Endgame Viable

Reviving A Boss DR-660 Drum Machine

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 25 Aug 2026 07:03:42 -0400

I bought a used Boss DR-660 Dr. Rhythm drum machine (manufactured in 1989) on Reverb a while back, and it arrived. I originally bought one of these around the year 1992 or 1993. It was my main source of drum sounds throughout the 90s.

It was packed well, so I was optimistic. I even got a nice note. Confusingly, and ominously, it came with a fresh coin battery.

After unwrapping, the device was in excellent physical condition. It’s actually in better condition than the one I owned back in the 90s.

However there’s one problem: It came with the wrong power supply. Not only isn’t it the original Boss BRA-120 adapter, it’s a third-party adapter that supplies the wrong power. The DR-660 requires 12V AC, but this adapter supplies 12V DC. Not only that, but the cable looked like it had been patched or repaired at some point.

So I didn’t plug it in immediately to see if it worked or not.

Luckily I was able to find a replacement power adapter on Amazon that supplies the correct power. It arrived several days later.

Once I was able to supply correct power, I eagerly turned it on and watched the display with anticipation. And immediately saw a “battery low!” message. Well, that explains why they sent a battery with it. I noted that wasn’t disclosed in the Reverb listing. Ah well.

Most of the old gear of this type from the 80s and 90s has a little coin battery in them, and they’re all dying or dead now. If you’re lucky, the gear was designed so you can easily replace the battery. Otherwise, prepare to get out a soldering iron.

If you’re looking to buy old gear like this, check the status of the battery.

After consulting ChatGPT, it was clear that the DR-660 had an easily replaceable battery. So I took the back cover off and beheld a rather significant obstacle.

There was a secondary circuit board, called a “jack board,” completely covering the spot where the battery was held. I could see the battery holder by shining a flashlight in between the two circuit boards, and there was no way to reach it without moving that jack board.

It appeared there was nothing physically securing the jack board in place, except a couple of copper strips of tape, and the jacks themselves. So I set to work trying to pry the board loose from the back cover. It took a while, and a lot of careful prying with a small screwdriver, but eventually it popped loose.

And there was the elusive battery holder.

I replaced the battery with the one that came with the package and put everything back together. I powered the DR-660 on, watched it initialize and boot up again, and the “battery low” message was gone. Success!

I plugged in a MIDI cable, plugged the outputs into my audio interface, and ran a test with one of my old songs that I’d loaded into REAPER. It worked! The DR-660 received MIDI notes, played the samples, and I was able to record them in REAPER. There was no extraneous noise or hiccups.

I have substantial work ahead of me to reprogram it like I had it in the 90s. I used some rather unconventional drum kits which aren’t going to be in the factory programming, so I have to recreate them from memory and by examining my old MIDI files.

Incidentally, I was able to simulate a DR-660 in VSTi form using a TX16Wx software sampler and a set of DR-660 samples downloaded from the Internet. It works, but it’s a pain to setup, and it doesn’t quite sound right. So I’m glad to have the real thing.

EverQuest Legends Sub Cancelled Already

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 06:33:36 -0400

Tipa is one of the only people I see playing EverQuest Legends regularly: EverQuest Legends: There’s no way this is going to last. – Chasing Dings!

And is EQL attracting many people who didn’t play it back in the day?

I can only speak for myself, but no, no it isn’t.

I got to level 3 and I feel like I’ve already seen everything that the game will ever be, which I assume is this: Go to a spot, whack some seemingly random mobs to death, collect loot and XP, return to sell loot. While noting every polygon in the extremely triangular terrain.

It’s certainly a nice recreation of my memory of MMORPGs of the 90s. Back then, those game tasks were new and exciting and fired the imagination. Now not so much. I don’t really feel like I need that in my life anymore.

Am I compelled to race to level 50 and see what exciting adventure awaits at the endgame? Not really. Am I eager to take on the evil villain and save the townsfolk? Um, what villain? What town?

I’ve already concluded that there isn’t much story to see in EverQuest. So since the game itself doesn’t deliver any lore, I can just read whatever lore I need on the Internet without bothering to launch the game.

