https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-07-04

Welcome to volume twenty of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. In this quieter week, I ask, “why do we blog?”

IndieWeb

Why do we blog? What keeps us online? How do we find balance in it all? I suppose… for me it’s many things. I enjoy sharing what I find, what I learn and what I enjoy with others. Second, I find blogging helps me process, helps me remember, helps me decompress, helps me celebrate, and helps me further understand the variety of things I encounter throughout any given day/week. In this journey, I have also (somewhat surprisingly) found something I did not originally expect—community. So though I don’t consider a lot of what I write and share here particularly “important”, I do take the process of blogging, and site-owning in general, pretty seriously. And ya know what? I think you too can find the magic here.

Enough with the why. Let’s talk about what we can do-with or add to-our sites this week. You don’t need anything fancy, an upgrade as simple as adding an email address to your RSS feed would make for an excellent improvement to your site! Let’s see what else… You could try a new blogging framework, learn about and then deploy some new CSS, add some Slash Pages, or collect and share some good links (y’know, like Fyr is doing!). If nothing else, you could simply write more.

A few final things to share in this week’s somewhat-teeny Scroll…

• Bonfire looks to be a promising place for future long-form content.
• RSSRSSRSS can help combine RSS feeds.
• Channel.org is here to help you take ownership of your presence, content and communities on the web.

Thanks for reading Scrolls. Stay cool!

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-07-04

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-06-27

Welcome to volume nineteen of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. This week, we pick up the scraps, help others join the Fediverse and get a li’l phreaky.

Three issues in one week!? Yep, I’m back. Y’know, from time to time you just gotta recharge a bit I guess, and I’m not the only one! Sometimes, you don’t blog, you just blob.

IndieWeb

Before anything else, I wanted to share some sad news from the IndieWeb world. I found out from Adam that Anne Sturdivant (a.k.a. @anniegreens) has passed away. I enjoyed reading her posts and her WeblogPoMo was the first monthly writing challenge I ever participated in. She was a critical part of my early IndieWeb journey and for that I am thankful. Her spirit lives on through all the people, like myself, that she inspired—to bring kindness, humanity, creativity and individuality into the world through our digital gardens. 🌱

As I have learned, and personally experienced, having a site and a blog is an extremely rewarding journey. In fact, it can even be all-consuming at times. Once you settle into a nice writing routine though, it just makes for a great habit in my opinion. A place you control, where you can share whatever you want, whenever you want, and in whatever form you want. You can add to it, edit it, delete it, change up the look—anything. It’s yours! For my more comprehensive advice on blogging, check this post out! Interested in what other people are up to? Take a trip to URL Town! 🚙

Looking to make, upgrade or grow your current site? Here’s some ideas fresh from the IndieWeb-World! Axxuy, sainthood and Abhinav have all been tweaking their /links pages and Ross introduced his new “/connect” slashpage. Cool!

But my favorite new thingy I’ve seen recently has been from fyr.io. Scrolls went on an unplanned hiatus for a few weeks, which seemed to have left a bit of void. Many folks reached out to me during that time, and since returning, saying they had really missed it. That has been extremely heartwarming to hear, and quite frankly, pretty energizing. But fyr took it one step further, coming out with their own Scrolls-like newsletter/roundup, dubbed “Scraps”.

I love it, and speaking directly to Fyr, I hope you continue to publish it, in whatever form and cadence you like. These little roundups are one of my favorite blogging vehicles and if my experience with Scrolls has taught me anything, it’s this kinda human-curated boosting that really helps connect the broader IndieWeb community and supercharge discovery, especially in the face of rapidly declining search engine usefulness and increased fracturing of traditional social communities. You may have made Scraps to fill a Scrolls-shaped void, but I promise you we need as many of these things as we can get! 🧡

Fediverse

The Fediverse is, in my humble opinion, the best social platform on the web right now—and will continue to be for the forseeable future. Not because it has zero problems mind you, but because of all the unique benefits it has, that you simply can't get elsewhere. One issue stems from one of its benefits, that is, its decentralized nature. Specifically, it has proven difficult for many to decide what instance to join when they are first creating a Fedi presence. There are different instances, different platforms, and lots to consider between all of them. To help navigate this, StartHereSocial or suggestions from folks who have been here a while are great places to start. I for example have my own list of Infosec Instances that you could check out if that is your thing.

What else is happenin’ around Fedi’? FediCon is comin’ up for those near Vancouver, Bonfire has an Install Party you can check out and Tim Chambers has dropped his The Seven Deadly Fediverse UX Sins Part 2 which is 100% worth the read!

