It’s worth a moment to take note here of the things I managed to do yesterday amid all the drama that either were self-regulatory in nature or at least helped to cut off prospects of further dysregulation.
Noticed while making breakfast that I was unthinkingly charging around the kitchen, and made myself stop and literally say aloud, “You need to slow down or you will break something, and it might be me.”
Come dinnertime, rather than simply having leftover macaroni-and-cheese from lunch I made myself the meal I’ve been having during the latest bout of food exhaustion: potatoes, chickpeas, spinach, onion, tomato sauce, and Old Bay seasoning.
With the assistance of 50 Foot Wave, somehow managed to do the full version of my evening walk route, of just under a mile and a half, at the unheard of and unrepeatable pace of a 15’47” mile, which frequently felt like barely-controlled falling.
Brought myself to within spitting distance of a working search solution for the blog, something which had escaped me completely since moving to Eleventy earlier this year and which I finished up today.
The long and the short of it: the blog finally has search functionality again, something it lost with the move to Eleventy back in March. This is not something I was sure would ever happen.
I’d avoided the consistently recommended Pagefind because I didn’t like that it used a separate page for search and unrolled the results into the page rather than what I was used to, which was a search form you could place in the sidebar that loaded a search results page.
Turns out that’s just the default Pagefind behavior out of the box. By utilizing its API, you mostly can do whatever you want.
Thanks to Matti for getting this started off something I’d said in the #software channel on the omg.lol Discord, complete with animated gif showing search behaving exactly as described above, which I used as the basis for figuring this out. I started tackling it yesterday in the midst of all the drama and by bedtime all I had left was styling the search box and preventing a quick flash of the blog’s front page whenever you landed on the search results page.
That last was an unfortunate artifact of doing this the way I wanted, where akin to both WordPress and weblog.lol search results appear at something like /?search=terms rather than on a separate page like /search. It’s something of an issuing cousin to the infamous Flash Of Unstyled Content.
In the end, this was solved by a bit on CSS which hides the usual content that appears at my site root of / by default.
#site-content {
display: none;
}
Then a script in <head> unhides that content on any page whose address in the location bar doesn’t contain search=.
This is pretty super-ridiculous, I find, but nonetheless it works and rids me of something that would have driven my OCD pretty solidly batshit every time I needed to search for something.
Unsurprisingly, right when everything was put together exactly as I wanted it, a major problem occurred: Pagefind did not appear to actually be indexing, or perhaps simply finding in the indexed content, everything it should be. I discovered this while running some tests, and found that a search for the word capacity was finding only three posts when in reality there were over a hundred posts using the word.
To make it all the weirder still, if you limited your search to capac, a non-word no one would ever type into the search box, Pagefind found all the relevant posts containing the word capacity. The problem appears to be something in the way Pagefind does what’s apparently called “stemming”—not to be confused with stimming, the self-regulatory behavior in which I had to engage as these weird problems continued to crop up.
It took all day, but eventually I found my way to a post from Bob Monsour—who coincidentally was in my mentions on Mastodon about other Pagefind stuff—and lo and behold, this solves the problem.
As is usual with posts about code requirements in making this blog function the way it’s supposed to: yes, I consulted the occasional LLM. They are copyright and climate monstrosities, but with the blog such an enormous part of my self-regulatory regimen (regime?), it needs to work the way I need it to work. It’s rank hypocrisy to be sure, but I’ll live with it for as long as I need this blog to exist to help keep my nervous system at even just a somewhat evenish keel.
At any rate, the point is that search is back, and functioning the way I want and need it to, and since search links in existing posts already use the /?search= format, I don’t even need to do any clean up. Everything now should just work.
Now that I’ve said multiple times that it’s working, I fully expect now that it’s gone live for something to fail, possibly in some spectacular fashion.
Continuing to feel better today, so pushed out an email newsletter improvement for Micro.blog Premium folks. I had mostly coded this a couple days ago, was waiting to make sure I could be around to test and monitor it.
I had to remove some features on each site to make this feel right.