I have to imagine most of the stories that came out of OG EverQuest were stories of interactions with other players. Or stories of people selling their accounts. I remember a lot of those. Oh, and the classic: Stories of recovering a corpse.

These days, I’m quite happy to play with no other players on the server at all. The novelty of Internet socializing from the 90s, when many of the people you met were the same societal outcasts as you, has long since soured.

Anyway I can’t imagine they intended EverQuest Legends to run for the next 20 years as their star property. It’s quite obviously a short-term cash infusion because surely Daybreak or whoever it is that still runs EverQuest and EverQuest II can’t possibly be very profitable.

I can’t even make decent videos out of the game. The combat is boring to watch, and there’s hardly any NPCs that say any meaningful dialog to read out loud in interesting ways.

So yeah, I already cancelled my subscription. I played a total of maybe 3 hours? Not bad for a modern game launch, actually. Typically I’m bored with new games within the first hour.

YouTube Channels I Follow

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 23 Aug 2026 07:40:34 -0400

I don’t actually know if it’s still Creator Appreciation week in Blaugust or not, but I know I don’t have anything to talk about this morning so I’ve pulled up this previously-prepared post.

This is a list of YouTube channels I regularly frequent. Some more regularly than others. In truth, I only frequent maybe five of these channels at any given time, since the algorithm tends to bury channels you haven’t watched in roughly the last 24 hours.

I tried to confine the list to more “independent” creators, though the definition of “independent” varies wildly.

Comedy

History

Macabre

Movies

Chris Stuckmann

Music

Podcasts

Politics

TTRPGs

* These channels use what looks like AI-generated thumbnails or B-roll illustrations from time to time, if that’s something that matters to you. I don’t know if it’s AI-generated, mind you, it’s just a suspicion. In any case, it doesn’t detract from the content.

P.S. Speaking of AI disclosures, I used Antigravity to fetch my list of subscriptions from the YouTube API and format it in Markdown, because manually going through a big list of subscriptions and writing down their links is for the birds. So a portion of this post was technically “AI-generated.” However, I did go through and re-order and categorize the list by hand.

Reverse Engineering Old Music Projects

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 12:26:00 -0400

Hoo boy did I fall deep down a rabbit hole. Nothing else in life matters now but this.

Parking my Promise Table web site reminded me that I have an assortment of music I wrote and recorded in the mid- to late-90s just sitting around doing nothing, and I wondered what I should do with it.

In my old age, I feel like most of my historical “content” should be available online, whether it has any value or not. With my blog and my YouTube channel I’m quite used to “putting things out there” and getting at best a polite golf clap, at worst a deafening apathy, so the idea of publishing my music–the artistic endeavor that I slave over more than anything else–doesn’t bother me too much anymore. I fully expect people “won’t get it” and that’s fine.

There’s basically no chance of profiting from all that work (the music industry and consumer habits being what they are, the odds of any independent musician making money from music is vanishingly small these days–as are the odds of making money from any artistic endeavor–thanks “democratization of content”), so I just want to put them somewhere on the Internet where anyone can click on them and listen.

So the goal is to publish my old music. But how?

One problem I can’t quite overcome is I still have a strong interest in retaining the rights to my music. Artists have very few rights anymore, and copyright is one of them. Even if I make no money from my art, I still have rights to my art, and I should behave like a professional rights holder no matter what.

Many years ago, I registered all my songs with the U.S. Copyright Office. I want to distribute this music in a way that doesn’t completely undermine my rights. It would be foolish to expect anything good to happen, but it would be even more foolish not to plan for the one in a billion chance that someone slaps one of my songs on a TikTok video that gets 500 million views.

My first thought was to create a BandCamp account and upload my songs there. I have an assortment of 16-bit 44khz master WAV files I can upload.

Later I came to realize that I could fairly easily create a static web site that is essentially a player for my music, and I didn’t really need BandCamp or SoundCloud.

