A Home For the Stuff That Doesn’t Need a Full Post#
I bookmark a lot. Almost none of it turns into a post here, because it doesn’t need one. It just sits in a collection nobody but me ever sees, or uses.
Campfire, by Timo Sugliani (@tsugliani), is what inspired me to change that. It’s a simple linkblog: a title, a short note, a link out. No comments, no engagement mechanics, just a running feed of things worth pointing at. I liked the idea immediately. I just didn’t like the idea of maintaining one by hand.
What Signals Is#
Signals is that something. It’s a separate site rather than a section of vNinja.net, because it runs on a different rhythm: short entries, several a week or several a day depending on what I run into, none of them proofread the way a real post is. It’s still a full site in its own right though, with its own RSS feed and its own search, just wearing a familiar look.
Every entry starts as a bookmark in a collection in my bookmark manager. I add a note when I have something to say about it, tag it, and a daily GitHub Action pulls new and updated entries into the site and rebuilds it on Netlify. There’s no manual publishing step.
Keeping My Notes Separate From the Source#
The one design problem worth mentioning: when I write a note on a bookmark, it needs to read as clearly mine, not as the source’s own description. Both are just text otherwise. I ended up giving the note its own quoted line at the top of each card, grouped with the date and left-aligned above the synced title, description and tags below it, with a short divider between the two. Small thing, but it took the most iteration of anything in building this.
Find It#
Signals now sits in the main navigation on both sites, right between Homelab and Series. Or just go straight to signals.vninja.net.
