Fast forward roughly a year and a half and I get an email from the always lovely Ray asking me if I was interested in becoming the new owner and custodian of his blogroll.org. I couldn’t pass on the opportunity. As you know, I am very into blogging and personal sites because I truly believe those are the antidote to the current awful state of the web. I started the P&B series because I wanted to help people connect with one another, facilitate discovery, and encourage more people to get back into blogging. That is because I believe that if you have something worth sharing, it’s better to do it on a site you control, rather than on social media. And blogroll.org, as a project, is very much aligned with that goal which is why I immediately said yes to Ray.

It took me a while to code a new version of the site and move everything from WordPress to Kirby but the new version is finally online.

I have to say that I’m quite pleased with this new version. It’s a lot more colourful than the sites I usually make but that tracks with the way my life is changing. I’m starting to get a bit tired of all this black and white and colours feel a lot more playful. The site is set in Sofia Pro and as mentioned runs on the latest Kirby version. It’s a V1, many features are missing and there are a lot of entries in my to-do list for this project but I’m happy that it’s at least online and people can start submitting sites again.

Like all the other things I’m doing online these days, the site is supported by the kindness of friends and strangers and if you find projects like this to be valuable and want to contribute you can join them for as little as 1$ a month.

As always if you have comments, feedback or feature requests, you can email me. My inbox is always open.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m not the best at writing about / introducing myself… but let me give it a try.

Hey there 👋 My name is Jedda, but I also occasionally go by JCProbably, which is a play on my initials. Due to having a unique-ish name, I sometimes prefer to sign my name as such to avoid being easily searchable.

I was born in Manila, Philippines but left very young. I lived in the Middle East (in my namesake city) for 6 years, before moving to the US. I spent most of my life in the East Coast, before moving to California in 2019.

I am a Product Manager by trade, and honestly can’t imagine myself being anything else. Once upon a time, I wanted to be a writer or photographer, but over the years, I’ve come to realize that I enjoy those passions more as hobbies. I guess the thought of turning them into a job just stopped appealing to me at some point. Now I just do them because I want to.

Outside of the above, I also enjoy reading, cycling, snowboarding (and longboarding), and most recently running. I’m still working on the running part though.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started blogging in the early 2000s. I never called it blogging back then though. To me, I was just an angsty teenager sharing my words with the world. I was on a lot of different platforms such as TeenOpenDiary, Diaryland, Xanga, LiveJournal, Tumblr (early days), and then eventually Wordpress.

It was on Wordpress that I bought my first blog domain. I was on and off blogging on there for over a decade before I stopped, and eventually let my domain expire for a few years.

Fast forward to 2023. I wanted to start blogging and creating again. I checked on my old domain, and since it was my name, it was still available. I re-purchased it and resurrected jeddacp.me, now known as august morning. After purchasing it, as excited as I was to create again, I had no idea what I wanted to write about. It had been awhile since I wrote publicly, and didn’t feel like I had anything to say. This was when I opted to turn it into a photo blog. A blog primarily made up of photos of my life in California, and just a little bit of writing. This went on for a year inconsistently, before I decided to make another change.

Notes by JCProbably came to be when I was testing out a new blogging platform. It was supposed to be a place to write down random thoughts I had about non-important, and trivial things. I remember writing about my contemplation regarding my online presence (which was non-existent at the time), and thinking that it didn’t really matter because I was just writing things into the void. It was then that I got my first email from someone who stumbled onto my blog and reassured me that I was indeed NOT shouting into the void. As someone who was not all that familiar with the small web or its community, that email meant more to me than I could ever really express. So Lou, thank you.

What was supposed to just be a side blog, Notes became my primary blog when I opted to use it for a month long blogging challenge in May, WeblogPoMo. That challenge pushed me to just write every day. I wrote a little bit about photography, and a lot about life. Although I’m no longer writing daily, I have tried to stay consistent since then.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Writing is my form of therapy. As someone who doesn’t feel comfortable talking with a professional about FEELINGS (yes, in all caps), this is a close second. I write a lot about personal experiences, and how I see the world.

When I write a blog post, I often find myself balancing between sharing too much or too little, but usually lean towards the latter. I think part of it is out of a desire for privacy, and the other part stems from growing up in an environment where talking about feelings was not the norm. When I finish writing, I sometimes have to remind myself that not every post needs to carry a profound lesson, even though most experience may teach something valuable (to me).

I write about my thoughts and feelings, but I’d be lying if I said that I never overthink them. Because I do. All the time. With that said, I don’t think this is limited to blogging. I think I’m just someone who tends to overthink a lot of things.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

My ideal creative environment would be a house by the beach, where I could always hear the sound of the waves crashing on the shore. Unfortunately, although my house is near a bay, it’s not close enough to the shore, and the waves are nowhere to be found.

So I guess I do believe that in some ways, my environment does influence my creativity. Although I’ve written posts on my phone in the middle of grocery shopping, I much prefer sitting in my own space at home with my laptop. I also love writing when I’m surrounded by books (like in my home office), as if I am absorbing their words and stories to create my own, and tell my own story.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I have a pretty simple tech stack.

• I draft/write all my posts on the Bear Notes app.
• A majority of the photos I post are also on Flickr.
• My domains are hosted by Porkbun
• A backup of all my blogs are on Obsidian

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Although I have reasons to keep my photo blog and Notes blog separate, I probably would’ve tried harder to consolidate them into one blog in the beginning.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I don’t really have a lot of ongoing expenses for my blogs. I pay between $11-18/yr each for my 2 domains and I paid a one-time Lifetime subscription for Bear blog for $200.

My blog doesn’t directly generate any revenue. I do occasionally write about a camera I use from a company I work with that earns a small commission through an affiliate link.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

There are so, so many amazing individuals I have had the privilege of crossing paths through the stories they share on their blogs. Not surprisingly, a lot of them have since been featured on People & Blogs like Véronique, Annie, and Ava, to name a few.

Here are a few others worth checking out (and would love to see an interview from!)

• Alexandra Wolfe
• anhvn
• Courtney
• Davey Craney
• Keenan
• Marisabel Munoz
• Richard
• Sebastian Malloy
• Steven
• Sylvia

I also curate a rolling list of posts, blogs, and links that I’ve been enjoying throughout the week. It can be found here on my Postroll, as well as the reasoning behind the project.

Shameless plug: also check out blogroll.club — which has so many awesome independent bloggers listed.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

The world can feel overwhelming (and at times uncertain) for a lot of people right now. Take some time to check in on your loved ones. Not just a quick “how are you doing?” but with genuine care and intention. Ask, listen, and hold some space for their feelings. Offer a hug, a few kind words, or just a reminder of how much they mean to you. Tomorrow is not guaranteed, and small gestures of love and support can make a world of difference to some people.

Just remember that not everyone expresses their struggles openly. Some may internalize it, mask it behind a smile, or an “I’m fine.” Try to pay attention to the smaller signs that are easily overlooked, be patient, and remind them that you’re there if they ever need it. Sometimes, just hearing that someone actually cares is enough to lighten the weight they’re carrying.

This was the 85th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jedda. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I’m Matt. I live in London and grew up on the south coast of the UK in a place called the New Forest. The gag is that it’s not new - it’s 900 years old - and it’s not a forest. When it was founded they chopped all the trees down to hunt deer.

I guess I work in design and technology? I help big companies and new ones have new ideas and bring them to market via my one person studio Acts Not Facts. Previously I co-founded a design consultancy called BERG and then ran a couple of startup accelerators with R/GA Ventures, and a ten thousand years ago co-authored a pop neuroscience book called Mind Hacks.

I’m currently manufacturing a clock that tells the time with a new poem every minute! I made an app that points the way to the centre of the galaxy!

So yeah I am super easily distracted with side projects. I like running (when I’m not injured) and I write a whole bunch.

My blog is called Interconnected and I’ve been blogging there for a little over 25 years.

What's the story behind your blog?

February 2000. That’s when I started. Though I felt like I was late to the game. Which is... wow. So wrong.

I used to make web toys. Nothing wild by today’s standards but I made this six degrees game called Dirk that anyone could add to. A Douglas Adams reference of course! The strap line was something about exploring the fundamental interconnectedness of all things.

And it got a little bit popular and somebody suggested I should get a domain for it, so I got interconnected.org. That was in 99 I guess?

Then blogger.com got popular and everyone starting blogging. And I prevaricated for a bit because I wanted to roll my own tech to do it, but in the end I started a blog and I needed somewhere to put it so I put it at interconnected.org/home and I’ve been there ever since.

What’s it like to write in the same place for 25 years? I blogged some thoughts on that if you want the blow by blow.

But I will say that, right there at the beginning, it felt transgressive and powerful that it was so easy to publish words and make a little home online. Once upon a time I used to make fanzines and that meant somehow begging access to a photocopier and somehow putting down money to print copies to sell. My eyes were wide when I discovered the web. (And then View Source.)

Like, our little blogs are on the same playing field as the New York Times! That’s what the web meant to me.

Blogging is small-p political again, today. It’s come back round. It’s a statement to put your words in a place where they are not subject to someone else’s algorithm telling you what success looks like; when you blog, your words are not a vote for the values of someone else’s platform.

Even without all of that, blogging has been good to me. We used to meet up, us early bloggers in London, and many of my friends today are friends I made in those early days. And my blog is how I’ve gotten jobs. And new ideas.

Now Interconnected is my public notebook. I think through ideas by writing so it’s part of my practice. I’ve posted something at least weekly for almost 5 years which is a neat milestone. I keep track of that particular streak in the site footer.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Ideas can happen anytime. The thing is to capture them. So I have a folder in a notes app and I’ll tap, tap, tap with my thumbs walking down the street.

Right now I use iA Writer for all my writing. I used Ulysses for many years and I still love it. But I’m trying something different because I have a million words in this app, all my private notes, and I care a lot about longevity i.e. always having access to my data. So, in choosing a notes app, I index on “big folder of Markdown files.”

I browse the ideas list and usually a couple combine and then I turn that into a rough outline. A good time to do that is on the train, or before dinner. I always need to know where to start a post. Then I start writing and never end up where I thought I would.

I do a quick edit before posting. My priority is to publish so I made a list of the mental blocks I create for myself and I work to avoid them. I’m not too diligent, by design. Lots of typos.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

A friend once sent me this poem by Charles Bukowski, air and light and time and space.

no baby, if you're going to create
you're going to create whether you work
16 hours a day in a coal mine
or

(And so on.)

Now I’m no poet (or maybe I am, given the clock I’m making) but I feel the same.

That said if I’m working on a more deliberate essay, or maybe a talk or some client work, I’ll open a bunch of tabs and pull a handful of books from the shelves and put them on the desk next to me, and I don’t look at them but somehow they help. This is a legit psychological thing apparently. I asked a friend about it a few years ago and he said “you gotta prime the latent conceptual space your thoughts move around.”

So that’s what I’m doing, priming the conceptual etc.

ALTHOUGH.

Like I said, everything starts with ideas.

I wouldn’t be able to blog at all if I weren’t writing down ideas.

And the ideas seem to come most when I’m doing something else: walking out to get a sandwich at lunch, going to a gallery, reading a book about something I don’t know anything about, listening to In Our Time (I listen to a lot of In Our Time)...

Typing it, right now, I realise I should prioritise more time and space for those activities. Huh. I should give them more air and light.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Right at the bottom of my blog, right at the bottom of the footer, the last line, there’s a link to the colophon. You’ll find the whole tech stack there.

Because it’s pretty baroque.

I prioritise three things:

• Control. Like, I want to have a pretty RSS feed and that’s hard to do on most other platforms.
• Place-ness. Every webpage deserves to be a place. Each of my posts has multiplayer cursors and if a post gets busy then you’ll see it swarmed with other people. You can chat with them too, in an ephemeral kind of way.
• Longevity. I’ve re-written the stack a bunch of times over the years. Words matter, code not so much. How can I be sure I’ll still be able to get to my words in another 25 years?

All of which takes me to building everything myself. Each post is a Markdown file, and the site is rendered by a small Python app. It’s not quite a static site. I layer co-presence on top which is written in another technology entirely.

And oh my goodness I would not recommend this setup to anyone, not a bit, but it works very well for me.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

If I were to start a blog today, I would start an email newsletter. And that would be a mistake.

I lucked into a situation where my words accumulate over time like a personal Memex and I have a small and amazing readership -- seriously, whenever I ask something, whether it’s about something esoteric or even a personal favour, people are so informed and so generous.

I close the loop by running something called Unoffice Hours. I don’t have comments on the blog but I do have a few open calendar slots each week, so I’ve had almost 400 calls over the past few years with readers or people who have otherwise stumbled across Interconnected.

And it all works so well for me, you know?

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I don’t make any money out of Interconnected, not directly. But it’s so, so worth it. I don’t how how to put a figure on the value of friends, work, ideas, opportunities and enjoyment I’ve got out of simply “thinking out loud” over the years.

How much does it cost to run? I don’t know if I could quantify that. I pay for a server at Digital Ocean, analytics by Fathom, and email (all posts also go out by email) with Buttondown. But if were to track my time making notes for posts or actually writing them, haha no way, I dread to think.

People should totally make money from their personal blogs if they want to and they can. This arrangement works super well for me.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

It’s so hard to recommend blogs without knowing a person! Here are 10 I picked a couple years ago (not all are still going but that’s what archives are for).

There are two people I’d be so keen to hear from.

Darren Shrubsole blogs at LinkMachineGo, which I love. We’re a similar vintage: we’re both London bloggers and he also just hit his blogging silver jubilee. So, how do our experiences overlap? How do they differ?

Lu a.k.a. todepond blogs in a wiki? Blog? Digital garden? Something. They are maybe a year or so into blogging with a combination of insightful-and-getting-the-big-traffic posts and beautiful, personal posts too. Lu isn’t “blogging,” they’re doing their own thing, and it’s electric and done with such clear-sighted self-knowledge, and such ease.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I think I should probably shut up now.

Anyway.

This was the 84th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Matt. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To make things even worse, traditional social media is not getting any better and people are running away from them to find refuge on Mastodon, Bluesky, or one of the countless other weird alternatives that have popped up lately.

Wiki defines the term counterculture like this:

A counterculture is a culture whose values and norms of behaviour differ substantially from those of mainstream society, sometimes diametrically opposed to mainstream cultural mores. A countercultural movement expresses the ethos and aspirations of a specific population during a well-defined era. When oppositional forces reach critical mass, countercultures can trigger dramatic cultural changes. Countercultures differ from subcultures.

Countercultures differ from subcultures. The way I see it, the true online counterculture is not to join Mastodon or Bluesky. That’s just a different spice of the rotten experience that’s social media. True online counterculture is rejecting social media altogether. It’s leaving your subreddit and teaming up with a bunch of other people to set up an independent forum, yelling “fuck you to spez” in the process. Counterculture is spending time making zines and sending them out to 10 people across the globe, rather than posting shorts on fucking TikTok. Counterculture is sharing things you’re passionate about not because you plan to make a living out of it but because you believe connecting with other human beings is important. Counterculture is forming online bonds with 20 people you get to know over time, rather than amassing hundreds of thousands of followers on Instagram.

You either believe that an alternative is possible, and you start actively working towards it, or you roll on your digital side and you metaphorically die.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm Maya, a goblin of the Pacific Northwest. I design, write, and administer maya.land, a moderately sprawling piece of hypertext that's nearly five years grown. It has a bloggy section wedged in a back corner, somewhere behind the clickable MIDI gramophone.

By week, I am employed as a software engineer for a giant tech company. I principally work on systems centered around optimization models. It is not the kind of thing I blog about, and seems almost embarrassing to mention here. Still, if you caught me at a work happy hour you would perceive the same frenzied enthusiasm that leaves crumbs on everything that I do put up online.

By weekend, I spend far more time link-hunting than is healthy for a person with a laptop-bound job.

This is the part where I'd like to make a breezy allusion to some very cool, very prestigey offline hobby that one does out of the house, with other people, and not hunched over. Let's all pretend I've mentioned one.

What's the story behind your blog?

I'll confess I'm an eavesdropper. I used to linger in parks to people-watch, scribble down lines in a notebook from others' conversations too good to forget. It is easy to live traveling in familiar wheel-ruts when there are whole other worlds of people moving parallel. Tiny points of public contact can be enough to remind you.

Then COVID. My travels shrunk. I was cloistered in a condo in a neighborhood that boarded up, terribly bleak. Even after they decided outdoors was safe, I didn't go out much. Summer 2020.

I'd always been a certain kind of Internet denizen (fuzzy feelings toward StumbleUpon, studied eclecticism in media preferences, appreciation for fractal subculture) but in this period I started needing something different from it. How do you eavesdrop within your browser?

This oriented me differently toward the Web, and uncovered a few motivations to start publishing. Webmentions appealed to me as a protocol, and I liked the sovereignty arguments the Indieweb folks make. Xanthe's site gestured at expressive possibilities both familiar and unfamiliar; certainly, I'd spent enough time on Geocities in my youth to appreciate the forms predating feeds and "social", but it'd never have occurred to me to define an idiosyncratic style guide, to work up an artistic design different for every page. Kicks Condor was and is the visionary behind my whole -ism of the Internet. While I still dare not dream of ever getting to his level, setting up a site of my own seemed imperative.

Therefore: a domain, a static site generator, a lot of hours spent twiddling with web technologies I'd never been taught.

I've not added complications (in the watch sense) to it in a long time, and I owe it a design refresh, but the whole site feels as homey as you'd hope it would after years. This is perhaps a happy consequence of having made it as self-centered as I did. If I'd been shooting at some idea of what other people would appreciate, I think it'd have had to change more.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

It's not that it isn't "creative", but it's first a consumptive process. The blog is an artifact of my chewing over an experience of the Internet, of culture. It's undeniable that the website exists, that I am really posting it up, sending out the bytes and packets and tags... but in my heart, it's only pretending to be for other people's access. According to this, it's really only an exercise of articulating my thoughts and feelings for an imaginary friend, in order to make them more legible to myself.