Takeaway: adding stuff is easy, removing stuff is hard.
The element is a web component and not even under source control (🤫). I serve it directly from my cdn. If I want to make an update, I tweak the file on disk and re-deploy.
Takeaway: cowboy codin’, yee-haw! Live free and die hard.
So. Many. Iterations. All of which led to what? A small, iterative evolution.
Takeaway: it’s ok for design explorations to culminate in updates that look more like an evolution than a mutation.
Want more info on the behind-the-scenes work? Read on!
Design Explorations
It might look like a simple iteration on what I previously had, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t explore the universe of possibilities first before coming back to the current iteration.
v0: Tabs!
A tab-like experience seemed the most natural, but how to represent it? I tried a few different ideas. On top. On bottom. Different visual styles, etc.
And of course, gotta explore how that plays out on desktop too.
Some I liked, some I didn’t. As much as I wanted to play with going to the edges of the viewport, I realized that every browser is different and you won't be able to get a consistent “bleed-like” visual experience across browsers. For example, if you try to make tabs that bleed to the edges, it looks nice in a frame in Figma, and even in some browsers. But it won’t look right in all browser, like iOS Safari.
So I couldn’t reliably leverage the idea of a bounded canvas as a design element — which, I should’ve known, has always been the case with the web.
v1: Bottom Tabs With a Site Theme
I really like this pattern on mobile devices, so I thought maybe I’d consider it for navigating between my sites.
But how to theme across differently-styled sites? The favicon styles seemed like a good bet!
And, of course, what do to on larger devices? Just stacking it felt like overkill, so I explored moving it to the edge.
I actually prototyped this in code, but I didn’t like how it felt so I scratched the idea and went other directions.
v2: The Unification
The more I explored what to do with this element, the more it started taking on additional responsibility.
“What if I unified its position with site-specific navigation?” I thought.
This led to design explorations where the disparate subdomains began to take on not just a unified navigational element, but a unified header.
And I made small, stylistic explorations with the tabs themselves too.
You can see how I played toyed with the idea of a consistent header across all my sites (not an intended goal, but ya know, scope creep gets us all).
As I began to explore more possibilities than I planned for, things started to get out of hand.
v3: Do More. MORE. MORE!!
Questions I began asking:
Why aren’t these all under the same domain?!
What if I had a single domain for feeds across all of them, e.g. feeds.jim-nielsen.com?
What about icons instead of words?
Wait, wait, wait Jim. Consistent navigation across inconsistent sites. That’s the goal. Pare it back a little.
v4: Reigning It Back In
To counter my exploratory ambitions, I told myself I needed to ship something without the need to modify the entire design style of all my sites.
So how do I do that?
That got me back to a simpler premise: consistent navigation across my inconsistent sites.
Better — and implementable.
Technical Details
The implementation was pretty simple. I basically just forked my previous web component and changed some styles. That’s it.
The only thing I did different was I moved the web component JS file from being part of my www.jim-nielsen.com git repository to a standalone file (not under git control) on my CDN.
This felt like one of the exceptions to the rule of always keeping stuff under version control. It’s more of the classic FTP-style approach to web development. Granted, it’s riskier, but it’s also way more flexible. And I’m good with that trade-off for now. (Ask me again in a few months if I’ve done anything terrible and now have regrets.)
Each site implements the component like this (with a different subdomain attribute for each site):
One of my favorite authors of all time is Ray Bradbury. I enjoy the way he constructs tales, his frenzied kind of storytelling. I first got to know of him by reading the excellent Zen in the Art of Writing, a recompilation of essays around the art of writing stories. He's one of those authors that's really successful at just letting his own subconscious guide the whole process, and trusting the process enough to not get in the way. The best thing, he says, that a writer can do is to be observant, everything else takes care of itself.
...
