Top all-time · #6156
maya.land
Personal blog · maya.landwritingcultureweb
maya.land is a personal blog at maya.land about writing, culture and web. Since 2020, 12 different Hacker News readers have linked it 44 times, most often “My matrix bot that transcribes speech in audio messages”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2025-10-27, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (6) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
Personal blog whose essays on social media, online community and hypertext are linked in discussions, along with its blogroll OPML file and a readability bookmarklet for reading posts.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 6 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
being the World Wide Web presence of one Maya, an enthusiasm enthusiast and æsthete of no renown.
Most-linked posts?
- /blogroll.opml3 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2021-09-20
- My matrix bot that transcribes speech in audio messages2 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2021-09-24
- /bookmarklets/readable/2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2022-05-03
- A Newfound Discomfort with Hypertext2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2023-03-21
What Hacker News says?
I really liked https://fraidyc.at/ because of how it gave frequent/infrequent posters equal space. I switched to miniflux for reasons, but I wrote a user script to reorder unread entries to simulate that. https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
Comment linking /userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
on “I Still Use RSS”Submitted Laptop of the magi: an annoyed iMessage antitrust anecdote as a story · 122 points
HN discussionIf anyone upscales this collection, can they send me a message (all modes of contact on https://maya.land/ )? I'm happy to send you some $ to be able to download the higher res copies; seems like a waste to do it twice.
Comment linking /
on “Studio Ghibli releases 400 free-to-use images”Submitted Embedded social media posts might now be illegal as a story · 116 points
HN discussionI use a "textured" font on my website ( https://fonts.google.com/specimen/IM+Fell+English , see https://maya.land ) and it bothers me all the time that the deformations repeat across letters -- like cracked stone ones where the cracks are the same on every "a"? Because I think mine's simple enough, eventually I'm going to figure out how to get a similar effect with an SVG filter like the "xerox" one on https://endti…
Comment linking /
on “Yep, I created the new Avatar font”Submitted The Tragedy of Gemini as a story · 62 points
HN discussionHandmade directories, like blogrolls, are a sweet spot IME: I keep mine at https://maya.land/blogroll.opml (human or machine-readable) and I've found a huge portion of what's on it via other people's recommendations.
Comment linking /blogroll.opml
on “If I could bring one thing back to the internet it would be blogs (2020)”Submitted /u/spez is right about feudalism and that's why Reddit as we know it is doomed as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI set my page length to something long (n>1000) and have a userscript that round-robin sorts the unread posts by feed, and it works pretty nicely for all but the most high-volume (e.g. Boing Boing) https://maya.land/userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
Comment linking /userscripts/miniflux/round-robin-sort/
on “Use RSS for privacy and efficiency (2021)”Submitted A newfound discomfort with hypertext as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI saw this here and was annoyed enough to [blog about it]. There's probably a joke there... [blog about it]: https://maya.land/responses/2021/10/21/twitter-threads-chest...
Comment linking /responses/2021/10/21/twitter-threads-chestertons-fence.html
on “Forget Twitter Threads; Write a Blog Post Instead”Submitted A Newfound Discomfort with Hypertext as a story · 2 points
HN discussion> “Make your own home page” is an old appeal. It is older than the mid 90’s. Not even 1994, but 1992. On the internet, one year is equal to ten astronomical years, there is a century between 1992 and 1994. > So in 1992, the home page was a document that you saw when you opened your browser – which at that time was WWW on the NEXT computer. > As the author of “The Whole Internet” noticed in 1992: “The home page provi…
Comment linking /monologues/2022/09/19/homepages.html
on “Show HN: I solved my New Tab page”Submitted My matrix bot that transcribes speech in audio messages as a story · 2 points
HN discussionMy site [1] tends to get linked to by these kinds of things (well, more than by normal things) so I've found a few just through referrer traffic, and joining webrings has been fun too. https://gossipsweb.net https://fediring.net https://nightfall.city https://linkbudz.m455.casa https://indieblog.page https://indieweb.xyz https://stumblingon.com https://webring.dinhe.net https://hotlinewebring.club https://handmade-w…
Comment linking /
on “Why isn't the internet more fun and weird? (2019)”Submitted Digital conditions don't mandate scale as a story · 2 points
HN discussionI’m getting a lot of mileage out of this simple bookmarklet found here: https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ Centered max-width without going all out reader mode.
Comment linking /bookmarklets/readable/
on “Why I Don't Use Netscape (1999)”https://maya.land/blogroll.opml <-- You can open this in your browser and look around at what I follow, the neocities and altweb sections in particular being relevant. The cool web isn't dead :) and I'm not even sure it shrank -- the less-cool web just got a lot bigger right next to it.