So, practically: with respect to my linkblogging, I annotate things I come across in hypothes.is (phenomenal tool: to be able to stomp across the Internet scribbling notes on the margins!). I pull the annotations over into my notetaking system. And then later, I go through what I've pulled over, and I think: do I want to point people to this? I am of Robin Rendle's school: "blogging is pointing at things and falling in love". Are there comments I must make alongside?

It's a feedback loop that shapes what I try to consume, too. I've written about this a bit before, but it's an old Tumblrite's habit. I have an intuited ideal blend of topics to reflect what I care about. If I've not had anything good about music to post in a long time, that means I'm not spending enough time on music. If everything's getting too angled toward one obsession or other, it's a good cue to even things out.

Outside of linkblogging, I also produce writing that we may deem both "overwrought" and "overwritten".

The process here, typically:

• A thought occurs.
• I make abortive conversation about it with others.
• I sometimes successfully discuss it with my sainted mother.
• I continue to stew for a few weeks, accumulating emotional energy around something incomprehensible to the people in my life.
• I earmark a good amount of a Saturday, gather material, and rage out a draft that is something like what you might scream out of a window after a bad day.
• (If interrupted at this stage, the draft may sit for weeks or months or years. An amateur's method relies on momentum.)
• This bit may be surprising to my readers: I do edit the draft. I intend the exhausting indirection of the high-level structure that you may observe. As regards the sentence-level prose, I make some effort to tamp down its congenital prolixity. Not, like, enough for others to notice, probably, but definitely more than zero effort.
• I post it. I thereafter see ten more things I need to change. (I change them, because I am not an institution and owe no one clean versioning.)

I try to come up with the post titles that will most cleanly both allow the kind of person who would like a thing to recognize it, and allow the kind of person who would not like the thing to recognize they should skip it. This is the polite way to entitle things. There is also the cryptic poetic way – think Olu's "Immortality" – which I also respect. Everything else is clout-chasing.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Flights of fantasy are most frequent and most powerful when one's mundane life is at its worst. Creative acts on side projects flourish when main commitments stagnate. As a preteen, I drew innumerable pictures of women with wings because I felt stuck – I mean, I was stuck, you don't have a lot of agency or autonomy being twelve. I spent envious time imagining beautiful architecture and the luxuries of the rich because my environment didn't resemble that.

So, what would the ideal creative environment be from the perspective of output? Probably not that different from being locked down in a highrise with a laptop, the view out the window too elevated to make out the faces of anyone on the street below. It's sand that seeds pearls. (Unhappy the oyster!)

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The flow:

• Hypothes.is
• ✨ cron ✨ on a VM running on a lint-ridden machine in a closet. This also pulls in other things like last.fm data for my use and abuse
• Tiddlywiki
• ✨ more cron ✨
• A Jekyll repo of a size I won't discuss in polite company

I also have webmentiond for webmentions! Lovely project.
Porkbun has been a totally solid domain registrar.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I might use a different static site generator? Jekyll's treated me well, but I hear alternatives are faster. I'd probably seek out a different templating language, since the complications I've introduced into Liquid are ... quite beyond its intended scope.

I don't know that I'd call my linkblogging "responses", an initial choice which is baked into my URL structure. Likely, my URLs would look altogether different, without any dates.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

Oh, God. Well. I kick some money to Goatcounter. Right now the site's run from a server in a closet, which is to say that its costs are immense but paid entirely in household labor. For annoying availability reasons I'm eventually going to move all the static content to AWS, where I expect it will take very little money indeed to host (I have a couple websites there already that demand about fifty-two cents a month each).

It generates no revenue. Every now and again I wonder whether I should add ads for things that have gotten Picked Up. There's no one right way to do just about anything on the Internet, so you have to evaluate each monetization approach in the context of a particular blog, and in the social context of that blog. I'm thinking of an online acquaintance who is compensated by ad revenue for the experience of having her stuff frontpaged on Hacker News; truly it is right and just that she be paid for having so many jokes fly over so many braying heads.

Still, I feel very protective of the idea that I – as a webmaster, which for me means something more like an artist than like anything else – should be able to define the terms of exchange with a site visitor without their being able to point to any material incentives of mine. I know many have felt their time wasted by the way I do everything. My site isn't for them. I should hate to give the impression that I'm trying to lure such visitors in for, well, impressions.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I have an extensive blogroll that at some points has been better known than my actual site. To commemorate this interview I've tidied it up somewhat, moving those whose feeds haven't updated in over a year to a "defunct" section.

As for whom to interview... I'm very interested in the people out there doing their socializing via blog / site in the post-Livejournal era. I get the impression that for certain demographics (largely younger than mine?), public web presences form a useful complement to the chattering impermanence of Discord. Alexandra's written on blogging before more generally, but I'd love to read her answers to these questions.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Mark Eastgate's Hypertext Gardens is from 1998 and is essential reading for anyone trying to break their thinking out of what corporate tech has since made of the Web. It was also annoying enough to re-find just now that it merits loud public linking.

The blog-reader will appreciate ooh.directory, a project positively Yahoo!vian in ambition.

This song is better played live and yelled along to, but I can't imagine too many of you will get the chance, so Spotify shall suffice.

This was the 83rd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Maya. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

That said, there are three minor annoyances that I’d love to see fixed at some point (even though I don’t have high hopes) and so here’s my Ko-Fi Wishlist.

Recurring Goals

It’s possible to set up goals on Ko-Fi and display them publicly. Unfortunately, there’s no way to have goals based on recurring donations which is kinda annoying. It’s especially annoying since the value of the recurring donations is displayed in the private dashboard so this is a feature that shouldn’t be too hard to implement.

Yearly Memberships

Another thing that’s very annoying is the fact that membership can only be monthly. This sucks for me since I run a membership with such a low barrier of entry and on a 1$ donation a huge % gets eaten away by Stripe/Paypal. As an example, Stripe charges a fixed 0.25c plus a % and this is how the math looks like:

(1$ minus 1.5% minus a fixed 0.25c) times 12 = 7.20$

So if you donate 1$ every month for a full year, I get 7.20$ while Stripe keeps 4.80$. This is how the same math looks like if you make a single 12$ donation once a year:

12$ minus 1.5% minus a fixed 0.25c = 9,95$

You donated the same 12$, but this time I get 9,95$, and Stripe keeps 2.05$. It’s not a huge difference in the grand scheme of things but it adds up quickly. Plus, some people prefer to pay yearly and so it sucks that there’s no option for me to let them do so.

Better Notifications

From my experience, Ko-Fi kinda sucks at letting people know what’s going on on the platform. I know a bunch of people didn’t even realise their 1$ month membership got cancelled—usually because the card expired or some other glitch—because they didn’t get any notification from Ko-Fi. Now, I don’t know if they landed in the spam folder, if they didn’t arrive at all or if something else happened but still, that’s a bit annoying.

I track expired/cancelled membership on my supporters page and so if you want to make sure you’re still on it that’s one way to do it without relying on Ko-Fi. I might have to set up a better system though because this is currently all done manually.

And that was it, those were the three items on my Ko-Fi wishlist. Overall I’m happy with the platform and I’m grateful something like this exists. I know alternatives are out there (I used both Donorbox and BuyMeACoffee in the past) but those all have their set of problems as well.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

I am, as I stated many many times, a nobody. I’m sitting here, minding my own business, running my tiny side projects, trying to make something a few people appreciate. If I manage, by pure chance, to create something 100 thousand people use, that would be beyond insane from my personal perspective. If I were to start a business that generates 1 million euros a year, that would be life-altering.

Now put those numbers in the context of an Apple, a Microsoft, or a Google. Apple made some 390 billion in 2024, Google around 350, and Microsoft 260. A million is 0.0004% of Microsoft's revenues and 0.0002% of Apple’s. Something life-altering for me is not even a rounding error for a company at that scale. So what does move the needle when you’re that big?

Lamborghini made just a bit over 3 billion in 2024. That’s less than 1% of what Apple made in the same year. Their most recent hardware experiment, the Vision Pro, has sold around 300 thousand units. Even if every single one of them was maxed out and sold at 4000$ that’s still “only” 1.2 billion or 0.3% of Apple’s revenues. At that point, isn’t it fair to wonder why even bothering to invest in a product like that?

Don’t get me wrong, I know that there is a point but still, when you get to that scale, pretty much everything you do is doomed to look like a failure compared to what’s already there.

YouTube has 2.7 billion monthly active users, almost 20% of the world population is an iPhone user, and between 2 to 3 billion people use a Meta product every month. These are numbers so big that almost nothing can make a difference at this point for these companies.

Wikipedia has a page with a list of social platforms with at least 100 million active users and it’s illuminating. Look at those dates and the company names. On the US side of things, nothing new has reached those scales in more than a decade basically. The only products that come close are products launched by companies that were already huge—see Threads for example—and I’d argue those are not even successful products. They only managed to get that big because they were forced down the throats of existing users.

It’s such a bizarre situation and it shows why, for example, Google has SO MANY DEAD PRODUCTS. If you’re at Google you can launch probably anything at this point and it’s likely going to be considered a failure when you compare it against existing and established products. And I know there are other reasons why Google kills so many products, but still.

Anyway, it’s gonna be interesting to see how the landscape evolves. I’m personally so uninspired by what I see in the big tech world at the moment but maybe that’s just me.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I'm Ben Borgers, and I'm in my last year studying Computer Science at Tufts University in the U.S.

I've really enjoyed working at startups over the past couple years, and have had the opportunity to learn a lot from working at Buttondown, Luma, Locket, and Notion.

At my university, I run a club called JumboCode where teams of students build software for non-profits.

In my free time, I really enjoy working on my own side projects!

What's the story behind your blog?

In high school, I decided that I wanted to start publishing blog posts about little bits of things that I was learning from programming. I started publishing blog posts and started getting a bit of traffic from Google SEO, which was really cool to see.

I kept writing these posts about technical topics, and then in my first year of college, I challenged myself to write a blog post every day. I kept it up for about six months, and that was a really fun experience (although a bit tiring and I was glad to end it).

I find that my website itself is a form of self-expression, so I end up getting the itch to rebuild it every couple of months to change the design and layout.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I keep a list of topic ideas, but most of the time I end up writing a post when I feel inspired and not when I'm looking to pull an idea off my list. I try to think of ideas from projects that I've been working on or opinions that have crystalized in my mind recently.

I write my blog posts either in a code editor (like VS Code) or, more recently, MarkEdit, which I've really been enjoying.

I don't really enjoy editing my writing, so I often just write one draft and then try to sleep on it. I come back and run through it, try to edit the writing so it flows a bit better and is clearer, and then just publish it.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I don't think I have a particular space that helps me, but it definitely helps me to write blog posts when I'm in a mental space of being really excited or passionate about what I'm writing about.

Sometimes I'll have an idea on my list for months, and then suddenly I'm thinking about how I would write a post, and if I write it in that moment it'll all flow out a lot easier than if I sit down and try to force it.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

In recent years my blog has always been built with Astro and Tailwind CSS and hosted on Vercel or Cloudflare. The blog posts have been in markdown (using Astro's content collections).

Keeping everything in markdown has allowed me to bring the posts with me really easily every time I redesign the site. Whenever I redesign, I make a new branch of the GitHub repo and start over with a fresh Astro site — so it really helps to be able to copy the directory of markdown posts over without any additional futzing.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I'd probably make a promise to myself to just keep all the posts in markdown from the start, for ease of portability. I've had stints of writing posts in Ghost, or in Notion and using the API to extract content, or even using GitHub Issues as a CMS.

In the end, I always just had to extract all my posts and put them back into markdown, which wasn't a lot of fun. It's hard to not get enamored by new shiny CMS options, but I'd say that in the long run I want to always keep it in markdown — it's just the simplest and "lowest common denominator" for me.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I don't pay anything for Vercel's hosting, and I pay $12/year for the domain benborgers.com. It doesn't really generate any revenue, except for the occasional person who lands on a blog post and gets in touch with me to do some consulting work — usually it's because they land on the blog post for opensheet, a free API I built and host to get Google Sheets as JSON.

I did for a while switch my website to the domain ben.page, which costs an absolutely frivolous $540/year. I eventually decided that I like benborgers.com more for my personal website, but that I like to use subdomains of ben.page for personal projects (like photos.ben.page or tufts.ben.page or queue.ben.page). That leaves me paying for both domains — but oh well.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• jmduke.com — my boss at Buttondown (Read Justin's interview).
• jero.zone — my friend who goes to Brown University.
• buildingslack.com — stories about the early days of building Slack.
• pketh.org — posts about building Kinopio, a really cool piece of indie software.
• simonwillison.net — how I've been trying to keep up with news about AI.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I think my Photo of the Day project is one I'm really proud of, and that I've been doing for over a year! Also if I had to highlight one post on my blog, it'd be this one about sneaking forks into the dining hall.

This was the 82nd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Ben. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi. I'm Keenan. I'm a non-binary (they/them pronouns) visual & verbal artist originally from Chicago, but now I live a bit further south near Louisville with my wife, Katy, and our extremely cool and normal dog, Olive. Despite being born and raised in the USA, I've never really felt like I belong here; my identity isn't particularly tied to my place of residence.

In fact, the only constant with regards to my identity is my relentless pursuit in trying to understand who I am and what the hell I want to do—which is, like, super cool to keep experiencing as I near 40. I was sort of bullied by [grand sweeping gesture] society into attending college, where I spent six and a half years screwing around, changing majors four times before finally graduating with a B.A. in Fiction Writing (Theater Acting minor) and so much debt. SO MUCH DEBT.

Like many overachieving morons who graduated art school with loads of debt and no direction, I found myself in a more traditional corporate job. It was there that I discovered that, on top of my writing chops, I was a pretty gifted public speaker who had a knack for teaching people about complex topics. So over the course of a decade, I ended up weaseling my way into Learning & Development roles for a variety of tech companies which culminated in a six-figure salary and a burnout-induced nervous breakdown.

One day in the middle of the pandemic, my wife sat me down and said, "Hey, you can't keep doing this. Your mental health is not only hurting you, but also me."

To which I said, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DO. I DON'T KNOW WHO I AM. I'M JUST SCARED ALL THE TIME." And then after further consideration, I eventually said, "Okay," and I quit my job.

For the last three and a half years, I have focused on reconnecting with my creative inner-child. My mental health has never been better!

Now I take photos, I do voice acting and podcasts, I make the occasional video, I pretend to be a web developer, and I write a lot of words infused with earnestness and chaos on my very good blog, A Very Good Blog.

My other hobbies include playing too many video games, watching too many shows and movies, bouldering, and feeling very sad and lonely as I try to navigate the complexity of adult friendships. I compensate for that last bit by trying make people laugh and/or cry with my writing.

What's the story behind your blog?

O, how I've yearned for a little place on the Internet that serves as a perfect representation of me in all my wondrous, stupid glory. As a young teen, it was Geocities. In college, it was LiveJournal and uJournal. Later, it was Squarespace. Then, later, it was Squarespace again. Then, later, it was Squarespace again. All of these homes, so many different domains, so many different identities. I thought for sure I wanted to be an author of books, but it turns out I just wanted to write about being the author of books rather than write the books. Then I thought for sure I wanted to be a tech blogger and did my very best John Gruber impression for a little while. Then I thought for sure I wanted to be a podcaster. And each endeavor ended the same: I would do it for a bit, I would (maybe) gain a modicum of notoriety, and then I would question everything and burn it all to the ground! When I finally shut down my tech blog, I thought I was closing the door on writing online forever (spoilers: I wasn't). Clearly, I wasn't cut out for it (spoilers: I was). Maybe I didn't need a website after all (spoilers: I did)!

At some point, in the midst of an aspirational fit, I thought it would be good to have a "personal brand" online again. I had long lost my gkeenan.com domain, so I went with the similar, but infinitely more confusing gkeenan.co. The G is my first initial, because at the time I was still holding onto the misguided notion that I would be known, professionally, by G. Keenan Mylastname. The problem being that I hate my first and last names and have only ever identified with my middle name, Keenan. I have since eschewed both, except, obviously, for my domain, which I often think about changing. Unfortunately, keenan.com is taken by some California-based consulting company that I've resented for as long as I can remember. In fact, the only reason I agreed to do this interview is so I can bring attention to my GoFundMe dedicated to amassing enough personal wealth to where I can buy that company out, shut it down, and pillage the domain for my own nefarious use.

Until the day I have successfully executed my hostile takeover of keenan.com, or until I get very bored, I will be on gkeenan.co. It began its life as a voice acting portfolio. Then it expanded into a broader art portfolio when I quit my job. Then I one day decided I WAS NOT ACTUALLY DONE WITH WRITING ONLINE and carved out a little section of my Squarespace site and told myself I wasn't going to worry about finding a niche, I was just going to write about what I wanted to write about. I called it A Very Good Blog because:

1. I thought it'd be kinda funny to be a cheeky asshole about it.
2. If only one person was going to like my blog, it might as well be me.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

The main thing that defines my process is just how remarkably undisciplined I am. I used to envy writers who sit down and poke away at their computers or their typewriters or their dictaphones all day, every day. But that has not been, and likely never will be my way.

To be clear, I am open to evolving! But my brain, who is a bastard, has as of yet proven unwilling. Until that changes, I suppose I will be relegated to a life where I think and think and think until my head is so full of amorphous musings that, in my desperation to rid myself of them, I am compelled to smack a keyboard until fully drained of all emotion.

And then sometimes Robb posts about the apps he uses and I go, "I wanna do that!" And then I do that, too.

The point is: inspiration is everywhere, motivation is elusive. There are some things, especially recently, that I've written under absolute duress. I knew the words needed to get out there, but it was work. Good work, but work. I had to wrench it out of me. When I was younger, I probably would have abandoned them, thinking that if they didn't come easy, I didn't mean them enough. I am slowly learning that sometimes it means they're the most important ones.

Ultimately, I am proud of what I've created under those circumstances, even though toiling with a piece for months, if not years, can be demoralizing.

I do wish it were easier. More consistent.

Because sometimes the spark is just... there. It ignites. A creative wildfire engulfs me. I sit down at my computer, nearly unable to contain the words. They come out as quickly as my fingers allow. It's as though they always existed in that order, they needed only to be revealed.

