In the town of Cedar, MI, there’s a store called Wool and Honey. They sell (wait for it…) wool. And honey. And also alpaca fiber and other things, but you get the idea.

We first found this place while taking part in the West Michigan Yarn Quest, where you travel around the state visiting yarn stores. It always happens at a very pleasant time of year, Michigan is always beautiful, and the yarn stores are always calming.

Cedar is a really small town, and I was surprised that a yarn store could survive in a town that small. But they do very well, and part of it is due to The Sleeping Bear Yarn Club. Named for the nearby Sleeping Bear Dunes, each month the folks at Wool and Honey take a photo of something local to Northwest Michigan and have a custom dye lot made to match the photo.

Then people are signed up to the club for anywhere from $39.99 – $538.89 per month, and the yarn is mailed to them with a custom pattern. We live close enough that we just go to the store, which is nice, because the ice cream place across the street makes a mean Boston Cooler.

They have quite a few people signed up, which is a delightful set of recurring revenue from outside the town, bringing money and foot traffic into the community.

I was curious where they get the photos for the club, and they said people just submit them. So I sent one in and linked to my WordPress Photos profile. They didn’t like the one I sent, but they picked another, this one, and here’s the yarn and pattern they made.

The photo is of a poppy. and is taken in front of my house. The poppies were planted by Cate’s grandmother many years ago.

This is the photo and yarn for June 2026, and I’m delighted to have my photo be a part of it.

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This post is about some of the things we did back then that may seem crazy now.

Spoofing Email

These days with all the spam in the world, mail servers are locked up pretty tight, and there are all sorts of things to ensure that the person sending email is real and it should go where it’s sent. Back then there was NONE of that. Spam didn’t exist yet when I got online.

Something we did early on was use telnet (a tool for connecting to the command line on a remote computer) to log directly into a mail server. There weren’t any usernames and passwords, anyone anywhere could log into every mail server in the world.

We’d type in mail headers like this:

HELO
TO: myfriend@example.org
FROM: god@heaven.org
You should stop going to naughty BBSs
.

And that would send a message from God to my friend. The period at the end was how you ended a message.

I went to a conservative Christian college, and email was new enough that some people really thought God was emailing them, and it caused some issues.

Can you imagine what spammers would do with this power today?

Connecting via anonymous phone numbers

When I got online we had 2 ways of being on the internet.

The school had a MIND BLOWINGLY fast T1 connection shared by the entire school. It was 1.544 megabits per second. For perspective, your average cable internet speed is about 100 Mbps and fiber (at my house) is 1000Mbps.

Anywhere else we used a modem, which at the time was just upgrading from 14.4 kilobits per second to 28.8. But for this to work you needed someplace to dial that offered internet. In my city we had the Grand Rapids Freenet, a free internet provider. It had 4 modems, so 4 people in the entire city could get on at the same time.

There weren’t any commercial ISPs yet. It didn’t take long, by 1996 there was a one local ISP and a couple national ones like Earthlink. But for a while, getting online via modem was HARD.

Then one day I found a 1-800 number that provided internet access. I don’t remember at ALL where I found it, but if you dialed it, you got shell access and could telnet anywhere in the world. I have no idea who owned it. It could have been a business, a school, the CIA, anyone at all.

At one point I thought “maybe I should know whose this is” and did some research. I got some clues that it was answered someplace in Ohio, but who knows?

I just dialed into an anonymous phone number and did my internet stuff.

Using a public, shared, web browser

When we got internet access at school, tools were rolled out slowly. First we got email. Then we got Gopher and telnet. Web access via the Lynx browser came much later.

Fortunately, there were places online you could telnet and use Lynx. My favorite was the University of Colorado. You’d simply telnet to the right domain name, get a shell, and type “lynx” and you’d be browsing the web. Thousands of people used this all the time. It was before things like caching, cookies, or any kind of stored data, so it’s not like you were leaving tracks. I strongly doubt they were logging what sites people viewed. I’m not sure that’s even possible with lynx.