Cybersecurity

Gotta real grab-bag of cyber-ey things this week…. ‘ere we go!

I’ve got a lot of infosec certs, so I feel somewhat qualified in telling you that what you get out of most of them is really not much. But y’know what, I’ll let CrankySec explain instead 😈. Want some actual credentials? Or real skills? You don’t have to look far, and you don’t have to spend much (if anything). Just look around! The Internet is bursting at the seams with free resources, writeups, trainings, tools, everything! Wanna learn how to forge passkeys? Got you. Want to write secure Rust code? Boom! Wanna fingerprint some network devices? Here ya go. Wanna take a trip down memory lane ya li’l phreak? Everything is here (i.e. the Internet), if you know how to find it, and have the will to just dive in and start learning, tinkering and building. Get out there!

Thanks for reading Scrolls. Now, it’s coffee time!

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-06-27

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-06-25

Welcome to volume eighteen of Scrolls, a newsletter for sharing cool stuff from the IndieWeb, Fediverse & Cybersecurity realms. In this issue, we ask “what is the web?”, we gaze across the Fediverse, and we declare “mission accomplished” on cybersecurity 🤡!

IndieWeb

What is “the web”? It’s damn sure not the corporate web I’ll tell ya that. The web is us. That’s right. People make the web—via the blogs we craft and those we discover. It may look less like it did in 1999, but this web persists, and it continues to regenerate and flourish each day. This, the good part of the Internet, is alive and well.

The IndieWeb’s vibrancy comes not from pace of content, but rather from individuality and creativity. Here’s some cool stuff I’ve seen recently (great too if you’re looking for inspiration for your own site!) Immich shared some cursed knowledge, Ava is looking to trade blog post titles, Axxuy celebrates their bloggiversary, Nick Simson is hosting this months IndieWeb Carnival, Brad goes brain dumping, Kris is doin’ a little link cleanup and Will is making the blogiverse a bit healthier. With so many ideas, so many aesthetics, so many voices, the personal web can seem quite chaotic. But that’s just what makes it fun! So get out there and build. Write. Share. Haul off and redesign your entire blog y’know? If it’s already been redesigned… redesign it again! Keep tweaking and having fun with it.

The other side of the IndieWeb-fun coin, beyond tinkering with and writing for your own site, is exploring everyone else’s sites. So go forth! Discover awesome sites and cool posts. Comment on them, comment on others comments, share them with your friends—with the world! If there’s no commenting mechanism, try contacting them through other means. Drop them a nice note about what you saw or what you read on their site. Trust me, it will make their day.

Small Web Finds and Features

Go check out these cool sites. Like, you could just leave this page right now and do it (but come back after 😉).

• 🧑‍🍳 😘 Gail 👏 - IndieWeb perfection.
• Speaking of perfection—Henry’s site is, in my opinion, the best looking site I’ve ever seen.
• The awesome, and brand new, good internet magazine. 👉

Fediverse

How do you view the Fediverse? Sure, it may be quiet at times, but I think that can represent a greater opportunity for signal over noise. In my experience, there’s a substance here that is lacking on other microblogging platforms. But Fedi (as you may well know), is not just microblogging. It’s an ecosystem of decentralized platforms, which all communicate over a shared protocol. That’s how you can have a Facebook-like system which can interoperate with a microblogging platform, or a forum-based platform, etc… It’s not perfect here, but the ever-growing list of benefits are well-worth the time spent investing in building a community and a personal presence here on the Fediverse rather than elsewhere. Interested in owning your own little Fedi-parcel? Check out FediHost!

Cybersecurity

Ok everyone, pack it up. The war is over. Cyber is solved. All thanks to AI!

But y’know if you can’t afford fancy-schmancy “world-saving” AI-based security capabilities. You might want to continue to learn up on the breadth of security issues that continue to face the industry. Y’know, like understanding logs, or linux process injection, or windows coercion techniques, things like threat intelligence, binary planting and the ongoing risks posed to DNS—to name a few.

To help you on this quest, check out some of these tools I recently discovered. NERDCERT.EU is a cooperative-based letsencrypt, Wazuh has a free threat intelligence platform “Vulnerability Explorer”, The Vulnerable MCP Project is cataloguing MCP-related vulnerabilities/research/exploits, and the CIRT team at AWS has just launched their Threat Technique Catalog. Cool beans!

IndieSec Blogs

Finally, here’s some cool Indie folks of the cyber world for you to follow and read…

• Incendium.rocks
• onlyf8
• Hydroph0bia

Thanks for reading Scrolls. Hope you had a blast!

https://shellsharks.com/scrolls/scroll/2025-06-25