fun new game I play with myself at random: when a phrase pops into my head that I think would be a good name for a podcast, I look it up, and it almost always already exists (today “Funny Business” came to mind which I imagined as a behind-the-scenes show about the work life of a comedian)

long overdue: rss feed for the book dotcom.press/archive/rss.xml

I moved my manuscript from Obsidian to Scrivener (keeping my research notes in Obsidian), and so far so good They hooked me a while back with clever h1 wordplay ("See the forrest *or* the trees") and I finally bit

just published an essay on the @val.town blog: *Code is inert. Val Town makes it ert* blog.val.town/code-is-inert inspired by this sentence in @ftrain.bsky.social's "What is Code" essay 11 years ago > Code is inert. How do you make it ert?

asked chat "can you pitch planet money a story?" and it pitched me six stories lol but I really meant, like, does @planetmoney.bsky.social *accept* pitches (because boy do I have a good one!)

new blurb who dis dotcom.press a book's website is a nice place to riff on things you'll eventually print on the physical book (title, backcover/flap blurb, bio, etc.)

improved my TLD wiki and wrote about the 2026 round: dotcom.press/archive/domainia huge thanks to @case.bike for collecting the data behind the wiki!

I'm considering switching to `text-align: justify` with `hyphens: auto`... are there any gotchas? I don't like hyphens breaking up anchor links, but other than that? I'm leaning toward the visual balance being worth the looser text tradeoff

experimenting with a video walkthrough of the (new) val town changelog, out yesterday www.youtube.com/watch?v=xtqa...

just switched from mac native dictation to aquavoice.com and it's so, so much better

means a lot coming from Sam! :)

dot org is not not for profit dotcom.press/archive/dot-org in which: - .org domains were supposed to be for nonprofits - but pretty soon anyone could register one - in 2019 ICANN removed 10% price increase cap - then PIR sold .org to private equity - ICANN said LGTM - California AG said not so fast

good no kings turnout in Cincinnati!

@allemann.org's domainnamewire.com has been an exceedingly useful resource for my domain book research hats off to Andrew on *21 years* of domain reporting! amazing consistency - well worth a follow if you're domain-curious

dot meow: the next queer corner of the Internet (like selling Subarus to lesbians) dotcom.press/archive/dot-meow write-up on @dotmeow.org's cool TLD bid! in memory of my childhood cat "one-eyed jack" (who was two-eyed when these pictures were taken)

the doodling culture has to be one of the biggest draws to working at @val.town (hiring a product engineer if anyone is looking! val.town/careers)

dusted off the door buzzer val for the party today

I think I've become way too into colons. I ctrl-f'd 15 in the ~1,500 word blog post I just published

another to add to the pete.garden/the-nature-of-the-job collection: seangoedecke.com/will-my-job-still-exist

did a double take reading this and seeing dotcom.press/history-of-domains in there :)

just listened to this and had an idea for a book I hope someone writes titled *Deprecated* with a subtitle something like *the software engineering identity crisis*

adding npm package names to my mental list of things that sneakily have secondary markets - domain names - 1-800 phone numbers - instagram/twitter/et al handles - license plates - ...

Ever wonder what happens to a cable when it’s no longer cabling? Wonder no more! This story has been a joy to write, and I hope I’ve done everyone in it justice. I hope the story of the people of infrastructure cleanses your timeline a little. (And I promise it’s not about sharks.)

notes on @aliahanna.bsky.social's *Take It From Me* petemillspaugh.com/take-it-from-me useful read for nonfiction authors -- I'd recommend it!

in 2015 google put up a backwards homepage on com.google with a CSS transform they still use the .google brand tld for some things, like registry.google

Made a site comparing the sizes of living things :) The great Julius Csotonyi spent 5 months painting over 60 illustrations for the site, no ai used > neal.fun/size-of-life/

TIL that "top posting" in email replies (now the norm) is considered bad email etiquette

more doodling and writing on the job blog.val.town/talk-of-the-town-feb-2026

added another one to the "nature of the job" collection: ratfactor.com/tech-nope2 full collection: petemillspaugh.com/the-nature-of-the-job

snowy run to the library to drop off and pick up some books

this was fast! @val.town is cool

started playing with mcp servers today and built a little one with just one tool to look up country by ccTLD val town for the server and @cloudflare.social's ai playground for testing is a nice feedback loop

I like how gwern.net hyperlinks have ::after hints like “W” for Wikipedia links

Your domain is your “internet handle” dotcom.press/archive/internet-handle Linking together some thoughts on: 1. @danabra.mov's "internet handle" 2. Cory Doctorow's "enshittification" 3. Gordon Brander's "credible exit" 4. my visit to the Verizon store in 7th grade

i wrote about atproto and why it matters

more doodling on the job 😌

Why are there so many C words in AI? Claude Code, ChatGPT, Cursor, Copilot... I noticed that all the Townie slash commands in @val.town start with /c ...which maybe @jxnblk.bsky.social did on purpose?

a favorite part of my new job is getting to* doodle for blog posts, like this octocat (drawn with my mouse in @excalidraw.com lol) *not just getting to, but encouraged to

shower thought: pre-mortems for books in the form of scathing reviews

My latest obsession has been optimising webhook events from Ghost to Netlify. I needed a way to filter out large payloads sent to Netlify. Using @val.town as a webhook middleware, I can strip payloads and skip triggering builds for certain posts. jonathanyeong.com/writing/usin...

To start 2026 I officially joined @stevekrouse.com, @macwright.com, and co. at @val.town as a programmer-writer, part-time while I continue writing my book :) Val Town's founding poem is still my favorite way to describe what it is: > If GitHub Gists could run > And AWS Lambda were fun

> John worked to make a format that was so simple that anybody could pick it up in a few minutes, and powerful enough that it could help people express pretty much anything that they wanted to include while writing on the internet. *End user programming!* Like spreadsheets

New achievement unlocked: guest post on @janefriedman.com's site! I've learned so much about books and publishing from Jane's work (and reading her book was what planted the idea in my head to write mine!)

Reading about @dpla.bsky.social in John Palfrey’s book Bibliotech, and they use a nifty domain hack! dp.la (which is the ccTLD for Laos)

a christmas re-gift a from-you-to-me-to-you-from-me gift

Just joined this (and ordered @cynthiadunlop.bsky.social and Piotr's book) on a whim - very glad I did :) If you're a (practicing or aspiring) programmer-writer, come join for the next one!

I've started directly placing holds at my local library, bypassing a want-to-read book list petemillspaugh.com/library-holds

📢 Introducing The Val Town MCP Server Bring Val Town to your favorite LLM – Cursor, ChatGPT, Zed, wherever! AI coding, instant deployments, built-in SQLite For example, here we use Claude Code to make a blog in a couple prompts Learn more & get started 👉 blog.val.town/mcp

ICANN is not a boring bureaucracy: internet governance drama buried in acronyms dotcom.press/archive/icann84 Writing about ICANN reminded me of my favorite David Foster Wallace essay, Authority and American Usage ("Did you know that US lexicography even *had* a seamy underbelly?")

I put together a timeline of domain history from DNS to 2026 gTLDs. Inspired by @deno.land's Brief History of JS and @neal.fun's Internet Artifacts (which is amazing if you haven't read through it before!) dotcom.press/history-of-domains