You can still use lynx today, I took this screenshot just now on my mac:

Easter Egg Hunt

Before the web was popular, people used a menu based system called Gopher, here’s a screenshot:

Places hosted Gopher servers just like places host Web servers. They could link to each others docs in the Gopherspace.

Someone made an easter egg hunt for it. Gopher servers all over the world made little nodes that you could find in their menu systems. Whoever won got to be known as the person that won. They did this for a bunch of years. Keep in mind that the internet was small enough that most of the servers in the entire world could (and did!) take part, and it was still doable by individuals without scripting or AI. Just visiting all the servers and finding them.

The End

If I think of more stuff I’ll post it.

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Exonym

The name of a country assigned by people who don’t live there. (Germany, Japan)

Endonym

The name of a country decided by the people who DO live there. (Deutchland, Nippon, Nihon)

Demonym

What you call people from a place. (German, der Deutsche (male, singular) or die Deutsche (female, singular). Collectively, the people are called die Deutschen.)

Eponym

A person after whom a discovery, invention, or place is named. You may also have heard of eponymous music albums, Led Zeppelin’s first album was titled “Led Zeppelin”

Toponym

A place name. Baton Rouge (red stick) Louisiana is named for the red poles that French explorers found there.

Allonym

The name of another person taken by an author. A pseudonym is a made up name, whereas an allonym is someone else’s real name.

Ananym

A name written backward. When I make local WordPress installs, my password is usually ‘rehpot’

Aptronym

A person’s name regarded as fitting to their occupation. They’re aptly named. Some real examples: Dr. Pain: Oral surgeon, Dr. Finger: Urologist, Dr. Katt: Veterinarian for cats, Dr. Stork: Obstetrician/Gynecologist, Dr. Bonebreak: Orthodontist,

Backronym

A phrase coined to fit an existing word, like the USA PATRIOT Act, MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), and the AMBER Alert.

Contronym

A word with two opposite meanings. Fast: Moving rapidly or firmly fixed in place (hold fast).

Heteronym

Words spelled the same but have different meanings and pronunciations. Close, bass, dove.

Retronym

A term for an old object that is modified to differentiate it from a newer version (e.g., landline).

There are lots more in this post from Dictionary.com.

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The storm builds in the west,
lighting the sky over and over.

Then the rain comes rushing across the field,
with the sound of thousands of tiny feet
beating down the grass
fleeing the wind from behind,
seeking the house before.

The wind and rain slash at the house,
seeking to get inside.
But the unflappable house quietly ignores it,
And protects us, as it protected Grandma for 50 years before.

Eventually the storm moves on,
though it continues to mutter and grumble.

We sleep.

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For a while now I’ve been disappointed by the lack of features in the default block, and overwhelmed by features in more advanced blocks, and been looking for a happy middle ground. Let’s see if this is it.

• A paragraph!

• A heading

  AND a paragraph in one item!

  Ok, so I like that I’m able to add block inside bullet points, that’s cool. Adding new bullet points requires clicking a button, rather than simply hitting enter, but that’s a consequence of allowing blocks inside items I guess.

  I did notice you can easily change between ul, ol, and no marker.

  I also just realized that hitting enter twice does NOT take me outside the list, I’m still in the bullet point above.

To get outside the list I had to click to the parent block and click after.

Another feature is the ability to change orientation, from vertical to horizontal.

Here’s an example:

• Item 1.

• Item 2.

This is a cool block, an I admire what it can do, I haven’t seen that elsewhere. That said, it doesn’t help with what I had to do to make this:

Which is to use the list block and then manually write styles for it.

Maybe there it would be too hard to make a block that does what I want as well as what everyone else wants. Maybe I simply need to make it myself and I’ll be the one happy user in the world.

So while I don’t think this is the block for me, I can tell it’s quality and scratches someone’s itch. Well done to Aurooba.

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Then I realized that nearly everyplace I’ve ever had anything posted has an RSS feed, or I could make one relatively easily. Then I could use something like WP All Import to simply import it. Not only that, most of the RSS feeds update themselves, so I simply need to run my importer occasionally to get the new stuff.