Regardless if the writing is a deluge or a trickle, the technical process looks very similar. I rarely rewrite full drafts. I edit as I write. (A much better writer would tell you to ignore editing and just get your Shitty First Draft down on the page, to which I say, "lol," and also, "lmao." Who do you think you're talking to? Someone who isn't a stubborn idiot, clearly. Sorry, Anne, I'm gonna edit as I write.)

Also, I read my writing aloud. A lot. Over and over and over. This serves a few different purposes as I put words onto the page:

1. It helps me edit, because I'm less likely to overlook typo or grammatical error if I'm reading aloud.
2. It helps me consider how my prose flows, because prose flow is a hallmark of my style. I want my writing to sound like me, and when I hear me read me I write me how I sound, ya feel me?
3. It helps me practice. I narrate a lot of my work as an audio blog, so reading the work aloud is a practical step to building familiarity with it, just like I would do for any other voice acting project.

Lastly, I will sometimes ask people to read my work before I publish. Usually, it's when it's at a state that I'm happy with, but because it's long, because I've spent so much time immersed in it, I feel like I need outside perspective just to bring me back to reality. Sometimes you need more eyes on something to see what you can't. I can always count on my wife and a few trusted friends to give me thoughtful feedback. If I ever ask you to read an unpublished draft of my work, rest assured that it's maybe one of my greatest expressions of love and admiration and trust for you as a human being.

Once it's published, I'll read it again, maybe multiple times, and inevitably find the typos that every other step in my thorough and deliberate process failed to uncover, in which case I'll furiously run back to my markdown file to update, and hope to whatever deity is out there that I didn't screw something else up in the process.

As you might gather, I am fairly meticulous, a little (a lot) neurotic, and while my writing is thoughtfully considered, brevity is rarely my strong suit.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

No.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I mentioned above that A Very Good Blog was originally a section of my Squarespace site, but that changed mid-2024 after Squarespace was bought out by a private equity firm. Despite the noticeable, years-long decline in the quality of their product, that was the final straw for me. I decided to expand upon my limited HTML/CSS knowledge and build my site from scratch, which I wrote a normal number of words about, naturally.

Now, the site is built with 11ty. I open VS Code, type some stuff on my keyboard, and through the power of what I assume is love and magic, it is sent to GitHub where it does something and then is subsequently blasted off to Netlify, whose free plan serves it to the denizens of the Internet. Oh, and the MP3s for A Very Good (Audio) Blog live on Bunny.

The domain itself is hosted on Namecheap, because that's where I bought it years ago and feel very lazy about moving it to a different registrar, though I dream of a life where I could say my domain is hosted on Porkbun.

For writing, I use iA Writer, since my library syncs across multiple devices in the rare chance I feel stupid enough to write on my phone??? But in all seriousness, I just really enjoy its devotion to minimalism. Its default monospace font is so sexy. The light blue cursor? Ugh, don't even get me started! Added bonus: its flavor of Markdown aligns closely with my own sensibilities. We're a cute couple.

For new drafts, I manually copy over a little bit of front matter into a new .md document, write my words, and when I'm ready to publish, I save a copy to the iA Writer library that is tied to the local folder on my PC where my blog posts live. Then I open VS Code and, like I said before, harness love and magic to get that baby in front of the eyes of my adoring fan, whose name is Mom.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

This is tough to answer, because, on one hand, I would probably do everything differently. On the other hand, I only know that because I am a product of every decision I've made leading up to this moment. Could I even do anything differently without having had those experiences? It's a real Sliding Doors conundrum.

I promise I'm not being deliberately coy. I am this obnoxious about everything and no one is more annoyed by it than me.

What I've tried to come to terms with over the years is that I can't change the past. All I can do is learn from my previous experiences, accept the reality of the present, and grow enough to be better for the future.

Actually, okay, if I were to change one thing, I would've registered keenan.com on November 9, 1995, the day before it was originally registered by Keenan & Associates. But I imagine if I had had that sort of wherewithal at the age of 9, my life would look drastically different than it does now anyway. At the very least, I probably wouldn't have all this student loan debt!

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I USED TO PAY SQUARESPACE.COM ALMOST TWO HUNDRED AMERICAN DOLLARS PER YEAR JUST TO HOST MY STUPID WEBSITE.

In that context, things are much better now. My domain costs are only $34 a year. Netlify is free. Bunny CDN is, like, I dunno, a dollar a month?

I am in full support of people monetizing their art, whether it's a blog or a video or a painting or music or whatever beautiful way they choose to express themselves as long as it's not generated via LLM. We are all embroiled in a system where merely existing is an expense none of us asked for, and given that, I think people should be compensated for the time and effort they put into their work, especially their art. Apologies for being so radical, but Capitalism fucking sucks, and until it finally collapses under the weight of its sheer stupidity, the least we can do is reward people for their creativity, rather than breathlessly spend our money on shit that doesn't matter, like, I dunno, ChatGPT or Amazon Prime or Oreos.

Anyway, I have a Ko-Fi page where a few very lovely, generous, and extremely attractive people graciously shower me with sevens of dollars each month.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Thinking about the sites I visit regularly (and who you haven't already interviewed, at least as of the moment I'm writing this):

• I am perpetually in awe of my good friend Robb. He is a digital wizard who builds and builds with a fervor I can't comprehend and he is also one of my favorite people, for mostly non-Internet-related reasons.
• Jedda takes beautiful photos and writes similarly beautiful words on her site.
• Annie Mueller's writing absolutely crackles with energy. I love her work so, so much.
• Anh is an extremely talented designer and artist. I love how she experiments with layout and illustration, especially when it comes to her very special Weeknotes.
• I don't know anyone who changes their site design more than Mike, and each iteration manages to be more stunning than what came before it.
• Similarly, I visit B's digital garden often, just to see what she's changed. It feels like we're kindred spirits in a way, rebelling against the forces that seek to suppress creativity. That sounds dramatic, and you know what? It is and I refuse to apologize for it.
• I love Pete Moore's minimal aesthetic, and how he lets his words speak for themselves.
• Is there any place on the Internet more peaceful than Katherine Yang's lovely website? She inspired me so much as I rebuilt mine.
• Hestia hasn't written much, but I quickly fell in love with what's there. An immediate bookmark for me.
• I don't really read tech blogs anymore, but I keep Matt Birchler, Nick Heer, and Molly White in regular rotation due to their invaluable perspective and terrific writing.

I could keep going. I want to. I worry that I left someone out. The last thing I want is to leave hurt feelings in my wake. But I'll cut myself off and hope they forgive me. Regardless, those are just some of the interesting people I admire, and I think any one of them would be captivating to hear from in this format.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

One of the things I find most disheartening as time goes on is how (the royal) we tend to coalesce around platforms that make farting out our dumbest thoughts to the masses easier and easier, while the people who control those platforms weaponize their algorithms to commoditize our attention, homogenize our individuality, and erode our humanity. I firmly believe the big social media platforms (the microblogging format especially) are a net negative, and we'd all do a lot better if we learned how to exist in silence again.

I don't say this from some very tall horse. I am not immune to this garbage. I participate in the social media hellscape to varying degrees, despite being increasingly skeptical of its value. I'm on Mastodon. I'm on Bluesky. I'm on YouTube. Follow me! I am about the nicest hypocrite you can imagine and my dog is super cute!

But there's a reason I own my own space on the Internet. There's no one else telling me who to be, what to publish, what is valuable there. I get to choose. I think every single person out there would benefit from taking similar steps to decouple their online existence from these platforms. Be who you are in your own space, and then inject that energy into the broader web with righteous indignation. I think some people call that POSSE.

It makes me so happy to see what appears to be a resurgence in people making websites. I am filled with joy every time I go to someone's personal space and see how they choose to express themselves. I want to do everything I can to inspire more and more people to follow suit, and I am grateful for projects like this that continually introduce me to fascinating people, fascinating perspectives, fascinating expressions of their humanity. As the reality of the world often feels like a shroud suffocating us, witnessing people wield creativity wherever possible reminds me that we do, in fact, have the tools we need to overcome.

So if you have a website, please dear god email me about it. I want to see you and celebrate you. We need more of you in the world.

This was the 81st edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Keenan. Make sure to follow their blog (RSS) and get in touch with them if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf — Prabash Livera

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

This site is a personal site. What I mean by that is that it’s mine. The words here are mine—100% organic, AI-free content around here—the pictures I share are all photos I took. The design is something I created and all that together makes it so that this is a personal site.

But how personal is it? I seldom share my most personal mental states. I don’t talk about my struggles very often, I don’t share my failures or my difficulties. I don’t share the down moments, I don’t write about the low points—most of the time. This site is just a curated slice of myself and my life. And that’s true for most personal sites out there and also most social media profiles. But we all know that this phenomenon, this hyper-curation of what gets shared online, can have a profound effect on outside observers. Being exposed to only the good parts of other people’s lives can lead to all sorts of mental issues and that’s a pretty well-known phenomenon at this point.

And so I’m starting to wonder: should I feel some sort of responsibility to share not just the good parts but also the shitty part of my experience as a human being on this hearth?

Every time I share something that’s a bit more personal, a few emails from strangers inevitably trickle in and they all share this sense of relief in knowing other people out there are struggling with the same problems they’re facing. And so I’m wondering if I should be doing it more. Maybe there’s value in being vulnerable on the web sometimes.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I’m James. I am a writer. I write stories, reflections, and explorations on my blog, James’ Coffee Blog. I grew up and live in Scotland. The poetry of the environment around me – the hills, the poets, the buildings – inspires me daily. I love watching how the seasons change the world around me: the lingering fog in the hills and snow on the horizon in winter, the first blossoms of spring, the grandeur of the green grasses and leaves, and the warmth of the autumn yellows and reds.

Professionally, I am a technical writer. I enjoy learning about technology and communicating it to others. I regularly ask myself questions like What do I need to explain? How do I make sure the reader has the right context? What terms do I need to introduce? Who is the target audience? How do I explain the concept to the target audience?

When I am not writing, you can find me browsing bookstores, playing piano, and watching comedies like Frasier on television.

I love listening to Taylor Swift’s music. cardigan is like a warm hug on a cold day.

What's the story behind your blog?

In 2019 or so, was growing more excited about having a personal website. I thought about the technical skills I could learn and enjoyed tinkering with design. I wanted a place where I could write and share what I had written. Around the same time, I found the IndieWeb community, a group of people passionate about and interested in personal websites. I felt validated. Other people see websites as a place to learn and write and explore, too. Role models are so important. Community, too.

During the pandemic, I developed an interest in specialty coffee. I decided to start writing more about coffee. I decided to name my blog James’ Coffee Blog, in recognition of all of the writing I was doing about coffee. Cafes have always had a special place in my heart, too, from the tearooms I visited as a child to the coffee shops I go to now. There felt no name more appropriate.

I wrote a lot about coffee: from diaries of brewing at home to interviews I did with coffee professionals. In coffee, I found community – something sorely valuable in the depths of the pandemic. Writing on my blog gave me a place to document my learnings, share what I had learned with the community, and helped me exercise my writing skills.

At the same time, I wrote about technology, too – anything I was learning could be a blog post.

In the last two years, I started to embrace my more poetic side, spending more time noting the world around me and seeing what stories I could craft from my observations. I started paying more attention to Nature. I started writing down things that made me smile that I could serialise into a Moments of Joy post, a category that now comprises stories that to this day warm my heart.

My blog is a canvas, a playground, and a journal all at once. I aim to create a place where I can practice my storytelling skills, think through ideas on my mind, and process the world around me. I also like to be playful, too: this being an essential part of my personality. Indeed, I love referencing Taylor Swift lyrics when I can, both in discussion and in my writing.

The motto of my blog is from words, wonder. My hope is that you come to my website and leave feeling inspired.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My ideas come from observing the world around me and chatting with friends – both in equal measure.

When I see something interesting around me, or feel a way that I want to capture in words, I take out my digital notebook and start taking notes. My notes may be short or long. Sometimes, like today, I thought about how I like the sound of the chime of a town clock. Other times, I write more, like how I was feeling when I walked through a bookstore on the first sunny Saturday in weeks.

Sometimes, I feel a spark, like oh, this is [heartwarming or joyful or exciting or intriguing]!. When I feel that spark, I start taking notes.

Chatting with friends inspires me in so many ways. I can chat through ideas. I can hear new ideas. I am challenged to articulate my thoughts. I can hear how others communicate. I can build frameworks for thinking through things. Every conversation is an opportunity to learn something new. I sometimes have discussions where I immediately go to my text editor and start writing, the conversation providing the inspiration I needed to get started.

For technical blog posts, I often write after completing the coding phrase of a project. I may have used a new data structure that I want to document, coded an elegant way of solving a problem that I want to share, or want to write documentation about how something works. With that said, many ideas come after discussion, too. Discussion helps me codify my thoughts and experiences into a more cohesive idea that I can then write about.

My writing comes in two phases: noting, then writing. I like to take lots of notes then turn those notes into blog posts later; usually, on the same day I wrote a note, or in the following few days. I think of note taking as a muscle: the more I do it, the easier it is to take more notes. I don’t always take notes as I am out and about, though: as much as I love capturing moments in words, some moments are to be lived with all the attention one can give. Those may become stories I write about, or stay as memories just for me.

When I am looking for something new to write about, I will consult my digital notebook. Or look at my whiteboards or notebooks. I love writing on physical mediums. Indeed, I have The joy of sitting on the floor writing on my whiteboard. written on one of my whiteboards right now, a reminder of the joy of immersion when you are sitting on the floor sketching out new ideas.

Despite taking lots of notes, I sometimes struggle to come up with ideas. I find that reaching for a new idea seldom works. If nothing in my notebook resonates with me on a given day, I try to keep my eyes open as I go about my day. Maybe a discussion will inspire me at some point. Maybe I will see something on a walk. Or maybe I need time to rest, so I will take a break.

I try not to force myself to write. There are certainly moments that I wish I had an idea to write about, but such moments pass – especially after getting out the house and/or having a conversation with a friend.

I use Typora, a text editor that supports markup, as my text editor. Typora’s default interface has few distractions. As I write, all I can see are words on the dark mode background. This is significant to me. I like to use tools that help me focus.

With an essay ready in my text editor, the next step is to publish the post. I do this in a tool I made called Create. It is a static page on my website that creates some of the meta information required to publish a post on my blog. The tool automatically creates the front matter I need for my blog posts to show up the way I want on my website, and has auto-complete for category names that ensures I use categories consistently on my blog.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I believe physical space influences my creativity. New spaces outdoors – from streets to coffee shops to museums – are fodder for writing. Every detail could be part of a story. My job as a writer is to figure out which I want to document.

I have a very visual mind. Writing notes about the environment helps me visualise where I was when I took notes. These notes can then make their way into a story. Maybe it’s the way someone gazed out a window in a coffee shop, or the look of awe on someone’s face as they admire a breathtaking portrait on a wall. Physical spaces inspire me.

I write many of my blog posts in one sitting, usually at home. I have written while on the go before – in cafes, on trains – but that was when I was taking less notes than I do now. I can write at any time of day, but I find myself particularly inspired during the evenings. I enjoy writing with my fairy lights on in the background, or while sitting on a comfortable chair with my plants around me.

I like the idea of having a writer’s desk, but I much prefer the comfort of sitting with my laptop and having an idea on my mind.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My blog runs on a custom site generator called Aurora.

Aurora is the culmination of years of learning, much of which has happened while engineering parts of my website. I wrote a static site generator a few years ago after running into limitations with Jekyll, the tool I was using before writing my own. But, my first static site generator was slow. Last year, with more experience of coding, I started from scratch and wrote something again, using all I had learned about programming patterns and data structures and performance.

Indeed, both in the tools I build and the words I write, my site is a place for me to learn, explore, and grow.

When I publish a blog post, I create a markdown file that I put in the project Git repository. This is then sent to GitHub, where an Action runs Aurora and builds my site. The site is then sent to my server using rsync.

I love working with static files. Having a single folder where all my writing is feels right. I can see my words; they are in plain text. I like that all parts of my site – the styles, the logic, my words – are in one place. I also love how my web server of choice – nginx – serves the folder of generated HTML with minimal effort.

My domain is registered with DNSimple. (Side note: they have some great comics about HTTPS, DNS, and more on their website.) My website runs on Hetzner, whose services are more affordable than many of the cloud providers I have evaluated.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

My blog is constantly evolving. I am, too.

Through writing on my blog, I have become more confident, I have learned and refined my writing, web, and design skills. I have put thoughts and ideas into words that I can share with others. I have been able to connect and reconnect with my self – present and past.

Through blogging, I have felt the joy of creating something new, the beauty (and sometimes solemnity) of reflection and capturing your reflections in words, the sense of excitement and ambition that comes from thinking about what’s next, and more.

Through blogging, I am reminded, every day, that there is a spark within me that wants to make new things. It is that spark that inspired me to interview coffee professionals, write about information retrieval fundamentals, experiment with introspective writing, explore poetry, and realise the joy of storytelling.

My journey of publishing on my website has brought me great joy, and writing continues to bring me joy every day. I don’t think I would do anything differently. But, I will say: if you don’t have a blog, consider starting one!

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I pay approximately €20 to Hetzner per month for one server. My static site could be housed on cheaper infrastructure, but my server runs several web services: my static website, my website search engine, the web reader I run, and more. I pay $34 per year for my domain. I also pay a few dollars a month for the DNS services that come with DNSimple.

My blog generates no revenue. I like to write for myself and to share ideas with others. I think money would add too much pressure. I do, however, fully support any creator who monetises their personal website. I support a writer and YouTuber whose work I appreciate via Patreon. When I support a creator, I like to set up a subscription.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

There are so many wonderful writers on the web. On my website, I have a page called Wander where I link to other websites. Indeed, the essence of the web is the link. I think there is nothing more of the web than when you link to others’ sites. Ava, Tracy Durnell, Ben Werdmuller, Molly White, dead.garden, Joe Crawford, Nick Simson, Sara Jakša, Winnie Lim, and Rubenerd are among the people whose words I read the most. But, there are so many more writers and web weavers I follow.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I have a web page for this, too! I really love it when I have a URL that collects resources that may answer a question; a blog post, a list, a dedicated page I designed. I maintain a link garden where I link to many web pages I have found helpful in learning about design, programming, typography, and more. The list is not meant to be comprehensive; maintaining a comprehensive list of bookmarks is stressful. But, I hope it can be a fun place to facilitate one’s web adventures!