Comment linking /blogroll.opml
on “Elevator.js (2015)”Override the font on all YouTube text elements. You'd probably think it'd be simple, right? This being the kind of thing that Cascading Style Sheets were designed to handle elegantly and gracefully? https://maya.land/user-styles/youtube/ I always thought people on here were just cranks complaining about style bloat, because a lot of the "this could have been a text file" arguments were applied to things that were ge…
Comment linking /user-styles/youtube/
on “I miss the programmable web (2021)”8/41, I think? ( https://maya.land ) This is a really cool list especially because it shows how varied people's aims are. Some people want a certain golden era of Twitter/Foursquare-type social media, but under their own control. Some people want to stretch the format of blogs beyond that of feeds. Some people want to go all-in on feeds and see what they can squeeze out of them. Some people are dicking around with R…
Comment linking /
on “Cool things people do with their blogs”I would like to advocate making one's OPML files human-readable. It can be done [simply] or [ridiculously] -- and then the result is aggregatable in its own right because it's an established format used by every RSS reader. [simply]: https://zylstra.org/opml/tonzylstra.opml [ridiculously]: https://maya.land/blogroll.opml
Comment linking /blogroll.opml
on “Show HN: Discover the IndieWeb, one blog post at a time”I've been thinking about this a lot the last two years as someone who also grew up with social community online. It was life-changing for me too, but sometimes I catch myself wishing I could have had these experiences offline instead. I read this a few months ago and I still think about it all the time. Curious about your thoughts. https://maya.land/monologues/2023/08/12/social-media-chalk-m...
Comment linking /monologues/2023/08/12/social-media-chalk-milk-guess.html
on “I don't want anything your AI generates”Maybe because it feels self-promotional? So along with mine ( https://maya.land/posts/ ) I'll share my blogroll ( https://maya.land/blogroll.opml ) of the many, many RSS feeds I follow. :)
Comment linking /blogroll.opml
on “The joys and sorrows of maintaining a personal website”I will note that indieweb folks sometimes get a little dogmatic about POSSE being better than PESOS (Publish Elsewhere, Syndicate to your Own Site). Because POSSE necessarily entails write-permissions, it's titchier to set up than PESOS-ing your public content elsewhere back to your own site. I had a lot of stuff PESOSed from Lemmy ( https://lemmy.ml/post/47757 ) to my own site ( https://maya.land/responses/2021/01/…
Comment linking /assets/twtxt.txt
on “POSSE: Publish on your own site, syndicate elsewhere”I have a personal site I'm trying to pursue an old-style feel with, but it never qualifies by the heuristics people use, mainly because: * image-heavy (with careful expressive intention! https://maya.land/latin/ ) * I have javascript that, horror of horrors, is separated into multiple files (so I can manage it without a build step) for such malefic purposes as accessibility ( https://maya.land/prefers-reduced-motion…
Comment linking /prefers-reduced-motion/
on “I Miss the Old Internet (2019)”Not sure what I'm supposed to be seeing. > Error loading stylesheet: An unknown error has occurred (80004004) > https://maya.land/assets/opml.xsl
Comment linking /assets/opml.xsl
on “Increasing the surface area of blogging”https://maya.land/blogroll.opml is also one the best examples I've seen.
Comment linking /blogroll.opml
on “Increasing the surface area of blogging”I got the rg280v because it's incredibly portable. I'm not sure about the battery life because I never want to play for more than a few hours at a time, but I haven't had problems. I would expect, though, that they're all built for you to go in with solder if you want to replace a battery. https://maya.land/rg280v/
Comment linking /rg280v/
on “Odroid-Go Super: $80 Games Console That Looks Like a Switch, but Runs Ubuntu”https://maya.land/bookmarklets/readable/ <-- I have a "do" folder for various useful bookmarklets, and this one has gotten some mileage
Comment linking /bookmarklets/readable/
on “The Demise of the Mildly Dynamic Website”As an admin and end user, I'm gonna tell you that the most exciting improvement was voice messages, which I am so happy to have again and definitely didn't get as much attention as they deserved. Wish I could buy y'all a beer. I made a bot [send the audio] to a speech-to-text API so I've got the feature I really missed from Google Allo. The lower-level work is real interesting, but I hope people in this thread are a…
Comment linking /monologues/2021/08/05/matrix-bot-transcribe-speech-audio-messages.html
on “Breaking the 100bps barrier with Matrix, meshsim and coap-proxy (2019)”