While falling asleep yesterday, I found myself thinking of a quote I once read from Bradbury. It's a quote that he gave in an interview1 about Fahrenheit 451 (great book by the way). I'll let the quote speak by itself:
In writing the short novel Fahrenheit 451 I thought I was describing a world that might evolve in four or five decades. But only a few weeks ago, in Beverly Hills one night, a husband and wife passed me, walking their dog. I stood staring after them, absolutely stunned. The woman held in one hand a small cigarette-package-sized radio, its antenna quivering. From this sprang tiny copper wires which ended in a dainty cone plugged into her right ear. There she was, oblivious to man and dog, listening to far winds and whispers and soap-opera cries, sleep-walking, helped up and down curbs by a husband who might just as well not have been there. This was not fiction.
I find this really interesting. The woman was just walking with headphones on, and that was enough to cause such a reaction in Bradbury. I say "just" because for us walking while listening to music or an audiobook is absolutely inconsequential. Actually, it might even be considered to be more in the here-and-now than many of our modern entertainments. To read this quote, in our current technological world, is almost comical. And yet, I think Bradbury hits it right on the head. The anecdote seems to ask: "Why would anyone want to escape such an idyllic afternoon stroll?"
We have a much bigger issue though: our phones. They not only capture the attention of our ears, but also our eyes and ultimately, our thoughts and minds. We've been desensitized to the ordinariness of everyday life. It's become boring. I know it can be so for me, and I imagine it is so for many others. I often find myself taking out my phone just to stare at it, even when there's a perfectly nice thing going on around me. When I'm waiting at a restaurant, or even when I'm playing with my son. The funny thing is that I don't really do anything with it. I just take it out to see if someone has written me anything. This is silly, because very rarely does anyone ever write to me. Then I put the phone back in my pocket for a while, and then the whole scene repeats itself. I sometimes open up Instagram or Reddit to look at things I really don't care much for. Why?
I often wonder what Bradbury would say about the current state of things. We think of our phones as something liberating, something that frees us from the limits of our bodies and allows us to connect with others in ways that wouldn't otherwise be possible. On one hand, that's true, as evidenced by your reading this. However, this freedom also means we're free from two essential limitation of our natural bodies: the world around us and boredom.2 I think these two go hand in hand.
This freedom, I think, is way too large for our human minds. Having access to everything we see the details of nothing, we're blind to all but the coarsest shadows and we think that being familiar with them is what being an informed and socially connected human being is all about. But how can we call ourselves "connected" or "realized" if we don't even take time to see the world around us? We take no time to see the beetles scurrying along in our backyard. We're not even familiar with the birds that frequent it! It's like we're living entirely in a world of our own making, which is nothing but a bleak reflection of what's really out there.
Wouldn't it be nice if it weren't so? I know I'm not alone in feeling like this. The hard part is that the path to get there is not clear at all. What are we to do? The truth is that leaving our phones in a drawer is not really the solution, nor are they the entire problem. If we abandoned our phones I'm sure the overall situation would improve, but the basic issue is a problem of habit. Should we give up the phone we would soon find ourselves being distracted by something else. Sure, maybe it's something healthier that offers less immediate gratification, but wouldn't it be nice if we could be really observant, present with the things around us?
This reminds me of another quote by Bradbury, this one from Zen in the Art of Writing:
[...] ideas lie everywhere, like apples fallen and melting in the grass for lack of wayfaring strangers with an eye and a tongue for beauty, whether absurd, horrific, or genteel.
May we all be on the lookout for fallen apples then. May we all strive not to squash them under our boots as we trample through life.
Footnotes
I tried looking for a link to the interview but wasn't able to find it. If you know which one it is then please do let me know! ↩
There's much to be said about how boredom has basically become to be perceived as one of the greatest evils in our modern world. We should avoid boredom at all costs. Just a couple of weeks ago I heard someone say that "boredom" was a bad word, and she meant it. ↩
Lore wakes up in an alley, naked, a huge gash running down her back, her identity implant—the only proof of her heritage in one of the world’s richest families—gone. Hearing footsteps, she calls for help, and meets Spanner, a hacker and opportunist who knows how to take advantage of anyone in anyplace. In her hands, Lore becomes someone else. But her past is never too far away, and her knowledge of how systems operate far too valuable to keep to herself. Her family’s history parallels a precarious operation to remediate the city’s polluted waterways—with both tracks as likely to end in disaster as redemption. Griffith’s characters always cut through the world like a knife, and Lore is no exception.