Aside from links, I have a few more things to share.

First: If you are thinking about starting a personal website, you should give it a go! Explore what interests you. Blog, share poetry, create photo galleries, organise links and quotes, or do something else entirely – whatever resonates most. Websites are creative playgrounds. One of the many joys of having a website is you get to choose what you make and how to make it. Then, if you want, you can share what you make with others – your friends, a community you are in; any audience.

Second: I recommend reaching out to creators whose websites you especially appreciate to say hi! Blogging can sometimes be a bit lonely, especially as you get started. Kind emails are really meaningful for me. They act as a reminder that my website is a place people visit. It’s a place I can have an impact. I like to pay it forward and make sure I say how much I appreciate people’s websites when I can.

Third: If you are looking for community, check out the 32-Bit Cafe and the IndieWeb. In both places, you can connect with people who are passionate about and interested in personal websites.

Finally: Thank you so much for reading! Have a wonderful day.

This was the 80th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with James. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf — Prabash Livera

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hey there! I'm Marco. I sometimes half-joke that I'm an "undercover physicist". I graduated in physics, got a degree in aerospace, but after that I didn't continue my career in academia for reasons that might become clear below. I decided that the world would be my lab, and went outside to experience how it works first-hand, always through the eyes of a scientist.

I have worked in various areas of engineering, management, and product development. I've gone from the space industry to microfinance, went deep into computer programming and made prose my skill of choice. In other words, more than anything else I like to straddle disciplines and to make connections between things. There is a kind of science that doesn't fit in well with any single university department, and that is my interest. The closest to a keyword for that is "complexity theory". I think this interdisciplinary interest is reflected in everything I write on my blog and elsewhere.

I moved to Japan over a decade ago, and have remained here ever since. I live in Tokyo with my wife and, although I don't have anything like a stable hobby (unless you call "reading" a hobby), lately I do play a lot of badminton and TTRPGs with my friends.

What's the story behind your blog?

I have two websites: Plankton Valhalla and Aether Mug.

I started the first a couple of years ago, when I decided it was time to put to words the fuzzy interdisciplinary observations I have been collecting throughout my "undercover physics" career. More specifically, my goal is to put them into words that are very accessible to everyone with a university education. I try to do this in the form of sporadic essays on Plankton Valhalla. But this is a collection of essays, not a blog proper, so I won't consider it in the answers that follow.

Aether Mug (AeMug) is the more blog-like website, and it's barely one year old. The more I wrote on Plankton, the more I realized that its format and focus were too narrow for the flood of ideas and questions that I come up with every day, so I started AeMug as a catch-all for those. To my surprise, a couple of my posts were featured on the front page of Hacker News, which helped connect me with some readers. But my readership is still in its infancy.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I try to publish every week. It's a constant tug-of-war with my perfectionism, which doesn't really make short deadlines fun, but slowly I've been learning how to strike a balance.

I don't really have problems with inspiration, because I've been hoarding ideas for years in my Obsidian vault, and have many, many topics that I have only partially developed and will be easy to dig into deeper when the time comes. I have more ideas to write about than I can ever hope to cover in my lifetime, and the list keeps growing.

Because of that, the main questions when choosing what to write about on any given week are:

1. Have I already covered the ideas that will serve as starting assumptions in this new post?
2. Will I be able to develop this in time?

The first one greatly limits which topics I can write about, because I want them to build on top of each other in a way that an interested reader can still follow. The second one I'm really bad at, and sometimes I end up spending much longer on a post than I originally intended. I still haven't been able to get ahead of the schedule by much. I'm learning.

Once I decide on a topic, I sit down, re-read my existing Obsidian notes about it, make an outline, and type it.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I need silence and solitude, or a nice cafe that is not too noisy—which is easy to find, at least in Japan.

I keep my writing tools simple. For years, when writing outside home, I did everything on an old smartphone in eternal airplane mode, propped up horizontally, and a Bluetooth keyboard. Nowadays I use an cheap Android tablet, and I'm now (usually) diligent enough to not be distracted by an internet connection.

More than the physical space, I think that a stable routine helps my productivity. I still haven't learned to be as diligent and constant with my writing while traveling, for instance. Too much around me is different. The older I get, the more I turn into a creature of habit. Or maybe into a hermit.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I already mentioned Obsidian as the place where I do all of my thinking and writing.

Aether Mug is a simple Next.js website I designed and built. I didn't go with Substack or other cloud platforms because I need the freedom to do whatever I want in my websites, like this experimental branching blog post. More weird stuff coming up soonish!

The website is hosted on Vercel, and the domain is from Cloudflare. I didn't put much thinking in these, they were just the easiest options I came by with a quick search, and I have no complaints.

The newsletter runs on Buttondown. Very nice and simple, and I like the mindset of its creator.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I only started a year ago, so all I can say is that I should have started earlier. It's a very formative experience.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I think I only pay for Buttondown, the rest is all free. Writing good stuff is very hard and valuable work, and I love the idea of people getting an income from that. Currently I'm not monetizing anything, because my readership is still small and I believe in giving a lot before asking a little. Eventually I may add a donation channel, but I want to keep my main writing output open and free.

The approach I like the most is that of Andy Matuschak, who receives donations to fund his independent research in user interfaces. I see my blog as a form of research into science communication, but not at Andy's systematic and focused level yet (Catch-22: I still need another job!). I hope Andy's funding model gains more popularity and acceptance among people on the internet.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Nowadays I read very few blogs myself, but I'll make a few recommendations:

• Robin Sloan's newsletter is a joy to read. He is a fiction author, but he blogs about much more than literature. I don't know how to describe it well. It's like reading letters from a dear friend who likes nothing more than delighting you.
• JP Koning's Moneyness may not be for everyone, but it's such an underrated blog. He's an expert in monetary economics and history, cryptocurrencies, and adjacent topics. Very system-thinking kind of stuff. I especially love when he gets all geeky about ancient coinage and medieval macroeconomics, like here and here.
• Manlio De Domenico's Complexity Thoughts is a great weekly review of recent papers in complexity theory. He is a professor working on these things, and the target audience seems to be other scientists. It might require a minimal scientific background to follow and fully appreciate. But his choice of papers to feature is always interesting and extremely interdisciplinary.

It would be great to learn how any of the three people above make their blogging magic happen, so if you can manage to interview them, kudos to you, Manuel!

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Read up on complexity theory! It has insights on literally everything in life. It changes how you see the world. I believe it is the most important scientific discipline today.

This was the 79th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Marco. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Jan-Lukas Else (RSS) — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
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Messages don’t go anywhere aside from into my ears. Think of it as a very personal social media post with an audience of one.

What a delightful idea this is by Lucy. I love this type of simple projects that are just ways to facilitate human connections.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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I don’t have a high opinion of myself, to put it mildly. And this is not a false sense of modesty. For my entire life, I never considered myself particularly good at what I was doing and that is because I was—and still am—way too aware of the countless great and talented individuals out there. I’m typing this, for example, knowing for a fact that there are much, much better writers and bloggers out there, with blogs that are miles better than mine. The only reason why I’m able to keep doing this is because it now serves as some form of bizarre public therapy, a way for me to keep sane somehow.

All this is relevant in the context of money because for me, accepting to get paid for something I do is painfully hard. This is something that’s less of an issue now—after 15 fucking years—in my professional life, even though I still struggle massively to ask for proper compensation when I do work for clients, but it’s still a huge issue on the side projects part of my life. Almost all the side projects I ran were either free or Pay-What-You-Want with a barrier of entry set as low as possible. I always told myself that this was the “correct” way to do things but the reality is that it was the only way for me to make it tolerable from a personal standpoint.

Because getting paid money, from strangers, when deep inside you constantly think you’re a fraud with no actual value, it’s a tough pill to swallow. And, before some kind soul out there decides to get in touch with me, at a rational level I know it’s not the case. I intellectually get it. But the problem is that the mind is not—sadly—pure rationality. I also know that all this nonsense I feel is probably just a stupid coping mechanism to avoid having to face proper failure. Because if I go in feeling I’m worthless, when I then inevitably fail I can simply tell myself “See? I knew I was right.” and that will help cope with the result. It’s a pathetic mindset, I’m aware of that. It’s not that I enjoy being this way.

Anyway, why reflecting on all this now? Well, earlier today I was doing some admin on the P&B side of things, sending out emails, and preparing tomorrow’s interviews and in doing that I wanted to make sure all the supporters were credited correctly in the upcoming interview. The People and Blogs series is, obviously, free for everyone for reasons that should be obvious by now. I’d never even dream of making it a paid series, not even for a dollar a year. And not because I don’t think there’s value here—the interviews are all great!—but because that money should not go to me. I did, however, set up a way for people to contribute if they found value in the series and that quickly evolved into what’s not my One a Month—which now has a lovely dedicated websites thanks to Jarrod.

One dollar a month is, in the grand scheme of things, a minuscule amount of money for a lot of people (and I don’t even get the whole thing, after the various fees I get maybe 65c) and yet I can’t help myself from feeling some obligations when it comes to celebrating that kindness. Because it is an act of kindness to send someone some money simply because you enjoy what they’re doing without expecting anything in return and that kindness is worth celebrating and promoting. And I’m doing that in every interview I publish as well as on the P&B website and here on this blog. But none of this process is automated and that means I have to constantly keep an eye on who’s subscribing and who’s cancelling because even in a world of 1$ donations, there is some churn. And it’s a particularly painful type of churn because if someone decides to stop sending you as little as 1$ a month it means you really aren’t providing that much value. And again, before you start typing, conceptually I know there are a million reasons why someone might stop supporting. Maybe they forgot their CC was expiring, maybe they use a prepaid, or maybe they’re just on a subscriptions killing spree. Whatever the case may be, them cancelling should not be seen as a value judgment of what I am doing here. I understand all that conceptually. And yet, it still fucking hurts.

And don’t get me wrong, I know it’s all self-inflicted. I could simply stop doing this. And over the past few days, I even considered that. Stop accepting donations altogether that is. It would make it so much easier from a purely mental standpoint. Minds are goddamn complicated at times. Or, well, mine is at least. Maybe yours is a wonderful place and if that’s the case, I envy you.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I’m Ben Werdmuller. I was born in the Netherlands, grew up and spent my twenties in the UK, and spent twelve years in the San Francisco Bay Area. Now I live in Greater Philadelphia in a creaky old house with my partner, our two year old son, and my father. At night the pipes clang and we sometimes wonder if they’re haunted.

My high school yearbook declared that I would be a journalist. That didn’t come to pass. Between then and now, I got distracted by the emerging web: what a wonderful medium to tell stories and find community. I studied computer science in Edinburgh because it was the only British university that didn’t think I was unfocused for being interested in both computers and writing.

Journalist or not, as it turns out, I can’t stop writing. In 1998, while I was at university, I started keeping a “web diary.” Then I built a humor webzine that accidentally grew to over a million page views a day. Ultimately, that led to me learning a lot about nascent social media and building one of the first open source social networking platforms. I’m socially, rather than financially, driven; my proudest moment was learning that it was used to organize the M-15 anti-austerity protests in Spain.

I co-founded two startups, mostly as a way to do work under my own steam. (I’m a terrible employee.) But I did spend some time working for other tech companies, and even invested in startups as part of a media accelerator funded by PRX, KQED, the Associated Press, and the New York Times, among others. These days, I lead technology at ProPublica, a non-profit investigative newsroom that reports on abuses of trust in the public interest. But, of course, I still have my own projects: most notably a full-length novel that I’m nearly done with.

What's the story behind your blog?

As I mentioned, I started a blog in 1998, although we didn’t know to call them that then. I sort of careened from platform to platform: hand-rolled HTML, Greymatter, Movable Type, LiveJournal, WordPress, my own Elgg and Known platforms. Almost all of them were named after some variation of my name or handle. At one point, when I was decades younger, it was called Squirming, because that was how I felt (and feel) in the world: always just a little bit uncomfortable in my own skin.

I originally just wanted to share a little bit of myself and hopefully, if I was lucky, finding some like-minded people to connect with. That changed a little when George W. Bush was elected in 2000: I couldn’t believe that America voted for the governor with the record for the most executions. It was the first time I realized that there really were people out there who had radically different beliefs, for whom the death penalty and religious conservatism were not just tolerable but desirable. When he started drumming up support for the War in Iraq, I became more vocal. My dad was a Vietnam War protester, and both parents were activists for equal rights, so I grew up with left-wing politics around the kitchen table; that’s what my family talked about every night while we were eating. It was natural to bring those topics to my blog.

When I founded Elgg, the social networking platform, I narrated my journey there, so it became a little more about technology and entrepreneurship. My politics actually informed my technology work: outrage over lock-in, rent-seeking, and sky-high license fees for private educational software paid with taxpayer funds led me to build Elgg. All of that was written out in the open in my posts.

A decade later, I built the first version of Known while my mother recovered from a double lung transplant. I actually started building it because she wanted a community of support but couldn’t bring herself to share her private medical journey on Facebook. Writing about building it, and its role on the indieweb, became an outlet that helped me deal with (or, probably more accurately, was a distraction from) the absolute heartbreak of caring for a loved one with a terminal illness.

So these days, my blog has a mix of those things: a progressive, humanist approach to technology and society, with a little bit of outrage about where things seem to be headed. The site is currently called Werd I/O, which I think I thought made it sound more like a professional technology site that people might want to subscribe to, but I’m planning to change it back. I’m Ben Werdmuller. My site is my online identity; I write about things that I find interesting. That’s all I want it to be. It’s just me.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I’m what writers call a pantster: I write by the seat of my pants. Usually, the first draft is what I end up publishing. My proof-readers are the first people who read the post.

If my post is a long-form reflection, it’ll sometimes take me an hour to write. I do try and check for spelling and grammar, although eagle-eyed readers will usually notice some cheeky edits in the minutes after I’ve hit publish. These are usually spurred by an idea that I want to explore; my post about it is just me thinking out loud, in a way. Writing helps me organize my thoughts, and it just so happens to be in public. I use iA Writer, which is a lovely, minimalist markdown editor, and then copy and paste into Known.

If it’s a link post, I’m usually publishing because I’ve just read something interesting and I want to share it. I don’t save bookmarks outside of my blog, or keep private notes, so there’s also, again, an element of reflecting on what I’ve just read and saving my thoughts for my own needs. I’ve got a browser bookmarklet that allows me to save my thoughts about it; then, when I hit Save, a pipeline of automations sends it to my blog and shares it on social media.

My worst posts are driven by an angry knee-jerk response to something I hated. I can get really angry, usually about right-wing politics, and the need to post cathartically sometimes occludes real reflection. Sometimes people respond to my catharsis and identify with it, so it’s not like these posts are valueless, but I still don’t think it’s as useful or productive as publishing something more deeply reflective.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I’ve been blogging for long enough that I can do it anywhere. I’m writing these answers with my laptop balanced on my knee on a SEPTA train in Northern Philadelphia at rush hour, with people all around me traveling back to their homes. It’s been a long time since I’ve had blank page syndrome; wherever I am, I can pull up iA Writer and type.

But there’s a mental creative environment that’s more important. The quality of my writing is directly impacted by the quality of my reading. If I’ve only been reading social media that day, my writing is anxious, poorly-framed, and staccato. If I’ve been reading long-form pieces, I find that it’s calmer and more reflective. It’s at its best when I’ve been reading a really good book.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I still use Known, which I built, as my CMS. It’s running on PHP 8.2 with a MongoDB back-end, and is hosted on a VPS on DigitalOcean. The domain is registered at Gandi.

Newsletter subscriptions run on Kit. I’ve previously used Buttondown, which is brilliant but not quite what I needed, and Substack, which I think every blogger should avoid. Kit picks up every new full-length blog post from the RSS feed and sends it in real time; it also gathers up my link blog posts and sends them as a digest on Monday mornings. The blog is always the source of truth for all my content; I think of the newsletter as an alternative to RSS for people who don’t use a reader. (Hey, email’s an open protocol too. Use what works for you.)

At some point, I’ll need to change my domain name. Werd.io is part of the .io top-level domain, which is assigned to the British Indian Ocean Territory. Quite rightly, and far too late, the British are ceding that territory back to Mauritius. At that point, there will be no British Indian Ocean Territory, and by ICANN’s rules .io will stop being supported.

To be honest: I didn’t understand that the TLD was a product of colonization when I originally bought it, and I should never have used it. It’s not a good look to still be using it today. I still own benwerd.com, and maybe I’ll revert to that. I’m genuinely not sure what I’ll do yet.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Right now my blog nominally has a tech / media / society angle, because that’s the intersection of where I work, what I’m interested in professionally, and where my anxieties about the world lie. But I’ll veer out of that to, for example, call for a Red Dwarf reboot or be excited about a book I read. I wish I hadn’t attempted a professional angle; I want to have impunity to just be excited about things or talk about my life.

Or, and I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately, I want to post fiction and art. I’ve considered starting a completely new website for that, but wouldn’t it be nice if that could just sit on my main blog?

There’s a newsletter version of my blog, too, which has quite a few subscribers who now expect that professional angle. On one level, it feels good to see all these people who interact with the pieces I’ve written; on another, it’s a trap. I had to start a new stream of content called asides, which are posts that won’t make it to the newsletter, so that I could feel free to post and just be myself, without worrying that my random notes would be emailed to hundreds of people.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

This is an expensive hobby.

My DigitalOcean droplet is $48 a month. But it’s worth pointing out: that’s where all my projects sit; it’s not limited to my website. I find it useful to have a server where I can just muck about. For example, ShareOpenly and Get Blogging are hosted on it, too.

Then Kit, which powers the newsletter, is another $49 a month.

I’m not in it to make money directly. I have experimented with both premium content and ads over the years, mostly to try and better understand the underlying dynamics, but never made any real money out of them. I can thank blogging for much of my career, so I figure it pays for itself in the end. Even if it didn’t, it would be worth it for the satisfaction I get from writing, and for all the people I’ve met along the way.