But I soon encountered a major problem. Back in the 90s, I judiciously used samples recorded from television, or downloaded from random sources on the Internet, and I didn’t keep track of where they came from or whether I could use them or not. They’re littered in my master recordings. They aren’t in every song, but they’re in the good ones.

Now I know better, and would never do that. So I can’t just drop those songs out there as-is, even though I have the master WAV files. I need to figure out how to creatively edit those mixes and masters to work around those samples.

For some songs, I can take the original mixdowns and cut and paste around the problem samples. For others, they’re buried deep in the mix and there’s no editing around it. I’d need to do a remix from scratch.

There’s another problem, though. Almost all of my old home studio gear is long gone, so recreating the environment in which I mixed a song from, say, 1995-1999, is nearly impossible.

From that diagram of my ~1995 setup, here in 2026, I only have the Sequencer Project Files, the Recorded Vocal/Guitar Tracks, and the Master Mixdown DAT Tapes.

In 2013, I digitally transferred the recorded vocal and guitar tracks from the original ADAT digital audio tapes into REAPER projects. No problem there. Well, it’s mostly raw data files, so there’s a ton of organizational and synchronization work that still needs to be done… but the data is there.

However, back in the 90s, we didn’t have DAW workstations where we could easily record hundreds of digital audio tracks inside our computers. We (specifically I) had an 8-track ADAT synchronized with MIDI gear, and mixdowns happened by playing the projects live and recording the mix by moving dials and faders around.

But I don’t have any of that MIDI gear anymore. Or the rackmount effects units I used. Or any of the mixers or time synchronization devices or anything, really.

It’s an interesting logistical problem that engages my problem-solving engineering brain.

I have the project files containing all of the MIDI notes sent to those MIDI devices, which is the most important part, but I don’t have any recordings of the sounds those MIDI devices made, other than what you can hear on the masters.

So it’s a daunting task to try to reverse engineer, remix, and remaster these old songs to remove potentially infringing samples, even in today’s DAW world where mixing and mastering music is a breeze compared to what it was in the 90s.

Some songs I can reconstruct easier than others, but some songs are going to require starting from scratch. Some songs I want to remix just because I did a rotten job of it back in the 90s.

It all starts with finding and loading all of the old project files. In the 90s I used Cakewalk products (Cakewalk Pro Audio was the first DAW for Windows, as far as I was aware), so it’s all Cakewalk files. Luckily for me, there’s still a free download of Cakewalk SONAR that is available from BandLab, so I can still read those project files.

I don’t want to work in SONAR anymore, though. I use REAPER now. So there is a step of exporting those old projects and importing them into REAPER.

But the lack of MIDI devices is a big problem. Reverse engineering those older songs back to a point where I can work with them today, in a modern DAW context, is, well it’s already been said… daunting. But not impossible!

My rabbit hole project is starting down the road to recovering those songs and recreating my old recording environment in REAPER.

I set out to find VST plugins to emulate all those missing MIDI devices. The complete list of devices is: A Yamaha TQ5 tone generator, a Yamaha SY77 keyboard, a Roland SC-88 tone generator, and a Boss DR-660 drum machine. And there’s also an Alesis NanoPiano, but I actually still have that one.

There used to be a Roland Sound Canvas SC-88 VST plugin made by Roland, and I had it, and it was great, but they discontinued it and I failed to get the lifetime unlock license in time. Maybe there’s a pirate version out there somewhere.

ChatGPT told me about a VST plugin called Swayed which purportedly emulates a Yamaha SY77, including SysEx compatibility. I shall endeavor to try it.

ChatGPT told me about another VST plugin called KQ Trixie which purportedly emulates a Yamaha TQ5, including SysEx compatibility. Music I made with a TQ5 is very, very, shockingly old, and probably not suitable for public distribution anyway. But it would be nice to recover them just for my own amusement. (Much of that music was driven by an Amiga computer, before 1993.)

ChatGPT told me it was easy to find Boss DR-660 drum samples that you could load into whatever VST sample player you wanted, so that’s a potential avenue to explore. But I’m sure it would be a pain to setup. (I have a vague memory of setting that up before, actually, now that I think about it.)

