I’ve wanted to relaunch Initial Charge shirts for quite some time, but it was always a project that ended up on the back burner in favor of more important things. I mentioned it publicly a couple of years ago and started toying around with some options.

I’ve ordered a bunch of samples, made some tweaks to the designs, and am pretty happy with the results. It’s time to finally ship it.

If you’re in need of some snazzy shirts, hats, sweatshirts, or stickers, you might as well buy them from me. It helps support the site and you get something that you’ll have to explain to all your friends when they inevitably ask, “what is that logo?”

You can just tell them it’s a website that all the cool people read.

On a more serious note, the shop is starting out with Initial Charge themed merchandise, but my plan is to expand it with more designs and product types in the future. If you have any ideas, please let me know.

I don’t expect to change the world with this. I’m certainly not going to be going full time with Initial Charge because of t-shirt sales. But even if just a few people buy some products I’ll be happy. Heck, if I’m the only one that ever wears them, that’s actually fine. They’re comfy.

For a little bit of a peak behind the curtain, in case anyone wants to setup a store of their own like this, I built the site on WordPress and am using WooCommerce and WooPayments. Products are printed and shipped by Printful.

I’ve opted for higher quality materials where possible — tri-blend shirts, organic cotton caps, and so on. All of the shirts are printed on Bella + Canvas, which has become my absolute favorite shirt supplier. I would recommend checking the size guide closely, I’ve heard from others that they tend to fit a bit smaller than shirts from other companies.

So please, check out the shop, buy some stuff, and send me any feedback you have.

I initially launched #OpenWeb over six years ago as a way to aggregate headlines from independent publishers that focus on Apple products and software. It was a fun little project to build, but the underlying system was a bit fragile.

The mechanism I used for publishing headlines was built entirely using IFTTT. The service was and continues to be great, but I found that RSS feeds would often break and I’d have to go in to the IFTTT dashboard to remove feeds, update feeds, or manually re-enable applets that repeatedly failed.

This eventually lead to me relaunching the site a couple of years ago. Rather than publishing headlines from a list of sources, the site would just publish links to independent weblogs.

This was a much cleaner setup as it no longer relied on IFTTT for publishing. But over time, my interest in managing the site waned. The process for publishing new links was a bit tedious and the site hasn’t garnered enough of a following to justify the effort required to run it.

So rather than continuing to half-heartedly update the site, I’ve decided to simply retire it.

Since making that decision, I have published the Initial Charge Rolodex, which is a list of writers that publish some of my favorite work. It’s like MySpace’s top 8, but for the open web.

The Rolodex will be a cinch to manage. I can revisit it once or twice a year, remove some folks that haven’t been publishing and add some new writers that I’ve found interesting. Easy peasy.

As for the #OpenWeb site, it will remain up for the foreseeable future. I don’t have any reason to remove it at the moment. I imagine it will be taken down at some point, though, if I decide to re-use the domain for a new project.

I’ve had a few ideas, but nothing I’m ready to get off the ground just yet. As a little bit of a peak behind the curtain of the frontrunner, though, I’ve thought about repurposing the domain as a landing page with information about how to get started publishing on the web.

It would likely focus on self-hosted options — WordPress, Mastodon, Pixelfed, etc. — and include recommendations for hosting services to try.

But that’s just an idea that exists in my head. I don’t know when I’d even start on something like that or what form it would exactly take. Who knows, maybe I’ll end up publishing something along those lines here on Initial Charge and the #OpenWeb domain will end up redirecting to it for easy sharing.

A list of writers that publish some of my favorite work on the web. You can click on each person’s name to see their site individually, but I’ve also published an OPML file that you can import into your RSS reader to follow the whole lot.

➝ Source: initialcharge.net

I’ve made some minor adjustments to the support options recently. Since Liberapay isn’t great for recurring donations and it’s little more than a frontend to PayPal and Stripe, I’ve removed it as an option. I’ve also removed the PayPal.me link in favor of a basic PayPal donation link, which defaults to a one-time donation but can also be used for recurring donations, if you’re feeling generous.

So if you’ve enjoyed anything on Initial Charge — whether it be the curated links, the published articles, or the projects shared — I ask that you support the site by giving back with value for value.

➝ Source: initialcharge.net

As a bit of an experiment, I’ve setup a page with information about supporting Initial Charge. So if you enjoy or appreciate anything on the site — whether it be the curated links, the published articles, or the projects shared — I only ask that you support the site by giving back with value for value.

➝ Source: initialcharge.net

I setup a new tag here on Initial Charge — “best” — and added it to a handful of the best and most popular entries on the site. My plan is to revisit the tag a few times each year to cycle entries in and out as new articles are published and traffic fluctuates. You can think of it as a living greatest hits, of sorts.

➝ Source: initialcharge.net

I got on a kick of implementing security-related headers on Initial Charge this week. Most of these were fairly easy to add, simply copy and pasting some code from various tutorials into my .htaccess file and then testing. But Content Security Policy was a major pain. It essentially tells the browser what content is allowed to run on webpages and where it can load that content from.

This add-on made the process much easier. Once installed, I opened the add-on’s menu, enabled recording of my site, then browsed to every type of page I could think of — on the front-end and the backend. The add-on kept a running tab on all the different types of content loaded and where it was loaded from. Then I grabbed the markup provided from within the add-on’s menu and added it to the site’s .htaccess file.

I’m using some declarations that are considered unsafe, notably the ability to run inline JavaScript and CSS. But now that I have the header implemented, I can go through the process of adjusting that content to run from safer sources and then change my security headers accordingly.

➝ Source: addons.mozilla.org

Álvaro Serrano, writing about his time attempting to make his site a full-time gig:

Those were probably the most creatively fulfilling years of my life, and I’m quite proud to say that, for a little while, I was out there blogging with the best of them. However, the reason I’m so glad I took that leap of faith has little to do with the work itself. It’s all about the people I got to meet along the way.

You see, if I hadn’t sent that email to Shawn I probably never would have become friends with Josh, and never would have even met Marius. Candid never would have existed and, by extension, none of us would have met Thomas. These are three of the most important people in the world to me, and even now, years later, I talk to them every single day. They’ve become part of my family, and I wouldn’t change that for anything.

Initial Charge turned ten years old this year as well — back in March. I didn’t celebrate the anniversary as much as I probably should have. The reality is that doing anything for ten years is an accomplishment. Especially something like this, a hobby that’s all too easy to fall away from.

Like Álvaro, I’ve had so many positive things come from independent publishing — having the opportunity to write for The Sweet Setup, getting a job at Automattic, but most importantly I’ve had the pleasure of meeting some friends along the way.

I don’t speak with them as often as Álvaro does with his and I should probably make a conscious effort to change that. But I value the friendship that we have more than just about anything else that I’ve received from Initial Charge. And hopefully those friendships will outlast anything that any of us create for the web.

➝ Source: analogsenses.com