gone at girls’ camp — what he now may be trying to resurrect, with hopefully more success than the seven other times he’s tried to do this in recent years.]

Anyway, here we are, twenty years after. (Which, to digress yet again, I read as a kid and quite liked. Maybe it’s time to reread that series.) If you, dear reader, were reading this blog or one of its sundry predecessors (mostly Blank Slate and Top of the Mountains) twenty years ago and are somehow still here, I salute your fortitude and perseverance, and I think you should poke your hand out of the fog of darkness (commentless blogs being one-way glass) and tap out a short email saying hi. [The author would like to note that — mildly disturbing metaphors aside — this friendly suggestion also applies to anyone who started reading the blog later on, anyone starting now (hi!), and anyone who can’t take it any longer and stops reading after this paragraph mercifully concludes.]

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]]> Housekeeping note: if you’re subscribed to the RSS feed via the crusty old Feedburner URL — http://f... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/2.27/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/2.27/ Wed, 26 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT Housekeeping note: if you’re subscribed to the RSS feed via the crusty old Feedburner URL — http://feeds.feedburner.com/BenCrowder — you may want to consider switching over to the shiny, stable direct URL — https://bencrowder.net/blog/feed/ — lest Feedburner find itself under the Google guillotine someday. (As it no doubt will.)

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]]> Moving to Cast https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/moving-to-cast/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/moving-to-cast/ Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT As of today, this site is now built by Cast, a new custom static site generator I’ve been writing. There shouldn’t be any visible changes on your end, but if you experience some weirdness (like all the recent RSS items showing up as new in your feed), that’s probably why.

Notes:

  • Before now, this site was using a PHP CMS called Blackbullet that I wrote in 2013. I wanted to simplify by getting rid of the PHP dependency and serving up static HTML files instead.
  • I initially started the project as a Go app in 2021, abandoned it shortly thereafter, and then picked it up again this past December with some new ideas on how to implement it. Also switched to Node.
  • I wrote my own rather than using 11ty or Jekyll or another existing engine because, well, I wanted to.
  • Right now it rebuilds the site from scratch each time and takes 8–12 seconds. Compilation is fast enough that I’m probably going to leave it this way for now, rather than adding support for incremental builds.
  • No plan at this time to release Cast as open source.

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]]> Quick minor note: I’ve redesigned the art page, grouping the pieces into collections. I’ve also adde... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/12.14/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/12.14/ Sat, 14 Dec 2024 12:00:00 GMT Quick minor note: I’ve redesigned the art page, grouping the pieces into collections. I’ve also added RSS feeds for all collections and tags (linked from the top of each collection or tag page), so if you’re just interested in the religious art and don’t want to subscribe to the full blog, there’s now an RSS feed for that. There’s also a feed for all the art.

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]]> After a decently long stint with Literata as the font on this site, I’ve switched to EBC Garamond. I... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/9.1/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/9.1/ Sun, 01 Sep 2024 12:00:00 GMT After a decently long stint with Literata as the font on this site, I’ve switched to EBC Garamond. It’s my personal fork of the 8 pt size of EB Garamond — I like thicker fonts that don’t feel quite so digital, and the 8 pt version has that. I’ve fixed some glyph collisions (in the small caps), modified some of the glyphs I wasn’t happy with (widening the /p/, for example), turned off some default ligatures, and fine-tuned the kerning. This is still very much a work in progress and there are still changes I want to make, but it feels ready enough for use here.

A note on process: I opened the original SFDs from the repo in FontForge and exported UFOs. I’m using Fontra (which I’m quite liking, by the way) to edit the glyphs, and I hand-edit the OpenType feature definitions in Vim. I use fontmake to generate OTFs and pyftsubset to convert them to WOFF2. And I have a little testbed HTML file that I use to check in-browser whether I’m happy with the changes. It’s a decent dev experience.

And goodness, this is fun. I’m having a blast.

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]]> Some small site changes: I’ve added a timeline page, listing the types of projects I’ve worked on ea... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/7.4/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/7.4/ Thu, 04 Jul 2024 12:00:00 GMT Some small site changes:

  • I’ve added a timeline page, listing the types of projects I’ve worked on each year. (A chronological view of my work to complement the topical view already on here. And mostly just because I’m a nerd and like making charts.)
  • I recently redesigned the reading log to be more compact.

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]]> Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/3.18/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2024/3.18/ Sun, 17 Mar 2024 12:00:00 GMT Just added a guestbook to the site. (I came across Manu’s and nostalgia kicked in a bit. Figured it might be fun.)

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]]> I’ve added a scripture reference index for my religious art, to make it easier to find pieces relate... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1521/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1521/ Sat, 20 May 2023 12:00:00 GMT I’ve added a scripture reference index for my religious art, to make it easier to find pieces related to specific passages.

scripture-reference-index.png

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]]> After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wan... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1477/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1477/ Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:00:00 GMT After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wanted to provide a more lightweight way for readers to respond to posts (email can feel a little too formal sometimes) without adding comments to the site itself, and I think this is it.

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]]> I’ve started adding short reviews to the reading log, to make the page a little more useful. Just th... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1371/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1371/ Mon, 24 Oct 2022 12:00:00 GMT I’ve started adding short reviews to the reading log, to make the page a little more useful. Just the 2022 reads so far, but I plan to keep going back as far as I can.

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