I wondered if it was possible to buy those old devices again. I’m an affluent member of capitalist society, surely I can find a way to throw more money at this problem.

It didn’t take long before I found a used Boss DR-660 and a used Roland SC-88 on Reverb in good condition, and I clicked those Buy Now buttons. Could it be a scam? Maybe, but it’s a weird way to scam people. The SC-88 I bought is actually the Japanese version so I have to get a step-down transformer so it doesn’t blow up when I plug it in here in the U.S.

If those two devices work when they arrive, that will solve 75% of my problems. I can plug them in, play MIDI sequences to them, and record everything they do to one of a thousand DAW tracks in REAPER, and never worry about losing a MIDI note again.

Or, they could be lemons and I’ll be out a bunch of money and back at square one.

I wasn’t able to find any used Yamaha SY77 keyboards to buy, nor the rackmount TG77 tone generator version of the keyboard. The Swayed VST is my only option for now, or else replace all those parts with new VST synth parts by guesswork.

To reiterate, it’s a daunting project. It’s all in service of remixing and remastering some old songs to remove some samples, so I can set up a web page to publish them.

Since obviously nobody actually listens to music that way, I’m also investigating how music distribution works in the modern world for places like Spotify, etc. (Initial investigations provide an easy answer: DistroKid.)

Should anyone ever say to me, “Oh you wrote a song, can I hear it?” It would be cool to be able to send them a Spotify link or something.

So that’s my secret music production project. That was kind of a big wall of jumbled text up there, but that hurricane of disorganized thought closely resembles what’s inside my brain during sudden rabbit hole excursions like this. It’s an exciting time, and a challenging exercise just to bring some order to it.

Retiring Old WordPress Sites

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Fri, 21 Aug 2026 07:04:13 -0400

I had three old WordPress blogs that were just decaying out there on the Internet, using up power and space for nothing.

Those three old sites haven’t been updated since somewhere around 2018, so it’s safe to say they weren’t going to suddenly spring back to life. In the development world, we love to build and deploy things, but we rarely think about destroying them when their usefulness has passed. (Trust me, in my day job, I run into this all the time.)

It was time to get rid of them, park those domain names, and redirect all those old links to this site.

This task was somewhat tangentially inspired by a Blaugust post I saw earlier: Re: The Loss of Links Continues | Michael Harley. My internal response to that post was something along the lines of: “You mean, there are people who don’t think about permalinks staying permanent? This has to be explained?”

And then I pondered my own shameful link rot problem. A couple years ago, I tore down my real name blog and replaced it with a Hugo landing page, but I also wiped out all the old permalinks on that domain, so those links have been broken for a while now. It’s bothered me ever since it happened.

It bothered me, but not enough to fix it. The trouble was, it’s a real chore to setup redirections for hundreds of links by hand. But now, with Antigravity’s help, during this Blaugust burst of blog-related productivity, I was able to setup a redirection file to restore those links on my real name domain, so they now redirect here. Far too late, perhaps, but it least it doesn’t bother me anymore.

As for the other three obsolete sites, I set out to create three tiny static sites, consisting of exactly one index.html landing page that says “go to Endgame Viable,” and find a place to host them for free.

Github Pages would have worked, but I discovered that CloudFlare Pages also supports a _redirects file to redirect people going to old links. (I think Netlify also supports it, but I can’t vouch for that.) Undoubtedly there are other options available but I picked CloudFlare Pages almost entirely because I had a CloudFlare account. (Which I honestly don’t remember setting up.)

I asked Antigravity to build a landing page for those three old sites, based roughly on the visual style of the WordPress pages that would be replaced. I tweaked them a little, but not much. How they look doesn’t matter that much to me. The only important thing is that there’s a prominent link to Endgame Viable.

I’ve already imported all the posts from those old sites into Endgame Viable. Since Antigravity has access to all the backup files from the old sites and all the imported files in my current Hugo site, I was also able to get it to automatically create a _redirects file that maps each of the old post permalinks on the old sites to the new url of the imported posts on Endgame Viable.