But I don’t begrudge people from trying to make money directly from their blogs. In an ideal world, everyone should be able to make money from their creative work. I’ve supported blogs via Ko-fi and Patreon, and will continue to. By far my favorite way to support bloggers, though, is by buying their other art, long-form writing, or software that I’ve learned about from their blogs.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

All blogs are worth checking out, but here are some favorites that come to mind:

MetaFilter, which is really a group blog, has been an essential part of my day for almost 25 years.

My guilty, secret pleasure is Everlasting Blort, which collects weird stuff from across social media and the web that I don’t find anywhere else.

Tracy Durnell and Simon Willison both have incredibly thoughtful blogs that share their thinking-in-progress out loud and curate some of the best posts from across the web. I aspire to blog like them.

Winnie Lim writes beautifully and personally about her life. Her blog is art: literary memoir as website. I can’t think of anyone who does it better.

I’m similarly impressed by Maya.land, which feels very personal, both in form and content. A real showcase for what the indie web can be. I think she’s who you should interview next.

I’ve taken my NewsBlur subscriptions and turned them into a public feed, so you can see exactly what I’m reading. It’s worth saying, though, that I don’t agree with or endorse everything those sources publish; for example, I read Marginal Revolution to get an insight into conservative economics, but that’s a universe away from my worldview.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

This is a year when blogging is going to be more important than ever. We need independent voices to tell their stories and share their lived experiences. Not only is that what makes the web such a vibrant medium, but it’s democratically important, too. The more we know about how other people live, the more we can relate to them and understand them as people.

So: to the extent that you can do so safely, please write.

This was the 78th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Ben. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Jan-Lukas Else (RSS) — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Contrary to most online projects that are open-ended, pop-up newsletters have well-defined boundaries. You know what you’re getting when you sign up and you know it’s gonna end at a specific point in time. I don’t know why, but signing up for something like this feels oddly different in a weird way. Maybe it’s because it speaks to the transitory nature of life itself, or maybe it’s because it’s just different from “regular” online content.

I think impermanence is an under-explored concept when it comes to digital content. I should probably build something around that and you should sign up for Cody’s newsletter.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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You can have a unique website that no one visits. Or you can have a "basic" blog that actually gets traffic. Which sounds more professional to you?

I love a false dichotomy to support a stupid argument. How about neither of the two? Also, what if having a unique website is the point? What if getting traffic is not the goal here? What if you enjoy the process of building a site for yourself? What if it’s a playground to strengthen your coding skills? And also, professional what? I find “blogging for traffic” to be awful advice.

When you're writing online, being unique doesn't matter nearly as much as being found.

And who gets to decide that? When you’re writing online what matters is what you decide it’s important for you. No one else gets to decide what’s important for you and for your site. It’s your fucking site after all.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Sure. I grew up in Seattle, went to college in Los Angeles, then lived in South Korea for four years, first as an English teacher in Naju, then as a grad student at Seoul National University. In 2022, I moved to the Washington, DC area for my current job as a numerical analyst at a government consulting firm.

I joke that I have “reinvented myself” several times, because I double-majored in jazz piano and Korean language in undergrad, then considered becoming a schoolteacher, then grew interested in math and programming and did my master’s in industrial engineering. But there’s continuity through these chapters. At work, I build numerical modeling tools (picture something like Universal Paperclips) for clients who are sometimes skeptical of analyzing their data quantitatively. That’s because they’ve been disappointed by past attempts that failed to account for the right variables, or that offered too much technical flourish with too little explanation. So, in my role, equally important to getting the math right is my ability to tell a convincing story about why I modeled the problem a certain way. That’s where I draw on my teaching background, the performance skills I learned in music school, and my ability to translate specialized concepts into accessible terms.

Sorry—I devolved into my job interview spiel. My blog is Illusion Slopes. I post book reviews, notes on programming and game theory, and observations about Korean language and culture. I hope there’s something for everyone, but you might have to scroll a bit.

What's the story behind your blog?

In music school, we often discussed the importance of building an artistic brand and having authority over what comes up when someone Googles your name. So, when I started my blog in 2015, it was with the vague hope that bolstering my online presence would help me find piano students, sell sheet music of my compositions, and maybe get my book reviews in front of an editor. It was a very careerist project—and not very successful by that yardstick! Still, I held onto the idea of the blog as digital resume for some time. When I was an English teacher, I blogged about language teaching; in grad school, I blogged about my academic research into college admissions markets.

Now that I have a stable job, I feel less pressure to professionalize my blog’s content. Instead, my goal is simply to keep writing, even at the risk of publishing an imperfect or overplayed take. Lately, I’ve been trying to post silly ideas and low-stakes opinions to practice writing in a different voice. The most enduring lesson I took from music school is the growth mindset (I memorialized it with my Crocs), which says that in order to improve at anything, you must find the edge of your comfort zone and take targeted risks. Before I die, I would like to get better at writing of all forms, and Illusion Slopes is one way I practice.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Well, I have two piles of notes: a Syncthing folder full of Markdown files, and a stack of handwritten pages torn from legal pads. I try to record all of my ideas, even the terrible ones, as soon as they arrive. Like Taylor Troesh says (aside: it is very cool to be on the same P&B as him), you have to make yourself a magnet for all ideas if you want to attract the good ones.

Every month or so, I shuffle through my piles of notes and try to turn a few into (for lack of a better term) finished products. A finished product can be a blog post, but honestly, it’s more often an email or a long message to a group chat, especially if the content is personal or an inside joke. (I like what Steven Garrity said about blogging in his company’s Slack chat—very relatable.)

In my blog’s queue, I also maintain a slush pile of kind-of-finished posts scheduled for various dates in 2050. If I can’t salvage any ideas from the notes but have fallen behind on posting, I pull something forward from the slush pile. Technically, these posts are already readable through GitHub, but I assume anyone who goes to the effort to find them there will recognize them as drafts and adjust their expectations accordingly.

The downside of my approach—gradually laundering notes into blog posts—is that it doesn’t provide a mechanism for following up on old posts with new information. For example, I recently wrote about the then-impending Korean presidential impeachment, but I never wrote an update when Yoon Suk Yeol was actually impeached (and more). I’m a bit embarrassed by the lack of continuity. But at the same time, part of the zen of non-professional blogging has got to be to release yourself from the obligation to always have a take.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Not really. Sometimes I write on my phone, other times on the computer, other times longhand. I think I do my best writing when I revisit the same piece in different surroundings. For example, if I write the first draft on my phone in the subway, I’ll do the second draft on a notepad at home.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I started out on Blogger, which I had used once for a school project. Then I migrated to a static site in 2022. I chose Jekyll because GitHub sets it all up for you, meaning you can start with their opinionated configuration, then pivot to self-hosting if your needs become more specialized. In my case, I still host the site using GitHub Pages, but now I use a custom build script so I can run the latest versions of Ruby and Jekyll. The one unconventional thing I do is install the Ruby stack in a conda environment instead of using rbenv or a Docker container.

I bought my domain on Google Domains in 2018 or so and was automatically migrated to Squarespace after the sale. One of these days, I want to try migrating my domain to another registrar, mainly just to practice doing so without breaking my 301 redirects, email, and so on.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

You know, despite all the drama with Matt Mullenweg lately, I sometimes wish I’d gone with WordPress. Most of my friends are not programmers, so when they ask me about creating a personal site (welcome to the ’sphere, Longtime), I can’t recommend my setup, which requires you to know and love Git, Markdown syntax, YAML, SSH keys, etc. I usually refer people to WordPress.com instead, because at least WordPress is free, open source, and can’t trap them in a walled garden. But I wish I were making the recommendation from a place of greater firsthand experience.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

With free hosting from GitHub Pages, my only direct cost is 12 USD/year for the domain name. Every few months, I pay a penny to rent a VPS, set up my site’s build pipeline, configure Apache, and test it all out. It’s that practice mentality again—I want to know I have options if I ever decide to move away from GitHub Pages.

I don’t object to others monetizing their blogs. However, when it comes to my personal consumption habits, I seem very reluctant to pay for anything on a subscription basis. My only media subscription is to the print edition of my favorite literary magazine. I think my revealed preference is for blogs that are wide open but double as a storefront for the author’s print books or CDs, sort of like Cory Doctorow’s site.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

So, one corner where old-school blogs are still going strong is in the community around foreign exchange programs like the (US government) Critical Language Scholarship, Fulbright, and Peace Corps programs. Participants in these programs often find, as I did, that living overseas for an extended period produces a kind of character growth that is difficult to fit into the tidy post formats of traditional social media. My friends Bethany and Paula have kept their blogs going for years since returning to the US, and both sites are awesome rabbit holes of personal reflection and useful information about how these exchange programs work. Fulbright Korea itself also has an official WordPress blog called Infusion run by current grantees.

Further recommendations: Anh’s homepage is one of my favorite personal blogs. I don’t know the author, but the design and content work together to project a very vivid sense of her personality. And she is an exceptional artist; check these out.

Shellsharks is also design inspo. I appreciate the Style Guide that shows all the CSS styles in one place. This site is super ambitious—really three or four blog-type things layered over each other—but totally sticks the landing.

Idealistic Future is a small trove of insights and anecdotes about the role of storytelling in the modern workplace.

I’ve followed Futility Closet since I learned how to work the internet.

I love Airplane on a Treadmill, specifically for this opening line:

I created this blog specifically to make this post. It may be the only post I ever write, but since human ignorance is seemingly unbounded, perhaps it won’t be.

(He wrote three more posts.)

I am not a parent, but I’ve always enjoyed the Free Range Kids blog, which challenges the decades-long trend of helicopter parenting in favor of letting kids make mistakes and grow.

The Chicago Manual of Style blog and Q&A are entertaining if you are into such things.

But as for who to interview next: I want to hear from Herb Childress. He is a retired academic who has written vividly about trying and failing to land a tenure-track job. He might offer interesting thoughts on carving out a space (including on his blog) for his writing and academic identity despite rejection from traditional institutions.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

First, track 1 from Gregory Porter’s Water album, which is where I got my blog’s name.

Second, Jia Tolentino’s Trick Mirror, which my friend got me into. I keep coming back to this collection of essays, especially the one about unearthing a DVD of her appearance on a reality TV show a decade after it aired. Big thoughts about constructing the self through the perception of others.

Third, whatever the hell is going on with fluxus.org.

This was the 77th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Max. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Luke Dorny — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Jan-Lukas Else (RSS) — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
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Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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some of you couldn't last five seconds in pdx. trans people are so normalized here i can't remember the last time i've been the only trans person in a public space.

We often talk about bubbles here in the digital world: people getting trapped in their own information bubbles and having their worldview shaped by what they read, hear, and watch. But I think it’s easy to forget that where we live, at a local scale, is as powerful as a bubble: your normal is not my normal and what we’re experiencing day to day could be massively different. I live in a somewhat remote part of the country and it’s not that trans people here are not normalised, they’re just not a thing. I’ve been living here for more than a decade and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a trans person. And so you can imagine that for the people in their 50s or 60s or 70s, who have lived here their entire lives, it must be hard to even wrap their heads around what people are arguing about when it comes to trans rights for example, because it’s such an alien concept considering the day to day reality of their surroundings.

Now, this is obviously not an excuse to be a transphobe or a bigot, that goes without saying, but it’s something that’s important to keep in mind when we interact with other people through a digital medium: their normal can potentially be a lot different than your normal and so taking certain things for granted when discussing complex topics can do more harm than good at times. Understanding someone else’s point of view often requires a lot of time and effort and I find the process to be a lot easier if I start without assumptions.

And that’s also why I love emails as a tool to interact with people btw. Emails land in my inbox with no context attached to the message and so the conversations I have are a lot “purer”. If you write me I can’t go poke around your other emails and see what you wrote to other people and start forming an idea of who you are in my head. I can only engage with what you wrote and I do that in good faith and that’s something I find incredibly valuable.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Lou Plummer. On the Internet typically use my real name and the handle @amerpie, which is a riff on the Don McClean song American Pie. I've lived in North Carolina most of my life, with the exception of various Southern military bases during mine and my dad's Army service. Although I attended 13 public schools, I managed to go to the same high school for three years. That was the end of my formal education. My early adulthood was spent doing jobs I wouldn't recommend to anyone: serving in the Infantry, working in a prison, framing houses and working in factory. There's nothing wrong with the people who do those jobs, they just have big downsides. Right before I turned 30, I bought a computer and a copy of Windows 3.1 for Dummies and knew immediately that I wanted a career that involved tech. After spending some time as a technical writer and editor, I landed a few jobs in IT support, ending up with the public school system, from which I retired in 2020. Today I have a very low pressure job at a private university just to keep myself busy.

What's the story behind your blog?

I was part of the initial wave of bloggers back in the 90s. Mine was hosted by GeoCities although I bought a domain named after a professional baseball player with the improbable name of Wonderful Terrific Monds III. That blog had two sections. One related the stories of my generation of Americans whose fathers had been the soldiers sent to Vietnam and how that affected them and us. The other section was more akin to what I do today which is part autobiography and part social commentary. I stopped writing their after a couple of years. My kids were teenagers and my partner at the time was going to school. Life just got busy.

In 2013, I got remarried and my wife and I decided that we would hike the Appalachian Trail, a 1,986-mile route through the mountains of the Eastern US. It starts in Georgia and ends in Maine, passing through a total of 14 states. I kept a journal on my iPhone 5 every night. When we got to a town, i'd upload the journal entries to a website that hosts blogs for long distance hikers. That blog is still on line today. - Lefty and Hush's 2013 Appalachian Trail Journal : Part of Trail Journals' Backpacking and Hiking Journals

My retirement from my career in the school system didn't go as expected. With nothing structured to do, I got depressed and lost interest in technology for a while, rarely opening my computer. I didn't keep up with tech news for the first time in 25 years. At best, I would doom scroll Reddit endlessly. When I finally began to come out of that funk, I picked up my iPad one day and opened up my RSS reader which hadn't updated in a really long time. I started adding and reading a few new tech blogs. Robb Knight, British blogger, developer and podcaster had inspired his listeners to create a page on their blogs listing the default apps they use in all the different areas of their lives, from their email client to what they use to make shopping lists. For some reason, I badly wanted to take part in this, so I did some research to find a platform, I settled on Micro.blog and bought the domain amerpie.lol. I wrote my default apps list and sent it to Robb. He wrote me a nice note and linked to my blog. This was in January of 2024.

I started off a little slow, just writing tech articles about the app I use as kind of the center of my digital life, Obsidian, which is an extensible markdown based notes app. I wanted to also write the kind of autobiographical and social criticism stuff I'd done back in the 90s, plus there was another blogging platform I wanted to investigate, Scribbles. I started writing essay style posts for my blog called Living out Loudand within a couple of weeks added another part of my online life, writing software reviews for my AppAddict blog.

The final touch came when I got a free domain name for adding a year to my OMG.LOL account. I decided to use it to start a links blog called Linkage. I usually list three to five themed links every day. The daily theme can be anything. I've featured books, music, food, places, people, you name it. I also decided to use yet another blogging platform to host it, BearBlog

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Early during my first year of blogging I decided I wanted to post daily. When I added other blogs to my little portfolio, I wanted to post to them daily as well. Every day when I wake up, I know I have three posts to complete before I go to bed. I have to do research for AppAddict. I've reviewed over 300 apps. Finding new ones is a daily task. I have a list of websites frequented by developers promoting their projects that I keep my eye on. Some developers contact me directly to ask me to look at their apps.

As I'm going through the day, most of what I'm thinking about in my spare time are different ideas to write about. If I'm not feeling inspired, I'm not above looking at a list of prompts. I occasionally just write about what's going on in my life. When I have time to open up Obsidian and start typing, it doesn't take me long to get my thoughts out. I started using Language Tool, a paid service as my automated proofreader. I suck at commas and there are some words I'll never learn to spell correctly, so I need the help. My next step is just to paste what i've written into the editor of whatever blogging platform I am using, adjust to format a bit and publish. Any after the fact editing of that first draft is the "of shit" variety when I spy a mistake in something online and hurriedly fix it. Or even worse, when someone sends me a message to inform me that I've made an egregious mistake.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I could easily write a blog post sitting in the stands at a soccer game. I write at my desk in our busy office during lunch. At home, most of what I write is done with my Macbook on my lap on the couch where I spend the evenings with my wife. I can stop in the middle of a post to have a conversation without being bothered. I've written and published on my phone from the passenger seat of our car on road trips, from airplane seats and even lying in a tent in the woods.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I like using different blogging platforms. The people who run the services I use are all personable and approachable. I have different elements of my online life hosted on four different platforms:

• OMG.LOL - my /now page and my about page
• Micro.blog- everything gets POSSEd here for one master feed
• Scribbles - AppAddict
• BearBlog - Living Out Loud and Linkage

I have three domains. Two of them are hosted at NameCheap and one at XYZ. All of the blog providers I use host their own images and I don't need anything more than that.

I write almost exclusively in Obsidian. I try to automate my image management as much as possible, using AI to generate alt-text and software like Apple shortcuts, Hazel, Clop and ImageOptim to move and edit pictures.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

The most difficult thing to figure out was how to automate getting POSSE to work. I use Echofeed and Micro.Blog to do that. It took a lot of headspace to figure out to get everything to go where I wanted to go. I participate in federated social media on Mastodon and Bluesky and cross post there. Since becoming involved in the IndieWeb, I've dropped corporate owned social media out of my life, ditching X, Facebook, Instagram and Threads.

I'm perfectly happy with my setup. The part of blogging i enjoy is the writing. I've spent so many years doing technical, behind the scenes work to earn a living that I don't relish having to fiddle with DNS, or data migration.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I'm a 60 year-old guy with no bills who gets a retirement check and works full time. I drive a 21-year old car. Technology is my hobby and I spend what I want on the things I find interesting or helpful whether it's hardware, software or services. No one should look to me for economy tips. I got some discounts my first year from domain registration services and hosts. This is what I am currently paying:

• OMG.LOL - $20 yr.
• Micro.blog - 120 - yr.
• Scribbles - $20 yr. (discount)
• BearBlog - $60 yr.
• NameCheap - $62 yr (two domains)
• XYZ - $22 yr (one domain)

I could add the $70 yr. for Language Tool and the $57 for Obsidian Sync and my wife would probably count the new macbook, iPad and iPhone I got since I started blogging.