Ways of seeing and feeling that I first learned from land artists have remained invaluable. This extensive show offered a chance to reconnect with one of my favourites.
I fell for land art while at art school in the early ’90s, and several key artists had a huge impact on me, notably those able to present work as both transient in the landscape (often documented through photos, video or maps) and more permanent in a gallery space. Two great examples are Richard Long and Andy Goldsworthy.
Wool Runner, 2025Fence, 2025Fence, 2025
I kept Goldsworthy close for many years before gradually drifting away. However, as soon as I heard about this bold new exhibition, I booked tickets and we planned our trip up North around it.
To mark fifty years of his work, National Galleries of Scotland invited Goldsworthy to devise new installations in response to the Royal Scottish Academybuilding. The show also features a limited retrospective of his work dating back to his 1970s formative explorations.
Gravestones, 2025Skylight, 2025Skylight, 2025
Goldsworthy is not an artist to namedrop and impress people with. His work is hugely popular across the world, and that’s largely because it looks good and is, on the face of it, easy to read. A lot of his works make great postcards and there are many coffee table books. Thousands of people will book in advance and tell their friends they went to see this show and that it was great.
And that’s good. But Goldsworthy matters to me because his work, while aesthetically engaging, represents far more than an attractive collaboration with nature. He loves nature but doesn’t (and probably couldn’t) romanticise it. While some works embrace natural beauty, others remind us that nature can be hostile and dangerous. Deeply rooted in rural graft and an understanding of natural materials, his work scratches beneath the surface to reveal truths about the land, farm labour, livestock, access, land histories, life, death and everything in between. The work is, if you want it to be, deeply conceptual.
Red Wall, 2025Red Wall, 2025Red River Rock. Dumfriesshire, 2016
Goldsworthy both explores and extends this language, helping us make sense of our direct contact with the landscape and deepening our understanding of what it represents. Richard Long’s influence on him is evident. In turn, Goldsworthy’s impact on subsequent generations has been profound, with artists like Olafur Eliasson using some of his concepts as starting points.
Oak Passage, 2025Oak Passage, 2025Oak Passage, 2025
The work is very often about transformation, and two works exemplify how Goldsworthy transforms death into fleeting beauty. With Feathers from Dead Heron, Cumbria 1982, Goldsworthy plucks the dead bird he found, and transforms it into material, creating a rhythmic monochromatic arrangement. With Fallen Elm, he uses vibrant leaves to highlight the cracks and wounds the tree suffered as it fell. Each work presents one death as a symbol of the wider threat to nature, and offers the artist a means to make sense of grief. This underlines that for Goldsworthy, art is less about expression and more a way of understanding the world.
That need to understand by doing is evident in Goldsworthy’s construction, with most works created carefully and rich with a profound sense of integrity. An old exhibition catalogue titled Nature as Material represents his philosophy — a commitment to honesty of construction and truth to natural materials.
I’m always interested in the act of bringing the work to life. With Goldsworthy, there’s an inherent performance quality to his process, yet it’s not staged for us or any audience. So much of this work is about how it’s made, but in this show we only get occasional video or process photos, and little for the big new installations. There’s lots of behind-the-scenes stuff on the artist’s website and the venue’s YouTube, but I wish there was more of the process in the exhibition itself.
Earlier, I suggested the retrospective is limited, and it is. Only in the gift shop do we find evidence of his deeply significant work with cairns, sheep pens and dry-stone walls — key aspects of his dialogue with recreational and working landscapes. I’d love to have seen more in the show itself.