Then I setup three new git repositories on my github account, and committed those three local directories of files. Which was essentially just two files for each site: An index.html file and a _redirects file. One of them also had an image.

Then I loaded up CloudFlare and found where you add Pages. (Not easy at first, because CloudFlare’s UI seems overly complicated to me.) I added one “application” for each of the three sites, connected each to the appropriate github repo, and enabled it. They were live almost instantly … with temporary development urls.

So I added a custom domain for each of the CloudFlare Pages, and went to my domain registrar and changed the nameservers to point to CloudFlare Pages.

Hopefully by the time this post publishes, the DNS changes will have propagated and the new sites will be live.

Two days later…

It was taking forever to propagate the domain change. But it turned out I had to make some additional changes to the DNS records that I didn’t expect. Once I fixed that, the changes propagated almost instantly, the new static sites were live, and WordPress was gone, forever exorcized from my life.

Everett Renshaw (writing)
Promise Table (music)
Swamp of Ineffectual Presumption (politics)

While I was at it, I changed my real-name site from a single Hugo-built page to a plain static index.html file as well, so I no longer need AWS Amplify to build it. It was a huge waste of compute just for a landing page.

Thomas Krehbiel

And that was it. Three old WordPress sites killed off in no time, one Hugo site reduced to an index.html . It took a single day. Not counting the waiting time and fixing the DNS records. The Internet now uses just a tiny bit less power thanks to me. We need all the power we can get to keep Antigravity running!

P.S. Right after I created three new github repos, I read this other Blaugust post about github outages and its unsustainable exponential AI-driven growth: GitHub’s growth | Sal’s. It’s me! I’m hastening github’s demise!

Secret Hyperfocusing Musician

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 06:29:45 -0400

Oh my. I’m caught in the awkward position of not having a post prepared for this morning. It kind of feels “normal” to post every day now. I was on a roll there for a while, on a comfortable pace getting posts prepped the afternoon before.

It’s not that I don’t have posts drafted. It’s that it’s taking a long time for some domain names to change nameservers and propagate, so I can’t talk about what I expected to talk about today. I thought it surely wouldn’t take more than 24 hours, but it’s taking, well, more than 24 hours.

So this morning I’m off to a regular followup appointment with the brain doctor to go over the results of my last brain MRI. I’ve seen the test results, and they appear nominal. Meaning everything’s the same as it was last time: There’s still a hole where they removed a tumor, and there’s still scar tissue where they irradiated two baby tumors, and there’s no sign of any new cancer growth.

Normally I would resent having to drive all the way across town just to hear what I can plainly read on the health portal, but on this particular day, I’m keenly interested in asking if they have any ideas about why I can’t bend my right thumb anymore.

Over the last couple of days, I’ve fallen down a very deep rabbit hole with a secret music production project. I don’t talk much about my secret musician alter ego on this blog, mainly because it’s been almost entirely sitting on a closet shelf for the last 20 years. But every now and then I suddenly revive my interest and work on a project.

One reason I haven’t done much with my music hobby is that I tend to fall deep into a different world when I’m working on it, to the complete exclusion of everything else in my life, like eating, sleeping, and work. Minor things like that. So I’ve developed a somewhat unhealthy attitude of, “Well, if I can’t dedicate 100% of the day to this hobby I love, from the moment I wake up to the moment I fall asleep, why even bother?” And then 20 years went by and I can barely play a guitar anymore. Learn from my mistakes, kids.

I’m still trying to work out a healthier way to approach it in my old age. I’m told this hyperfocusing is a feature of neurodivergency. It’s just so, so frustrating to have a project idea and not be able to work on it because of some other commitment, like the aforementioned eating, sleeping, and work. C’est la vie.

Anyway, I’ll have another post about the secret music project at some point in the future, because writing about music production is also quite fun. (I doubt there are many music producers or sound engineers among my readership, though.)

Hummingbirds

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Wed, 19 Aug 2026 07:00:20 -0400

I have hummingbirds now.

Some time ago, I walked into the kitchen and saw, to my surprise, a hummingbird flitting around outside the kitchen windows. It was hovering at the glass, seemingly peering inside, like it was casing the joint, looking for something. It went back and forth between two windows before flying away.