I do not monetize anything. AppAddict gets an insane amount of traffic and the one little affiliate link I have there has generated about 18 months of free service from SetApp for me. I have had some referrals to OMG.LOL too, but my intent is to donate that time for a scholarship for that service. I don't have an issue with people who have pay tiers or "buy me a coffee" buttons. I subscribe to two pay blogs, Kottke and Joan Westenberg I also support six blogs, including this one, as a member of their "dollar a month " clubs.

• Hey Dingus
• Matt Langford
• Flohgro
• Keenan
• Numeric Citizen

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

Over the past year, I've read some of the best writing I've ever encountered and gotten to know a few people who are just wonderful. I think all of them have enough experience to be helpful to anyone who would read abot them in this newsletter.

• R. Scott Jones is currently blogging about the 100-Day Trip around the world that he is on
• Jedda is blogger from the Bay Area who is my partner in Blogroll.Club space where we curate Indy.Web Blogs. She is a rare talent at both writing and photography.
• Brandon actually lives about an hour from me, although we have never met. He is a pop culture and Internet ace who writes in a way that makes you feel like you are already friends.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Not everyone needs or wants social media in their life, but if it's something they find value in, I really hope they will ditch Meta and X so as not to support billionaires with shitty ethics. Mastodon and Bluesky bring value to me. I wouldn't be true to form if I didn't suggest a few apps. Please give Obsidian a try if you do much writing. It can be adapted to just about any workflow. Clop is the image optimization tool you didn't know you needed. It's cheap and automated and makes working with images much easier.

One parting thought. Social justice and making a better world for every class of people are at the center of who I am as a person. There is a concerted effort going on all over the world right now to devalue and threaten people who aren't part of the ruling majority. We all have a voice and I ask that anyone who can, use theirs to speak out against injustice, intolerance and bigotry. Do what you can every day to stand in the way of any movement that doesn't value all people.

This was the 76th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Lou. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Jan-Lukas Else (RSS) — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

You too, are unique. You might not feel that way, and that’s fine, but you are. You are the only person in this world who is the result of the experiences and life circumstances and all the other stuff that went into making you, you. And that’s why you are interesting.

It’s also why I find broad group definitions so annoying. Lumping together potentially billions of people using arbitrary traits as the dividing line is such a lazy way to look at the richness of human diversity and experience. Every time I see people using one of these definitions—in a serious way that is—I immediately start to lose interest in the argument they’re making. And unfortunately, overly broad definitions are everywhere online and I’m sure you’ve seen them: people grouped because of where they were born—how can you just say “the Chinese”, “the Indians”, or “Americans” and be taken seriously? People grouped based on the hue of their body—seriously? In 2025? People grouped together based on their gender and/or sexuality—as if all lesbians, gays, or trans are the same. The list of these broad generalizations is endless. I sometimes see myself included in some of these pointless definitions. Yes, I am European, but thinking that 750 million people can be grouped together as one collective is quite idiotic. And also yes, I am a “white cis male working in tech” as if that’s a useful definition to use. The moment you started using these definitions, you lost me. Not because I’m offended by them, but because it saddens me to see the complete annihilation of individuality which is what makes us uniquely interesting. The moment you decide to simply label someone as anything, you prime yourself to be incapable of recognizing that there’s a lot more beneath the surface. And that’s such a fucking shame. And I don’t care about how well-intentioned you are because as they say, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

The work I do, doesn’t define me, as an individual. Yes, at the moment I “work in tech”, whatever the fuck that means. I can stop tomorrow and become a gardener. And then what? Would that instantly make me better because I’m no longer a white cis man working in tech? No, I might still be a piece of shit that cuts grass rather than writing code. Do you see how stupid all this is?

Humans are complex. You are complex. Reducing you to a simple label is convenient because it allows me to not go through the effort that’s necessary to understand who you actually are. I can just squash your entire existence into a few words that are convenient for me to use and move on. Don’t think I have to say that it’s the wrong approach.

But hey, you don’t have to listen to me. After all, I’m just a tall, bearded, bald, unbaptized, agnostic, bilingual, unmarried, hiker blogger. The hell do I know about the world that’s out there?

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Let’s start from the basics: Can you introduce yourself?

My name is Donny Truong. I am a web designer. I still write HTML and CSS by hand. I haven’t used frameworks because I haven’t found the need for them.

I have a BA in digital arts & multimedia design and an MA in graphic design. For my independent study in grad school, I wrote Professional Web Typography and published it as a web book. For my final thesis, I wrote Vietnamese Typography and also published it online for free access.

Vietnamese Typography has become an essential reading for type designers who would like to support the Vietnamese language for their typefaces. The web book has also led me to become a type advisor, in which I work with type designers around the world to help them with their Vietnamese diacritics for their typefaces.

In recent years, I have become obsessed with skiing and snowboarding. I skied for four seasons and snowboarded for two. This winter, I became a snowboard instructor. I am teaching beginner group lessons. When I first learned snowboarding, I fell a lot. My goal is to help people fall less and enjoy riding more.

I live in Fairfax, Virginia with my lovely wife and our four boys. I enjoy blogging, reading, rollerblading, ice skating, skiing, and of course, snowboarding.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I started blogging in 2003 to experiment with design, share my thoughts, and improve my writing. English is my second language and I wanted to communicate better through words. When I came to the US at the age of eleven, I didn’t know a word of English and I hated writing. I couldn’t put a sentence together.

Even in my college years, I never let anyone, except for the professors, read my papers. I was afraid of being judged. When I started blogging, however, all of my fears went out the window. I didn’t worry about my grammar errors. I didn’t worry about my incomplete sentences. I didn’t care how I sounded on the page. I didn’t care who read my blog. I just wanted to write.

I appreciate the freedom of blogging. I write for no one, but myself. I grew up listening to rap music; therefore, I used lots of curse words in my early blogging. The more I write, however, the less curse words I use. I still use curse words once in a while, but only when it is necessary.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My process is just to write whatever comes to my mind. Whenever I have 15 to 30 minutes, I would sit down and bang out 100 to 300 words. I constantly think about topics to write about in my head. Once I sit in front of my computer, I don’t have to stare at the blank screen and the blinking cursor.

When I am out and about, I jot down my thoughts right on my phone. I write when I stand waiting in line or at the doctor’s office. I use Google Docs so I can quickly transfer my writing from my phone to my laptop.

I give myself no restrictions. I can write one line or ten paragraphs. I want to be as open and as honest as possible in my journal. I share as much as I can without getting in trouble.

Blogging is both pleasure and therapeutic for me. By writing down my thoughts, I no longer need to carry the weight in my head. Writing to release my tension has kept me blogging regularly for over 20 years.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

Blogging for myself doesn’t require any creativity. I just need to get the words from my head to the page. I write when I am bored. Even when I am driving on the road for long trips, I write in my head. It makes the driving go faster. Once I have access to my phone or my laptop, I would write down what I was writing in my head; therefore, I don’t necessarily need a physical space. I can write and hit publish anywhere and any time on my phone.

A question for the techie readers: Can you run us through your tech stack?

My blog is powered by WordPress. I design my own theme with just three files: index.php, screenshot.png, and style.css. A modern WordPress theme these days has hundreds of files. I just checked WordPress’s default Twentytwentyfive and it has 253 files. How insane is that?

I redesign and realign my blog several times a year. When I licensed a new typeface, I would want to use it first on my blog. When I found inspiration or got bored with thee current design, I would change it. Although I changed the look and feel quite often, the underneath blogging structure hadn’t changed much since the beginning. If I were forced to move over to Gutenberg, I would be screwed. I wouldn’t know how to create a modern theme.

For hosting, I use a Droplet from DigitalOcean. I use Cloudflare for SSL, basic caching, and security measures.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

WordPress has served me well over 20 years. It has grown significantly as a solid CMS over the years, but I still use it as a blogging platform.

I am deeply concerned about the controversies lately between WordPress and another premium WordPress hosting company. The WordPress founder is going bananas. I am not sure about the future of WordPress.

If I have to do it all over today, I don’t know where to start. I don’t know what platform to choose. I know other CMSes, but they are not a blogging tool out of the box like WordPress.

Financial question: How much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate revenue?

I pay about $250 a year for hosting and domain registration. My blog does not generate any revenue. I tried ads. They didn’t work and I found them distracting the reading experience. I tried custom banner ads, in which I would work with the clients to design them to fit with my design and their message. They didn’t work out.

I am asking for support from readers and that isn’t working either. My blog remains my own hobby.

Time for some recommendations: Any blog you think is worth checking out? And who do you think I should interview next?

Here’s my blogroll. You should interview Mandy Brown next.

Final question: Is there anything you want to share with us?

Check out donnytruong.com. It’s my portfolio site. You can see my works there.

This was the 75th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Donny. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

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Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
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Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

This site is out there, accessible to the approximate 5.5B people with an internet connection—unless I’m banned somewhere, I guess. That is both scary and exciting. Because that means there are 5.5B potential random human interactions waiting to happen. Those are opportunities to grow, to learn, to discover, to share. Because for me the entire point of the web is to connect. It’s about personal expression, it’s about creativity, it’s about sharing openly. It’s about respecting others, it’s about listening, it’s about reflecting on what other people say. And all those things I believe are better done in a space I control control, rather than in some soulless social media platform where my content is no different than everybody else’s.

Years of social media have managed to convince us that a scrollable timeline, a comment box with a characters limit and a like button are the tools we need to use to connect with each other. That is a big fucking lie and if you don’t believe me write me an email and I’ll be happy to show you.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

I'm Ava, from Germany and I am working with pharmaceutical databases fulltime. I'm also a parttime law student and enrolled in a separate course to become a data protection officer. When I am not studying or writing my blog, I like to do different creative things like pixel art or glitch art, sewing or embroidery, or I am exercising. I especially love the treadmill, indoor cycling, pilates and yoga.

What's the story behind your blog?

I originally planned it as just a side thing to document my progress through completing The Odin Project, learning Rust, modding my Steam Deck and writing custom CSS themes for it, as well as any general tech things like my desk setup, my Linux ricing and more. But I got very sick, and I had barely any energy for any of this especially on top of my work and studies, so I opened it up thematically, starting with a post addressing my health issues. Slowly, I chose to share more, and documenting my coding process or projects have moved more in the background. But now that I am better, I might feature more of that.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I write them on the phone in the default Notes app. I often think of the best things when I try to fall asleep; then I write it all off my chest into my phone and when I'm done, I finally sleep. No bullet points, it's the full text, and I only read over it once or twice to catch mistakes or weird wording, then it's ready to go. I schedule many of my posts to release later, even if it's just an hour. If it's very personal or I'm not sure, I might let it sit in the drafts for weeks.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I'm usually in the bathtub or in bed when writing my posts, I am very rarely actually at the desk or on a laptop. I heard of people needing a very specific environment to write, like being on their desk, a specific time, coffee, quiet; it's not like that for me. When I get an idea for a post and write it down, it feels like being struck by lightning. Suddenly there's all this text in my head, and I can barely write as fast as the sentences run down in my head. So occasionally it happens that I am not in bed or in the bathtub during, and I just pull out my phone whereever I am and furiously type and I cannot stop or focus on anything else until that's done. I've jokingly compared it to being some kind of conduit.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The blog is hosted on Bearblog, the little coding I have to do for it is done in the on-site editor. The domain is from Porkbun. My website itself is hosted on Nekoweb, a static site hoster; I was previously on Neocities. I know some people prefer to host their blogs themselves and/or use SSGs to automatically generate and update their blogs, and I commend them for all that effort! But I try to make it as easy for me as possible without having to fix much, worry about rates and uptime or anything like that.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Nothing, I am very happy.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I paid a one-time lifetime payment for Bearblog that was about 190 Euro, I think. My domain renews yearly for $16.88. I pay a monthly fee of 7,99 Euro to a provider handling legal notice mail for me; in Germany, depending on your content, you need to provide your contact details, including your address, on your website. Since me and others don't want to doxx ourselves, there are services providing an address you can offer instead, and they'll send you any mail that comes in for you.

So all in all, recurring costs are low. My blog doesn't generate revenue, and that's fine, I find the thought a bit weird. When I see other people monetizing their blogs, I think that's good for them, but I'm not feeling it for my posts and don't like the potential of money transforming how or what I post.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I think Robert Birming of birming.com could be interesting, as well as Jedda from JCProbably.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I also have a blog where I review and talk about matcha. It's at emeraldsip.cafe.

This was the 74th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Ava. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Jan-Lukas Else (RSS) — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Maybe it’s worth saying it out loud: you don’t know me. You don’t know probably 99.99999% of the people you interact with online. You have no idea what’s going on in their lives, you don’t really know what was like being them growing up, you don’t know their life situations, you don’t know what they’re struggling with. You fundamentally don’t know shit. You might think you do, but you don’t. And I don’t know shit either. I don’t know who you are, I don’t know what you’re going through. And that is why the only reasonable thing to do is to assume you’re trying to do your best and be kind and compassionate towards you. Because the alternative is just so goddamn exhausting.

I’ll start sounding like a broken record but, at this point, I don’t care: social media was and still is a mistake. Enough people all bunched together in the same space with the ability to quickly interact with each other will produce more harm than good. And no, decentralising this crap won’t make it better. You can lie to yourself and pretend it will, but it won’t. But hey, I’ll be happy to be proven wrong.

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I try to stay away from hot topics on this site, primarily because I find them incredibly boring to write about, but also because I believe certain topics are worth discussing only privately, one-to-one, when the people involved have the time and the willingness to actually engage with each other in an honest way.

I do want to say something to you though. You are, an awful person. Yes, you are. I’m sorry to say this to you but you definitely are. Why? Because I am absolutely certain that you have, at some point, given money to some corporation that is run or has employed some despicable human being. And by abstraction, you now are, an awful individual.

I’m just messing with you, you are wonderful, and people probably don’t remind you about this enough. That said, you likely have spent money and contributed to the revenues of some psycho somewhere. Hell, just the other day I learned that the producer of the lovely anime “Your Name” has been arrested for some despicable stuff..

I enjoyed that movie, am I supposed to now feel bad about that? Does that make me a terrible person? Obviously not. Annie has a great post on this topic that you should read.

What I’m trying to hint at here is that the online world is turning everyone into extremists and I’m gonna blame social media for that. People are complicated. Making assumptions is easy. Jumping to conclusions is even easier especially when you have a mob ready to support you. But you know what’s a lot harder? Being kind to a stranger even when your first instinct is to be enraged. Because no person is black and white. I can guarantee you that you could take things I said to friends in private and you could assume I’m a terrible human being. But I can also guarantee you that you could email me and we could have a lengthy chat and you’d come out of that thinking the exact opposite.

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It’s funny how I’ve been doing this job for almost 15 years and for the vast majority of that time I never had a proper portfolio. But who knows, maybe this is gonna be an opportunity to design and code something fun.

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That said though, I love seeing what other people are doing in this space and I want to take this opportunity to highlight two people who are taking photography a lot more seriously than me.

One is Cody, who’s about to leave for a trip to Japan and will do a pop-up newsletter where I assume he’s going to share both his photos but also his writing, which I very much enjoy. He also has a podcast—one of my favorites—co-hosted by another photographer, Ben Horne.

The other is my long-time friend Mattia who I assume is trying to escape the corporate world and find a way to preserve his mental sanity through photography.

So there, if like me you’re also interested in photography maybe go check them out and send them some positivity. The web can be a lonely place at times when you’re a creative person and getting words of encouragement from strangers can be incredibly helpful.

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And this is why it makes me so irrationally mad when I see small creators using the same shady tricks employed by big companies. How the fuck are we supposed to improve things if we all behave like this? It’s so sad.

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Historically it’s only been 90 seconds and that’s because we wanted to focus Instagram on short-form videos.

So apparently we live in a world where 180 seconds is considered long-form since it was too long for a platform whose focus was short-form videos. But thank god they’re no longer focused on short-form videos and people can now create long-form content. That is, as long as they stay below 180 seconds.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Annie. I’m a middle-aged cis woman from the U.S., a writer, a single mom of four teenagers (ages 13, 15, 17, and 18 currently). I grew up in Mississippi, but other than several years living in Puerto Rico, I’ve spent most of my life in St. Louis, Missouri, which is where I live now.

I worked as a freelance writer for about 20 years, starting straight out of college. I got an English degree but found rather quickly that no one wanted to pay me to write poetry or provide literary criticism. So I branched out into learning whatever topics had potential to be lucrative. This worked out well for me because I love exploring new subjects. As my Dad describes us both, we’re "about a mile wide and an inch deep." I’ve covered a wide range of things but ended up specializing in finance and tech. For me, a real sweet spot is clarifying and explaining somewhat complex topics, like tax law or digital security, for a more general readership.

For many years, freelance writing was something I did at the edges of my life. When the kids were little I used to wake up at 4am so I could write a draft, then nurse a baby, then write a little more, then spend the day keeping a herd of tiny humans alive. I’d write a little more during nap time and after their bedtime. I homeschooled for several years, too. I look back now and have absolutely no idea how I kept up or what I was thinking. I didn’t get enough sleep for at least a decade.

In 2021 I started working full-time for Teamup Calendar. They’d been a client for years, so it was an easy transition. And it was time. I lost about half my clients in 2020 due to the pandemic. And while I liked working on different projects, it’s a lot to keep up with. I’m enjoying work that goes deeper now, focused on one team, one product, one role. As the designated ‘content’ person in a small company, a typical day might include writing product news, editing site copy, making mockups, updating documentation, helping with customer support, and putting together tutorials. I get to work from home, my hours are flexible, I like our product and I absolutely love the people I get to work with. So I feel really grateful for where I’ve landed with work.