Still, this exhibition reassures us that Goldsworthy’s work continues to evolve while maintaining its core essence. And it shows us that environmental art remains vital because it creates a necessary dialogue between humanity and nature, between permanence and impermanence. Goldsworthy's work invites us not merely to observe nature, but to participate in its cycles, to understand its processes, and to recognise our place within it. His ways of seeing and feeling our world resonate more profoundly now than ever before.
Photos from downstairs
All photos above are of the newer installations upstairs. To conclude, here are my photos from downstairs — mostly archive projects and details I appreciate.
Downstairs
Andy Goldsworthy: Fifty Years is at Royal Scottish Academy, Edinburgh until 2nd November, 2025. All photos in this post are my own, taken at the Fifty Years show.
I’ve been playing around with Midjourney for work and the one thing that makes Stable Diffusion cool and useful to me is the --sref flag to summon results in a specific visual style or “style reference” (e.g. Celestial Swirlscape is --sref 2566192150). They differ a bit from traditional or “artist” styles (e.g. “In the style of Picasso” or “Rip off Studio Ghibli”) but can be that or they can be more generic or compositional like “Pink Retronetic Dreamscape”. I’ve read a deep-dive on SREF codes and it’s still a bit unclear how they work to me. They’re like a hybrid between prompt shorthand and style classification. Curated and collected by humans, but a code generated by machines. I have to imagine there’s some clumped circles on a node graph chart somewhere that determine this… but I don’t know those answers.
The idea of a classifier (human assisted or otherwise) that can suck up and analyze all the art on the internet and end up with a 10-digit number that represents nearly any visual style of imagery I’ve ever seen is mind-bending. Not to mention the ability to overlay that style reference on any image I want in under a minute. “Anime waifu. --sref 3196580341” is the “Tea. Earl gray. Hot” of digital imagery. It feels unreal.
Could we apply a universal classifier to blog posts so that your “longread about cool bugs” and my “longread about cool bugs” have the same --sref tag? And then we retro-actively apply human-readable tag names to this stylistic tag? And then could I subscribe to a feed of those specific types of posts? That might be interesting… or radicalizing.
Design tokens? Could those be a system of classifiers instead of arbitrary language? Probably not. But why not? Web design almost certainly could, if it isn’t already.
While the idea of classifiers tickles the logical computer part of my brain, reducing the entirety of the visual arts down to a set of ten billion categories offends the artist part of my brain. It is odious. There’s an observer effect to it whereby in the act of classifying the art you’ve limited and altered your ability to understand it. And any mimicked generation has an imposter-like, soul-less character to it, no matter the quality. I can’t explain that. Even though I’ve seen the machine generate incredible art beyond anything I’m capable of, I still feel that intangible void on my retinas when I interact with it.
My wife and I were joking about how the algorithm is serving us videos about certain personality quirks that map to (possibly made-up) niche disorders. My wife –who can remember the melody to every guitar solo but can’t remember the words of the songs from her own band– has a diagnosis from Dr. TikTok that she has “polyphonic perception”. My personality quirks all point to my particular flavor of ADHD. How long until our entire personalities are all tied to a collection of niche diagnoses? How long until our brains are all classified by a ten-digit number? That could be incredibly useful for getting help but brings up nature versus nurture questions for me. Did God make me this way or did I dent the packaging? Can people with --brainSpiceRef 2566192150 even apply for this job? How long until the machines build these types of preferences? Myers-Briggs but instead of made by a racist, it’s made by MechaHitler.
When I think about the future I want, it always comes down to one idea: I want a pod-like chamber I can walk into that scans my entire body, makes bleep-bloop noises to show that it’s working, and prints out a receipt with a list of all my ailments (cancers, deformities, disorders, and otherwise) and recommends a diet and exercise plan until my next scheduled visit to the pod. Bonus points if it orders groceries accordingly after my entire family has exited the chamber. I’m aware this has “Big Theranos Energy” and is an incredible surface area for conspiracy theories… but it’s the science fiction future I want. Classifiers seem inevitable on that pathway. But how do we preserve our humanity when reducing the human race –who we are and what we create– down to a series of ten-digit codes?