It’s not the first time I’ve seen a hummingbird around the house during summer. I’ve seen one or two every summer for years, always just a brief showing before disappearing. This was the first time I ever saw one sending a clear message: “Hey, you in there, give us food!”

I’d always meant to setup a feeder for them, but this year I finally did.

I ordered two glass hummingbird feeders, put some sugar water in them, and hung them on a shepherd’s crook hanger outside the window.

Within an hour, the hummingbirds had found it.

Now I see them buzzing around out there every day. Sometimes they get a drink and leave. Sometimes they land on top of the hanger and park there for a while, looking back and forth, like they’re guarding their territory.

I don’t know much about bird identification but basic search skills tell me they are classic Virginia ruby-throated hummingbirds. However, the ones I’m seeing don’t have a ruby throat, so I assume they’re females, or smaller young ones with muted colors.

Apparently they’ll be heading south in a month or so. But it’s been fun for now.

Sending Webmentions and Pingbacks

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 07:04:00 -0400

Another day, another major upgrade to the blog platform.

This time I’ve added support for sending webmentions and pingbacks to external sites referenced in posts.

I think you can probably guess how I did it by now: I used Antigravity to build out the serverless Lambda functions I required, adding onto the previous Bathtub Robot repo which handled sending fediverse notifications.

I asked Antigravity to create a diagram of the architecture:

I hope that renders on my blog. Hugo doesn’t natively support Mermaid diagrams; it supports Goat diagrams, for some reason. (Will it translate to RSS though?) [UPDATE: The answer is no, no it won’t. Oops. Note to self: Future diagrams need to be images.]

In narrative form:

A poller checks the blog’s JSON feed for updates every 15 minutes. If there’s a new post, an SNS event is dispatched. (It’s the same event that triggers posting a notification to the fediverse.) (Someday I want to work out a way to get my Hugo deployment to trigger notifications when deployment is complete.)
The link-dispatcher serverless function triggers, which extracts all the external links from the post within the <article>, and sends out SNS events for each link.
Both the webmention-sender and pingback-sender serverless functions are triggered, which perform the work of discovering the right endpoints and sending webmentions and pingbacks to external sites. (Pingbacks are not sent if the target site supports webmentions.)

I’ve tested the functions as much as I can locally (using localstack), but I won’t actually know if it all works until I publish this post, at which time it will trigger the above chain reaction of serverless functions and SNS events.

I will now embed a link to a WordPress site I own so that if it crashes spectacularly, at least it won’t hurt anybody else. Yikes, I haven’t updated that site since 2018. It’s obsolete now and needs to be destroyed.

I receive webmentions and pingbacks by leveraging webmention.io, a site that I basically never check, so I have no idea if anyone is or has been linking to my blog.

Someday I might wire up something of my own to handle that, but it’s a little more complicated to setup an always-on server to respond to POST requests. Well, not complicated per se… the word I was looking for was expensive.

I could potentially use my Vultr VPS as a webmention receiver, since it’s now running my GoToSocial instance and needs to be always on anyway. Food for thought. An Antigravity project for another day.

One thing I probably won’t do is add a list of pingbacks and webmentions at the bottom of each post page, like WordPress did. (Does it still do that?) I’ll have to find some other way to get notified if and when anyone ever references my site.

I don’t know if I’ve improved much in terms of writing during Blaugust this year, but I’ve made a shocking number of changes to the tech running under my blog’s hood this year, undoubtedly more than I ever have at once before, and that’s worth the price of admission this year for me.

And another thing…

I host this blog entirely within AWS, mainly because a baseline AWS knowledge happens to be useful for my day job. I set Antigravity to work on analyzing my AWS cost breakdown and found several things I was paying for that I no longer need.

My goal has always been to keep the hosting of the blog on AWS as close to $5/month as possible (not counting the domain name renewals). It’s been approaching $8/month for the last year though.

UPDATE: The test worked. A pingback and webmention were both successfully sent from this post.