I’m an avid reader of fiction (mostly science fiction and fantasy), poetry, and whatever nonfiction topics strike my interest. I’ve been enjoying memoirs a lot lately. I love blogging, all things indie web, and getting confused about CSS. I have a small circle of close friends whom I regularly spend time with; otherwise, I’m usually hanging out with my kids and/or being blissfully cozy at home. I stay physically active by dancing, mostly in my kitchen, and hiking and trying to run without dying and I’ve recently taken up weight lifting which I enjoy way more than I thought I would. I’m not very crafty but I’m learning how to crochet because I need a hobby that doesn’t involve staring at words. It involves more math than I expected. I might try collage next; I like the idea of ripping things up and then pasting them together.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started blogging during my college years, on Xanga. I was hooked. I’ve been keeping a diary or journal of some sort since I was about 10, and blogging was such a natural extension of that. Then I got interested in having more control and options. But I’m no coder. I tried a few different options and ended up with a self-hosted Wordpress site. I went through a few different domain names too but have been at my current domain for about 10 years now.

Wordpress was good for a long time, and I had fun playing with themes and doing minor customizations. But it became too unwieldy for me. The process of sharing a simple blog post felt kind of complex and clunky. I’d wanted to move away from Wordpress for a while but hadn’t figured out where when I came across Pika. I moved there last September and I’m absolutely delighted. It’s just a delightful blogging experience.

I also have a micro.blog site, which I really enjoy. It’s where I put photos and stuff like quotes and links and little notes and what I’m reading. For me, it works well to have the "big blog" separate from the "micro blog." They’re two different states of mind, or categories, for me. Micro.blog is for little stuff I want to keep or note or track or share. Logging, which might include a bit of writing but might not. Pika is for writing posts. Blogging, which might include or link back to something I’ve logged, but might not. It’s an arbitrary distinction, but it works well for me.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Writing is how I process life, really. I write about my feelings all the time. I write about stuff that I notice, what confuses me or delights me, my questions, experiences, fears, hopes. I write a lot of the same stuff over and over.

Blogging is a really special mode of writing. It can be as mundane and specific and personal as what I write in my journal, but I’m sharing it. I’m letting others in, inviting people to know and participate in these small experiences I’m having. They’re doing me a favor by taking a few moments to read what I post and I’m always kind of shocked and quite honored. Amazing! So many things people could be doing. If they take a minute to read something I write, what a gift that is for me. It’s really cool. Blogging gives us a way to find these little points of connection and have interactions and conversations and develop relationships with people we might otherwise miss.

As far as my writing process, it’s pretty simple. I think of something, I want to blog about it, I open up my blog dashboard and start writing. Or I’m writing a note in Obsidian, decide to make it a blog post, and copy it over to my blog. I don’t think too hard about it. I usually proofread it, but not always. It’s just a blog.

That’s the process about 75% of the time. Zero friction. The Pika editor is delightful to use.

The other 25% of the time, I might realize I’m writing something that needs more thought and time, or research, or I just need to sit with it for a bit. Those drafts live in Obsidian. When I’m ready to post one, I copy it to my blog.

For microblogging, I use MarsEdit on my laptop or the official Micro.blog app on my phone.

I don’t really have a plan about what I’m going to blog about, but ideas aren’t ever an issue. I journal daily, I take notes all the time, I make lists incessantly. And I’m continually inspired by what other people share and blog about.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mean, sure. My ideal creative environment is the library from Beauty and the Beast. I’d also love it if someone could bring me snacks and keep me supplied with coffee, tea, and sparkling water. Maybe a nice Cabernet in the evening. I like to have an array of beverages.

I don’t know if physical space influences our creativity, precisely. But I do believe that our environment influences whether we feel safe, and how much energy we have, and how easy it is to focus. And those are factors in how creative we can be. It’s not that creativity is a dial that gets turned up and down by our physical environment; it’s more that we are creative beings, inherently, always—and when we feel safe and have energy and aren’t too stressed about other stuff, that creativity can come out more easily and more generously. However, I’ve also found in my own life that creativity benefits from constraints. Sometimes working with a small amount of time hunched over a laptop or scribbling frantically in a cheap notebook is the key that unlocks a door.

I think more than our physical environment, our internal environment is key to healthy creativity: Do I believe I’m a creative being, or not? Do I believe that what I have to share is worth sharing, or not? Do I think about myself as someone whose work is valuable? Do I honor my own boundaries? Do I respect my intuition? Do I feel that my voice is worthwhile? Am I invested enough in my own creative expression that I’ll risk embarrassment? Am I confident enough to make mistakes publicly, and know that I’ll recover?

If I cultivate positive beliefs about who I am as a creative being, and back those beliefs up with action, I build an internal environment that stays with me no matter what physical space I’m in.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My domain is registered with Hostinger. My blog is hosted by Pika, which is also my blogging platform.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I wouldn’t get so precious with it.

When I first started blogging, it was simple and fun. Along the way, I started feeling like I needed to have important things to say, be more professional, have all these polished bits and pieces, publish on a schedule, blah blah blah. Ridiculous. It sucked the joy right out of blogging. So I just wouldn’t waste any time worrying about weird corporate standards applied to my personal blog. I’d stick to doing what I do now: say what you want to say , don’t take it too seriously, have fun, let your weird flag fly so you can find other interesting people. Be part of the beating bloody heart of the Internet. Be messy, be alive, and tell us about it. Share the stuff you’re doing and making and thinking about and trying out. Don’t censor yourself so much. Blog a dozen times a day or once a month or whenever you feel like it. Try things. Change your theme, change your platform, do whatever. Mess it all up and start fresh. (Related: I’d also be better about backing up allllll those blog posts before trying things and messing it all up.)

Blogging is just one person saying, "Hey, here’s me." I know sometimes it can feel like you’re screaming into the void but honestly, even that can be therapeutic. Because at least you’re the one screaming, you’re making a sound, you’re putting something out there. There is a lot more power in that than we realize. I guess that’s the other thing I’d do differently: I wouldn’t ever worry about who’s reading or not reading my blog. All expression craves an audience: that’s beautiful and natural and normal and good. We want connection, not a vacuum. But when we focus on the audience, it’s so easy to lose our own voice and perspective. We start tuning ourselves unconsciously to please this audience. Then we’re not creating, we’re performing. And we lose something really essential, the joy of creating for its own sake. And we get resentful, because we’ve traded something essential, something that’s in our control—the process of creating and sharing—for something non-essential and out of our control. Because other people’s attention and approval is always out of our control. No one owes me their attention, and certainly no one owes me their approval. But I owe myself the time and space and energy to do what makes me feel most alive, and to contribute something positive, however tiny, to this reality.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I pay $15/year for my domain name. It’s $6/month for Pika and $100/year for Micro.blog Premium. I don’t have any revenue. Sometimes I get emails from people wanting to sell stuff on my blog and it’s always the dumbest, most unrelated stuff. Anyway I hate ads so I’m not gonna do that. I did start setting up Ko-fi at one point.

If people can monetise, I think that’s great. I love the one-a-month concept and club. I like supporting other bloggers, but I don’t have a lot of extra money so that’s a cool way to contribute without breaking the budget. Tiny things add up.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• Patrick Rhone
• Tracy Durnell (read the P&B interview)
• Baldur Bjarnason
• Loura
• Keenan
• Lou Plummer
• Alexandra Wolfe
• Véronique (read the P&B interview)
• Nicholas Bate
• Courtney

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I love my guestbook, please sign it so we can be friends. :)

This was the 73rd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Annie. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

This is part two of an ongoing series apparently.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

The modern web—and society to a certain extent—is built on this idea that we should remove friction as much as possible. Everything has to be optimised, smoothed out, and made as easy and convenient as possible. The embodiment of this idea to me was the Amazon Dash. This idea of being able to simply push a button and have something show up at your door is the perfect representation of the capitalistic goal applied to the web. The only improvement from there is to read your mind and skip the button step altogether. Imagine how much value for the shareholders we can create if something shows up at your door every time you simply think about wanting—or needing—something.

I, on the other hand, enjoy friction. I also enjoy limitations. When I set up my site, years ago, I made it insanely simple on purpose. As a developer, the only limit to what my site can do is basically my imagination and yet I decided to stick with just one layout, in a single column, with no navigation. There is no automation going on, in order to publish something I have to log in and manually copy-paste my content. I could improve that, I could set up a custom API and do all sorts of stuff but I decided not to because I enjoy the added friction.

The same thing happens with the email version of my content. I could set it up so that everything is automated but I decided against it because doing everything by hand gives me the time to reflect on what I’m doing rather than letting everything go on autopilot.

Friction, in the digital world, is important. Everything is already moving at a pace that’s not really compatible with the way humans work. We need a way to slow down, we need digital speed bumps to remind us that going slow sometimes is preferable.

If I can offer you my advice—and this is my blog, you can’t stop me from doing it—it would be to insert some friction here and there. Doesn’t have to be anything massive or terribly disruptive. It just needs to make things slightly less immediate. I think you’ll find this experiment quite revealing.

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To all bloggers: If you were born and brought up in the time of modern social media, where Twitter and Instagram have always existed, would you even blog?

Before I tackle this, I want to highlight Jamie’s answer, which he posted on his blog.

This question is interesting because it’s tied to our relationship with the web, with social media, with the society we live in, and with our age. And given that, some context is necessary. I was born in 1989 and for the first, I’d say 15 years of my life I almost never interacted with the web. I knew what it was, but I didn’t have a home connection growing up. By the time I started to use it, Facebook was already here, and so my exposure to social media began while I was in my early 20s. It’s incredibly hard for me to imagine growing up with the constant presence of social media. But it’s also hard for me to imagine being an adult and living with the constant presence of social media.

Becoming a developer wasn’t a deliberate choice. I stumbled on it by chance, and my exposure to the more technical side of the web was simply the result of me wanting to learn more about how things work. I started making websites for myself not as a hobby, but because I needed a way to practice my skills since I wanted to do it for a living.

I began working as a solo developer in 2011. It took me till 2017 to make myself a blog. I was 27 years old at the time. I didn’t grow up with blogs the same way I didn’t grow up with social media, but to me, the blogging world felt a lot more appealing mainly because it was under my control.

Not a single person in my inner circle had a blog at the time. No one pushed me towards blogging, the same way no one pushed me towards practising meditation or reading philosophy in my teens. It was just the combination of my personal exploration and what was available to me at the time.

So, to get back to the original question, if I was born in the time of modern social media, would I be blogging? The only question I can give is “Maybe?”. It’s hard to say.

Writing this made me realise that we’re dealing with a catch-22 when it comes to social media and blogging. I am a big proponent of leaving social media and getting back to personal sites. But I keep saying that on my blog. And the people who read my blog are the people who know blogs exist. What about those people who are “trapped” on social media? Those are the people I should be speaking to. But I’m not on social media. Because I think people shouldn’t be on social media… You see where I’m going with this.

Anyway, I think there’s also another thing at play here and that is the fact that at their core, social media and blogging are not the same. The vast majority of people on social media won’t move to blogging because what they get out of social media is not the same thing you get out of blogging. I think it’s a false equivalence.

Blogging is primarily a solitary, output-driven, activity. People have blogs because they want to share, they want to express their thoughts and feelings. Social media is instead driven by consumption. Sure, some people are power users and post 5000 times a day, but the vast majority of users are lurkers who just scroll their timelines, follow other people and their interactions are limited to likes and the occasional comment.

Given that, I think it’s even harder to answer the question Jatan posed. Creative people will try to find a way to express their creativity, no matter what, and some would inevitably be driven towards personal sites and blogs. At least that's what I think.

Having said all that, I now think I should be doing more to help people rediscover these other corners of the web. How to do that though, it's still an open question. Starting a blog has never been easier, contrary to what other people might say. People managed to get blogs online back when computers were rare and connections were slow as hell. Today we have an endless supply of tools and the knowledge is out there for those who want to seek it. So, if you're on the fence, give blogging a try. Creating an account on bearblog.dev is not harder than signing up on Instagram and buying a domain name isn't rocket science. Don't let other people discourage you. And if you need help, hit me up via email. My inbox is always open. Thank you for the question Jatan, this was fun.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Steven Garrity. I live and work in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada with my wife and three kids. I am the Creative Director at a web/app design & development agency called silverorange. I’ve been at silverorange for over 25 years and was one of the team of original founding partners. I’m a tired dad, I enjoy playing guitar, and have aspirations of writing / recording music.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started the Acts of Volition blog <conan-obrien-voice>in the year 2000</conan-obrien-voice> along with my two friends Rob & Matt. This was prime “start a blog” time, and I worked at a web development agency where we had the time and headspace to spin up our own simple blogging engine. I’m grateful to my much more capable colleagues who helped build the system and taught me a lot in the process.

Rob & Matt stuck around for a couple of years, but eventually drifted away from posting. I kept at it and eventually started to think about the site as my own blog (with appreciation for Matt & Rob’s contributions).

I just kept writing over the years. I wrote about whatever interested me. Music, the web, uninformed opinions that occur while in the shower, etc. I also like naming things after myself.

In the first ten years or so, it felt very much as though the blog was part of a ‘social network’ (in today’s terms) of other blogs. We read each other's blogs, commented on each other’s posts, and followed along with RSS feed readers.

Gradually, this blog-centered social networking was mostly replaced with centralized social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. I bristled at the idea of giving control of my own writing and thoughts to a privately-owned centralized system, and so never participated in any significant way in any social networks until Mastodon came along (and even then, only casually).

After most of the conversations moved to Twitter, I kept writing on the blog, mostly for my own sake. These days I write less frequently, but I still appreciate having an outlet for my writing.

I also made a music podcast, Acts of Volition Radio, published through the site. From 2003-2009, I recorded a podcast with music recommendations. I never really ‘finished’ it and hold out vague dreams of adding new episodes, even though it’s been over 15 years (!?) since the last episode. I don’t think I could continue the same format, where I played full songs that I didn’t own, without figuring out the ownership/payment/legal issues.

I do occasionally write/publish on the silverorange blog about more work-related items as well.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I do a lot of writing and have a lot of creative freedom in my work at silverorange. I have found that having a great job that I love has met many of the creative needs that might have pushed me to write more on a blog, or to other creative outlets.

I’m a bit embarrassed to hold the dubious title of most-frequent poster in our company Slack. To spare my co-workers as much as possible, when an idea strikes me and I think to post it on Slack, I try to stop and ask myself if it’s something specific to our company. If it’s not, I try to redirect it to the blog.

I generally have two types of posts:

1. The carefully drafted post: This is something I may think about for weeks or months. I may have a draft I pick at occasionally. These tend to be longer posts with more structure. It’s not like I’m writing for The Atlantic - but they aren’t just tweet-level think-and-post pieces. For example, my post about the design of license plates in my province, or about my favourite guitar.

2. The quick ‘write & publish’ posts: These tend to be short and rich with typos. I try to minimize the process behind these posts, aiming to get them out while they are fresh in my mind.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I’m pretty good at ignoring my physical surroundings while working. At the start of the pandemic, I set up an old card table in an already crowded bedroom, and for better and for worse was able to disappear into work easily each day even though I was surrounded by laundry, chores, and general life distractions.

I’ve now got a much better setup with my ideal home office. It’s bright, climate-controlled, has a comfortable desk/chair and a sofa, and also houses my guitars. As far as a physical location and setup, I’m swimming in privilege. That said, I do associate this desk setup with ‘work’, so I will sometimes bring the laptop to the couch for a change of pace.

I think the people around you influence your creativity. In that respect, a lot of my thoughts end up in our company Slack. Working remotely, as I do, there’s much less opportunity for meandering lunch conversation that can be fertile ground for blog post ideas.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The blog was originally hosted on a custom blogging CMS we affectionately called “blorgy”. It was built on some open-source frameworks we had developed at silverorange. There was an early version written in ColdFusion, and we then migrated it to PHP.

After a decade or so, we were moving on to more modern frameworks. I decided to migrate the blog to Wordpress, as it seemed like (and maybe still is) the closest thing to an industry standard format for a blog. If I ever want to migrate to another platform (which I do think about occasionally), Wordpress feels like a system that will be well supported in terms of import/export options.

I use a cheap web host that I don’t want to plug, because it’s a cesspool of upselling. I’d like to find a host that’s a bit less of a bargain-basement service, but to be fair, this one has been stable (and cheap).

My general goals for the tech setup are to not get stuck with any one vendor or platform. With some care to preserve URL structure, I could change the CMS or point the domain to a new host without much disruption.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Though it’s a bit of a discouraging thought, I probably wouldn’t start a blog today. I’m glad I have Acts of Volition as an occasional outlet, but the energy to create it initially was easier to come by 25 years ago.

Imagining I did start anew today though, I wouldn’t be starting a multi-author blog, as Acts of Volition was initially. I’d likely explore a static-site-builder approach, or the Ghost platform. When I first started the blog, I wanted absolute control over every aspect of the site. These days, I’d be a bit more content to let a good service handle some of the details for me as long as the domain name remained my own.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The costs to keep the blog alive come down to two hard costs (hosting & domain) and then my own time. The domain name is registered with Hover (which I’m quite pleased with) for about $20/year (Canadian). The hosting is with a cheap-o host for about $150/year (Canadian).

If I could put up with the pain-in-the-neck, I’d find a host less interested in upselling add-ons I don’t need.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I thought I’d have dozens of blogs to recommend, but when I looked at my list of subscriptions in Feedbin (which I love), there were a lot of dead or stagnant feeds. I do feel like I’m a part of an alumni class of bloggers from a few (online) generations ago. Quite understandably, many of us have other creative outlets and draws on our energy than we did when we were younger.

My first recommendation is my friend Peter Rukavina. We both live in Charlottetown and have had many meandering lunch conversations turn into blog posts. I was delighted to see Peter has already been featured on P&B.

I enjoy the Shoptalk Show podcast (about web design & development). Chris Coyier has already been featured here, but I’d recommend talking to co-host Dave Rupert as well.

I love the visual polish and interactive examples that Josh W. Comeau builds into his blog.

He doesn’t publish frequently, but I’ll read anything that James Long posts online.

One of my colleagues at silverorange has a great blog: Maureen Holland.

It’s inevitably self-promotional, but I do love sharing writing duties with my colleagues at silverorange on our silverorange blog. My friend Kristen’s post, Be Kind, is one we reference often.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I will leave you with a suggested question to ask other blog writers: What will happen to your blog after you’re gone? I ask because I don’t have a good answer for this. I don’t think anything I’ve written is critical for future generations, but I’d also like my eventual great-grand-kids to be able to read a bit about how their old great-grand-dad saw the world (if they care to).