So I did it. I made Topher.How and started importing content. It’s not 100% yet, but there are several hundred items.

There is lots of content I’ve made that is either behind passwords or is actually lost, so this isn’t truly everything I’ve ever made, but it’s a good start.

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But surely I can get another job, right? I got the last two pretty easily. Alas, no. I’ve applied to nearly a hundred jobs since then, and I’ve learned a few things. Here are some things I’d like employers to take to heart. These are things that the majority of places I’ve applied to failed it.

Send me an auto response

I can’t tell you how many jobs I’ve applied for and once I hit submit nothing happens at all. Did it go through? No idea. Send me an automated email saying “Thanks for applying, we’ll get back to you!”

Tell me when I’ll know either way

Include it in the auto response. “We plan to make a decision by Date”. Then I don’t sit staring at my inbox for days. And then weeks. And then months.

Let me know if I don’t make the cut

Don’t ghost the people who don’t make it. Give them closure. Waiting is super painful. “But we get 5,000 applications!” Fine, send an automated message to ALL of them.

Don’t list jobs that aren’t available

A few weeks ago I spent an hour pulling together a cover letter and tailoring a résumé, and the email I got back said “Oh sorry, we’re not actually hiring for that position, we just list all jobs all the time”. What a huge waste of my time, AND an emotional let down.

Post your jobs on your own site

You want to cast a wide net, I get it. You post on LinkedIn and a zillion other places. The problem with that is that Job Spam is a real thing. People post fake jobs for real places all the time, and I could waste my time, or worse give them my personal info on a fake job. When I see a job listing, the very first thing I do is leave the site I found it on and go to the site of the company and find the job.

The listing is usually much better because lots of job sites simply scrape the internet and de-format the listing, which make it look terrible and is hard to read.

Posting it on your own site lends it credibility, usually tells me a lot more about the job.

Have an RSS feed for your jobs

There are two types of applicants:

• Those who script their application and spam hundreds or thousands of jobs, whether they qualify or not.
• Those who carefully hunt for good jobs and then carefully apply for those they’re qualified for.

You want the second type, and you want to make it easy for them to find your position. Requiring those people to manually go to several different sites daily or weekly looking is a huge blocker.

If you want quality applicants, publish your open positions via RSS. I’m astounded by how few companies leverage this very simple power tool.

If you’re doing it right, your jobs have a custom post type. If you instead simply make them posts on your WordPress site, make it a category. Then WordPress MAGICALLY makes an RSS feed for your jobs. No work involved.

Tell me the pay scale

It’s very difficult to find out late in the process that the pay scale is ridiculously low. Just yesterday my wife sent me a job listing that looked pretty great. Fortunately they did the RIGHT thing, and said right up front that the pay scale was 80% lower than it should have been.

Finding out after interactions have begun, or in a first interview, that the pay scale is wildly out of scope is hard. Tell me right in the job listing what the range is, so I don’t waste my time applying for a job that isn’t a fit.

Be human

Some of the very best rejections and interactions I’ve had were because someone communicated with me personally. I recently called a phone number on a website and the CEO of the company answered. I asked if I could come in and say hi and he said yes. We had a great conversation. He then ghosted me, but that doesn’t change the fact that the whole thing felt more real because I talked to someone.

Summary

If LinkedIn is to be believed, finding quality applicants is difficult. As some who has been trying to be a quality applicant for 2 years now, I can tell you employers are NOT making it easy, and they ARE streamlining for poor applicants. Please don’t do that. It’s bad for you, and it mentally and emotionally depressing for those of us trying to find a job.

Every listing that looks good creates a spark of hope. Not getting a job because they picked someone else is hard, but understandable. They can’t hire everyone.

Not getting a job because the employer failed at the things above is depressing. Having it happen 100 times over the span of years quells hope. And one you loose hope, life can get pretty dark.

Banner image by gabypunk15. It’s cropped, but no other modifications were made.

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