A Dynamic Blogroll

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Mon, 17 Aug 2026 07:24:40 -0400

A couple of quick health updates: 1) My brain MRI came back without anything unusual, 2) This infusion cycle has been going better than usual, 3) I still can’t bend my right thumb, but I got a referral to a hand specialist.

Now on to the topic du jour.

I’ve been meaning to add a dynamic blogroll to my static Hugo site for years.

Yesterday I finally started researching the nitty-gritty details of all the JavaScript and CSS I’d need and … and …

Ha, just kidding. I mean, can you imagine?

While I was sitting in a chair yesterday morning at the infusion center getting my regular IV fluids for this cycle, I started chatting with Gemini on my phone to get some ideas for how to actually implement a Javascript blogroll. It started out as a Lambda serverless function and an S3 bucket, but by the time I got home it had simplified considerably.

I sat down and explained what I wanted to Antigravity and I had a working prototype in no time.

It was easier than I thought, because I was able to use InoReader for the entirety of the data source. I knew it could output an XML feed for folders, but I didn’t realize it could also output a JSON feed for folders. JSON is very easy to read from JavaScript.

If I didn’t have InoReader, I would have gone ahead and implemented a simple feed reader in a Lambda function to be run every hour or so. But, no need.

The biggest difficulty was figuring out where to put a blogroll in my layout. I don’t have any sidebars, so that’s out. I don’t have a lot of vertical space for a big list, either.

I ended up making a kind of stock ticker of blog post titles that I can fit at the bottom of my posts, and in between the first and second posts on my home page.

It’s not perfect, of course, but then they never are. InoReader doesn’t provide the name of the blog that created the post, only the author and the post title. So I can’t really cite the blog name, only the domain name.

I may yet build my own feed reader in a Lambda function just to fix that one issue.

For now, I set it to use my Blaugust 2026 folder as the data source.

Anyway, I hope it’s useful for someone. It’s more for everyone else than it is for me.

Other Changes

While I was tinkering with the blog, I did some other things.

I got rid of the “Related Posts” section at the bottom of posts, because I never liked it. Whatever algorithm Hugo used never came up with decent posts, and I never clicked on them. (Typically the things that get priority on my site are the things that I personally use.)

And for fans of industry-wide standards, I added Schema.org’s LSON-LD metadata to the blog, too.

And for all you IndieWeb enthusiasts out there, I added that h-card and h-entry nonsense … I mean, carefully thought-out schema … to the pages. (I personally think it’s quite silly to assign semantic meaning to css classes when there’s HTML5, but whatever, it’s no skin off my site generator.)

However, the h-cards are entirely useless because there’s a maze of additional things you have to setup before IndieWeb tools can actually consume your site, including IndieAuth endpoints and Microsub endpoints. Neither of which can be done natively on a static site, so you have to farm it out to some third-party authority you’ve never heard of, and it’s not worth the effort for roughly 7 readers.

P.S. Less than two hours after I published that, I worked with Antigravity to build a Lambda blogroll-aggregator which is now the data source for the dynamic blogroll. That means I can now show the blog title instead of just the domain name.

Community Aggregators

endgameviable@gmail.com (Endgame Viable) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 12:09:47 -0400

There’s been a handful of posts floating around recently talking about a community site or blog aggregator.

It started with Tipa discontinuing The Daily Blogroll. I thought it was a cool project, but for me, as a reader of blogs, it wasn’t better than InoReader. Tools like Feedly and InoReader already solve all the problems that most custom aggregators try to solve.

As a reader, all those RSS blogroll widgets on everybody’s blogs also feels pretty redundant to me. TAGN and others have a great blogroll in their sidebar, but I’m not likely to load up TAGN’s page to read blogs in the blogosphere.

I get some referrals from those blogrolls, so somebody must be reading them and clicking on them, but it just doesn’t fit into my blog-reading routine. I generally prefer to bring the blogs to me rather than going to the blogs.

But in community terms, I can see the benefit of a dynamic blogroll. The main (and only?) one being they have potential to send some traffic from bigger blogs to smaller blogs, as a way of giving back to the community. Someday I’d like to figure out how to add one to my blog. (There aren’t any handy plug-and-play solutions for static blogs that I know of.)

Scopique wrote of RSS readers in his newest post: “if I want to read posts across all feed sources in reverse chronological order, I can’t, really.” I found that puzzling because InoReader 100% does that and I’m pretty sure every reader I’ve ever seen does that. Reverse chronological order across all blogs is how I’ve read blogs for what must surely be 20 years now. First it was local readers downloading feeds to my local computer, then it was Google Reader, now it’s InoReader.

I’m sure this isn’t the intention, but Scopique’s initial thoughts on a community site sounded like a proposition to remake Facebook or Reddit again. A place where bloggers can author their posts? A community site that’s also a publishing platform sounds like nightmare fuel to me. That’s basically a WordPress instance with a lot of accounts with publishing rights. It’s basically MassivelyOP.

Disparate bloggers banding together into one super-blog to increase their reach was a thing back in the old days before social media, back when survival depended on there being something new on the blog every 15 minutes. A lot of political blogs originated that way.

But I personally wouldn’t be very interested in posting on a community mega-blog, because I want to maintain ownership over all of my content on the Internet. What happens to my posts if/when the community site eventually folds? What happens to those permalinks that are supposed to last forever?

As for community aggregators, I find most custom aggregators fit into the classic developer category of “a solution in search of a problem.” Fun to work on, but not necessarily useful.

And, to be brutally frank, here in 2026 anyone can now create a perfectly serviceable custom aggregator using AI tooling in a day. Scopique demonstrated that in one of his posts. I made one before Blaugust because I was curious about counting posts, and to see how often the number of blogs went up (a lot, it turned out). It was super easy to get it started.

I remember one political aggregator from the old days of political blogging, before social media. It was great, until there was a huge controversy: The definition of “the community” excluded someone who thought they should belong, and someone had to make some inclusion rules. The community divided into two communities, and everyone had to decide which one they wanted to be in. A tale as old as time.

It happened in miniature with the Blaugust AI rules just recently.

So I’m pretty skeptical about communities in general.

There are usually two types of communities: Commercial and organic. The commercial ones are made by companies, and I dare say they’re the most dominant type today.

The organic ones start out fine but they’re usually destined to die out or divide because they start to feel more exclusionary than inclusionary. It’s great if you’re one of the “chosen few” but not as much otherwise.

You can see that pattern in almost every MMORPG guild that’s ever existed: There’s always “the guild” and then “the inner circle of the guild.” If you have a history attending small churches, you may recognize it there too. There’s “the congregation” and the inner circle of “the vestry.” It’s human nature to exclude people.

Just the word “community” feels so tainted these days because it’s often just a target audience for advertising. That’s the “commercial” community I mentioned, attached to every entertainment property there is. Those seem like the only communities that ever actually grow over time.

Anyway, that’s a different topic.

Back to blogs, I’m more of a proponent of the reader determining which feeds they want to read.

But from the blog owner’s perspective, community aggregators can be advantageous because they can get more eyeballs on your content.

So I usually don’t mind submitting my blog to aggregators, as it’s generally positive to accumulate more eyeballs. Often, joining a community is far more valuable for smaller blogs than bigger blogs. Bigger blogs don’t have much to gain from aggregators until or unless the aggregator itself exceeds their views.

But I don’t really want to work at adding my blog to aggregators. I’m well past the point of needing or wanting to advertise my blog. Which reminds me, I wouldn’t want to participate with any custom aggregators that served advertising, as I find that a bit on the sketchy side.

So I guess my conclusion is that I’m still a little unclear on the merit of a community aggregator in a modern world. I don’t have a clear understanding of what the problem is that needs to be addressed.

My response to blog aggregation always comes back to “just use InoReader or Feedly.” And everyone put a list of blogs you like on your site somewhere. That’s the web ring.

The only reason I can think not to use Feedly or InoReader or the like is if you don’t want to support those companies, because they definitely profit off of your RSS feeds. It’s certainly a valid argument, but to me, the level of service and convenience is worth it.