Ideally, I’d like to not have my blog just turn into link-rot, but I also don’t want to burden my family with tech debt either. I’d love to hear how others plan to address their digital legacy, if at all.

I would also just like to reinforce the value of writing as a tool to shape our own thoughts, and as a means to build shared understanding with others.

This was the 72nd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Steven. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

This is part two of an ongoing series apparently.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

The modern web—and society to a certain extent—is built on this idea that we should remove friction as much as possible. Everything has to be optimised, smoothed out, and made as easy and convenient as possible. The embodiment of this idea to me was the Amazon Dash. This idea of being able to simply push a button and have something show up at your door is the perfect representation of the capitalistic goal applied to the web. The only improvement from there is to read your mind and skip the button step altogether. Imagine how much value for the shareholders we can create if something shows up at your door every time you simply think about wanting—or needing—something.

I, on the other hand, enjoy friction. I also enjoy limitations. When I set up my site, years ago, I made it insanely simple on purpose. As a developer, the only limit to what my site can do is basically my imagination and yet I decided to stick with just one layout, in a single column, with no navigation. There is no automation going on, in order to publish something I have to log in and manually copy-paste my content. I could improve that, I could set up a custom API and do all sorts of stuff but I decided not to because I enjoy the added friction.

The same thing happens with the email version of my content. I could set it up so that everything is automated but I decided against it because doing everything by hand gives me the time to reflect on what I’m doing rather than letting everything go on autopilot.

Friction, in the digital world, is important. Everything is already moving at a pace that’s not really compatible with the way humans work. We need a way to slow down, we need digital speed bumps to remind us that going slow sometimes is preferable.

If I can offer you my advice—and this is my blog, you can’t stop me from doing it—it would be to insert some friction here and there. Doesn’t have to be anything massive or terribly disruptive. It just needs to make things slightly less immediate. I think you’ll find this experiment quite revealing.

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To all bloggers: If you were born and brought up in the time of modern social media, where Twitter and Instagram have always existed, would you even blog?

Before I tackle this, I want to highlight Jamie’s answer, which he posted on his blog.

This question is interesting because it’s tied to our relationship with the web, with social media, with the society we live in, and with our age. And given that, some context is necessary. I was born in 1989 and for the first, I’d say 15 years of my life I almost never interacted with the web. I knew what it was, but I didn’t have a home connection growing up. By the time I started to use it, Facebook was already here, and so my exposure to social media began while I was in my early 20s. It’s incredibly hard for me to imagine growing up with the constant presence of social media. But it’s also hard for me to imagine being an adult and living with the constant presence of social media.

Becoming a developer wasn’t a deliberate choice. I stumbled on it by chance, and my exposure to the more technical side of the web was simply the result of me wanting to learn more about how things work. I started making websites for myself not as a hobby, but because I needed a way to practice my skills since I wanted to do it for a living.

I began working as a solo developer in 2011. It took me till 2017 to make myself a blog. I was 27 years old at the time. I didn’t grow up with blogs the same way I didn’t grow up with social media, but to me, the blogging world felt a lot more appealing mainly because it was under my control.

Not a single person in my inner circle had a blog at the time. No one pushed me towards blogging, the same way no one pushed me towards practising meditation or reading philosophy in my teens. It was just the combination of my personal exploration and what was available to me at the time.

So, to get back to the original question, if I was born in the time of modern social media, would I be blogging? The only question I can give is “Maybe?”. It’s hard to say.

Writing this made me realise that we’re dealing with a catch-22 when it comes to social media and blogging. I am a big proponent of leaving social media and getting back to personal sites. But I keep saying that on my blog. And the people who read my blog are the people who know blogs exist. What about those people who are “trapped” on social media? Those are the people I should be speaking to. But I’m not on social media. Because I think people shouldn’t be on social media… You see where I’m going with this.

Anyway, I think there’s also another thing at play here and that is the fact that at their core, social media and blogging are not the same. The vast majority of people on social media won’t move to blogging because what they get out of social media is not the same thing you get out of blogging. I think it’s a false equivalence.

Blogging is primarily a solitary, output-driven, activity. People have blogs because they want to share, they want to express their thoughts and feelings. Social media is instead driven by consumption. Sure, some people are power users and post 5000 times a day, but the vast majority of users are lurkers who just scroll their timelines, follow other people and their interactions are limited to likes and the occasional comment.

Given that, I think it’s even harder to answer the question Jatan posed. Creative people will try to find a way to express their creativity, no matter what, and some would inevitably be driven towards personal sites and blogs. At least that's what I think.

Having said all that, I now think I should be doing more to help people rediscover these other corners of the web. How to do that though, it's still an open question. Starting a blog has never been easier, contrary to what other people might say. People managed to get blogs online back when computers were rare and connections were slow as hell. Today we have an endless supply of tools and the knowledge is out there for those who want to seek it. So, if you're on the fence, give blogging a try. Creating an account on bearblog.dev is not harder than signing up on Instagram and buying a domain name isn't rocket science. Don't let other people discourage you. And if you need help, hit me up via email. My inbox is always open. Thank you for the question Jatan, this was fun.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hi, I’m Steven Garrity. I live and work in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada with my wife and three kids. I am the Creative Director at a web/app design & development agency called silverorange. I’ve been at silverorange for over 25 years and was one of the team of original founding partners. I’m a tired dad, I enjoy playing guitar, and have aspirations of writing / recording music.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started the Acts of Volition blog <conan-obrien-voice>in the year 2000</conan-obrien-voice> along with my two friends Rob & Matt. This was prime “start a blog” time, and I worked at a web development agency where we had the time and headspace to spin up our own simple blogging engine. I’m grateful to my much more capable colleagues who helped build the system and taught me a lot in the process.

Rob & Matt stuck around for a couple of years, but eventually drifted away from posting. I kept at it and eventually started to think about the site as my own blog (with appreciation for Matt & Rob’s contributions).

I just kept writing over the years. I wrote about whatever interested me. Music, the web, uninformed opinions that occur while in the shower, etc. I also like naming things after myself.

In the first ten years or so, it felt very much as though the blog was part of a ‘social network’ (in today’s terms) of other blogs. We read each other's blogs, commented on each other’s posts, and followed along with RSS feed readers.

Gradually, this blog-centered social networking was mostly replaced with centralized social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. I bristled at the idea of giving control of my own writing and thoughts to a privately-owned centralized system, and so never participated in any significant way in any social networks until Mastodon came along (and even then, only casually).

After most of the conversations moved to Twitter, I kept writing on the blog, mostly for my own sake. These days I write less frequently, but I still appreciate having an outlet for my writing.

I also made a music podcast, Acts of Volition Radio, published through the site. From 2003-2009, I recorded a podcast with music recommendations. I never really ‘finished’ it and hold out vague dreams of adding new episodes, even though it’s been over 15 years (!?) since the last episode. I don’t think I could continue the same format, where I played full songs that I didn’t own, without figuring out the ownership/payment/legal issues.

I do occasionally write/publish on the silverorange blog about more work-related items as well.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I do a lot of writing and have a lot of creative freedom in my work at silverorange. I have found that having a great job that I love has met many of the creative needs that might have pushed me to write more on a blog, or to other creative outlets.

I’m a bit embarrassed to hold the dubious title of most-frequent poster in our company Slack. To spare my co-workers as much as possible, when an idea strikes me and I think to post it on Slack, I try to stop and ask myself if it’s something specific to our company. If it’s not, I try to redirect it to the blog.

I generally have two types of posts:

1. The carefully drafted post: This is something I may think about for weeks or months. I may have a draft I pick at occasionally. These tend to be longer posts with more structure. It’s not like I’m writing for The Atlantic - but they aren’t just tweet-level think-and-post pieces. For example, my post about the design of license plates in my province, or about my favourite guitar.

2. The quick ‘write & publish’ posts: These tend to be short and rich with typos. I try to minimize the process behind these posts, aiming to get them out while they are fresh in my mind.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I’m pretty good at ignoring my physical surroundings while working. At the start of the pandemic, I set up an old card table in an already crowded bedroom, and for better and for worse was able to disappear into work easily each day even though I was surrounded by laundry, chores, and general life distractions.

I’ve now got a much better setup with my ideal home office. It’s bright, climate-controlled, has a comfortable desk/chair and a sofa, and also houses my guitars. As far as a physical location and setup, I’m swimming in privilege. That said, I do associate this desk setup with ‘work’, so I will sometimes bring the laptop to the couch for a change of pace.

I think the people around you influence your creativity. In that respect, a lot of my thoughts end up in our company Slack. Working remotely, as I do, there’s much less opportunity for meandering lunch conversation that can be fertile ground for blog post ideas.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

The blog was originally hosted on a custom blogging CMS we affectionately called “blorgy”. It was built on some open-source frameworks we had developed at silverorange. There was an early version written in ColdFusion, and we then migrated it to PHP.

After a decade or so, we were moving on to more modern frameworks. I decided to migrate the blog to Wordpress, as it seemed like (and maybe still is) the closest thing to an industry standard format for a blog. If I ever want to migrate to another platform (which I do think about occasionally), Wordpress feels like a system that will be well supported in terms of import/export options.

I use a cheap web host that I don’t want to plug, because it’s a cesspool of upselling. I’d like to find a host that’s a bit less of a bargain-basement service, but to be fair, this one has been stable (and cheap).

My general goals for the tech setup are to not get stuck with any one vendor or platform. With some care to preserve URL structure, I could change the CMS or point the domain to a new host without much disruption.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

Though it’s a bit of a discouraging thought, I probably wouldn’t start a blog today. I’m glad I have Acts of Volition as an occasional outlet, but the energy to create it initially was easier to come by 25 years ago.

Imagining I did start anew today though, I wouldn’t be starting a multi-author blog, as Acts of Volition was initially. I’d likely explore a static-site-builder approach, or the Ghost platform. When I first started the blog, I wanted absolute control over every aspect of the site. These days, I’d be a bit more content to let a good service handle some of the details for me as long as the domain name remained my own.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

The costs to keep the blog alive come down to two hard costs (hosting & domain) and then my own time. The domain name is registered with Hover (which I’m quite pleased with) for about $20/year (Canadian). The hosting is with a cheap-o host for about $150/year (Canadian).

If I could put up with the pain-in-the-neck, I’d find a host less interested in upselling add-ons I don’t need.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I thought I’d have dozens of blogs to recommend, but when I looked at my list of subscriptions in Feedbin (which I love), there were a lot of dead or stagnant feeds. I do feel like I’m a part of an alumni class of bloggers from a few (online) generations ago. Quite understandably, many of us have other creative outlets and draws on our energy than we did when we were younger.

My first recommendation is my friend Peter Rukavina. We both live in Charlottetown and have had many meandering lunch conversations turn into blog posts. I was delighted to see Peter has already been featured on P&B.

I enjoy the Shoptalk Show podcast (about web design & development). Chris Coyier has already been featured here, but I’d recommend talking to co-host Dave Rupert as well.

I love the visual polish and interactive examples that Josh W. Comeau builds into his blog.

He doesn’t publish frequently, but I’ll read anything that James Long posts online.

One of my colleagues at silverorange has a great blog: Maureen Holland.

It’s inevitably self-promotional, but I do love sharing writing duties with my colleagues at silverorange on our silverorange blog. My friend Kristen’s post, Be Kind, is one we reference often.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I will leave you with a suggested question to ask other blog writers: What will happen to your blog after you’re gone? I ask because I don’t have a good answer for this. I don’t think anything I’ve written is critical for future generations, but I’d also like my eventual great-grand-kids to be able to read a bit about how their old great-grand-dad saw the world (if they care to).

Ideally, I’d like to not have my blog just turn into link-rot, but I also don’t want to burden my family with tech debt either. I’d love to hear how others plan to address their digital legacy, if at all.

I would also just like to reinforce the value of writing as a tool to shape our own thoughts, and as a means to build shared understanding with others.

This was the 72nd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Steven. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
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4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

And since you kindly asked Kev, I’ll be happy to answer those questions on this gloomy Sunday of early January.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I wanted to have a simple tool to keep myself accountable and I also needed an excuse to write more in English. And that’s why on January 1st 2017 I woke up at 5 am and coded myself a blog. I posted a somewhat detailed history of my personal site years ago.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

Kirby. Started on Kirby, still on Kirby, will stay on Kirby for as long as Kirby exists (or until I find something better, not that I’m actively looking for it). I can’t remember if I started on Kirby 2 or 3 though. I am currently on Kirby 4 and will upgrade to 5 as soon as it’s out.

I used it because it’s the tool I also use to code almost all my client projects. It’s file-based, it’s simple to use, it’s a pleasure to work with, and super flexible. I also enjoy the community so it was a no-brainer. I didn’t really consider other options at the time because when you have a tool that works why bother looking for something else?

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I had a few Tumblr sites but it wasn’t really blogging. I was posting almost exclusively pictures. So I think the answer is no. My personal blog started on Kirby and it’s still on Kirby almost 8 years later.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?

I write on iA Writer, do a quick grammar check with Grammarly, and post using the admin interface. The workflow is the same no matter if I write at my desk or on my phone while I’m on the go.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m annoyed and frustrated by something or someone, and I end up writing massive rants. Other than that, it’s all very random. I don’t think I have a specific moment. When I feel it’s the right time to do it, I sit down and I do it.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I write and I hit publish. I don’t proofread, I don’t do drafts. As I wrote before, I’m not a writer. I treat blog posts the same way I treat emails or text messages. You don’t let an email sit there for a few days and then come back to it. You write it because you have something to communicate, you hit send, and you then move on with your day. That’s exactly how I blog.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

Always the next one.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I plan to completely rewrite the CSS of my site and switch from SASS to native CSS and split it into multiple files because I hate to load unnecessary CSS. I’d also love to have a variable version of my typeface available and not load three distinct files but I don’t have the necessary skills to make it happen so I’ll live with the fact that those three files have to be there.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let’s start from the basics: Can you introduce yourself?

Hi! I’m Pauline Narvas, online known sometimes as “Pawlean”. Over the past two years or so, I’ve lived a semi-nomadic life travelling with my 40L backpack around the world 90 days at a time. Home will always be the UK for me, with “home-home” i.e. my roots being the Philippines. I also have a soft spot for Greece. It’s been quite a journey experiencing so many different cultures, connecting with some incredible people and generally, living such a full, exciting life on the road. I’ve slowed down in the last year or so, but still try to chase the sunwhenever I can.

Back in the day, I studied Biomedical Sciences at the University of Sheffield. But I’d always been so curious about technology, writing my first line of code at a young age and kinda followed my heart into the tech industry after I graduated. After various iterations in my career, I’ve now landed in what I would call a “dream” role or at the very least “a calling” which is community building. I’ve worked in Community now for the last three years and prior to this, I was a Software Engineer who accidentally dipped my feet into DevOps and Platform Engineering and did that for a bit. You could say that I’ve seen a little bit of everything. 😆

Outside of my career and travelling, I’m an “OG” blogger, writing on the internet since around 2008. I also love the possibilities that come from social media, after seeing it for myself from being a very early user of Twitter. Offline, I enjoy weight lifting, yoga, hiking and boxing which is the secret sauce to keeping myself sane in today’s world.

What’s the story behind your blog?

My blog is a reflection of my journey into tech, which began with a dream to create an MMO game like RuneScape. As I delved into web development, teaching myself HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and eventually PHP and WordPress theme development, my focus shifted. I started my blog to share ideas for my game but soon found joy in documenting my thoughts and experiences.

Over the years, my blog evolved into a space where I chronicle various chapters of my life. Along the way, I connected with a community of bloggers in the “blogosphere” who motivated me to keep writing. This journey intertwined well with my tech exploration as I shared my learning process and projects, which naturally led to a broader readership and deeper involvement in the tech sphere.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My creative process for blogging is deeply rooted in real-life experiences!

I find inspiration in everyday moments, exploring the world around me, and engaging with others. I try not to force my writing; instead, I let inspiration come from these experiences.

Back in 2020, I challenged myself to write weekly during the pandemic. And I did. Sometimes even twice a week, because what else was there to do? 🤷

This discipline grew from a desire to almost “process” daily life, especially during university years filled with exciting tech events, hackathons, meetups and other opportunities. I shared my journey into tech and beyond, documenting each step not just for myself but to show others what's possible, especially for someone who looks like me.

This practice of reflection carried into my travels, where my writing evolved from recounting events to exploring personal growth and connections. You can see this “change” in the last two years of posts.

Ultimately, my blog serves as the public journal of Pauline Narvas 😁 that captures my perspective of life and the insights I get along the way.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I don't have an ideal creative environment because most inspiration strikes at unexpected moments. I find myself jotting down thoughts in my phone's Notes app while walking or even during exercise. Lifting weights actually is where I get most sparks of random ideas ideas! I am that weirdo recording voice memos for myself to use later on. 🤣

I know for sure, I often feel most inspired away from my laptop.

A question for the techie readers: Can you run us through your tech stack?

My blog operates on a headless setup with WordPress on the back end, hosted on an EC2 instance on Amazon. The front end is built with Next.js and hosted on Vercel. This separation allows me to develop the front end separately so it runs in faster and generally a smoother user experience.

In the early days, I used static HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, manually creating separate files for each blog post, but this became unmanageable as you can imagine 🤣

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I wouldn’t do anything differently if I were to start a blog today.

The challenges I faced, like setting up a WordPress database and losing my work or dealing with broken themes in production helped me troubleshoot, adapt, and ultimately become a better developer.

From a writing perspective, I’d also stick to writing authentic, personal content because that connection is more important than ever in today’s AI-driven world.

Financial question: How much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate revenue?

My blog costs about £100 a year to run, covering expenses like AWS hosting, domains, SSL certificates, and Vercel front-end hosting.

While it doesn’t generate significant direct revenue, I’ve done occasional sponsored posts and use affiliate links, which I always disclose transparently. That said, I would argue my blog is a huge asset—it’s been instrumental in building my career and continues to open opportunities for me. In that sense, mu blog generates value far beyond traditional revenue streams.

Time for some recommendations: Any blog you think is worth checking out? And who do you think I should interview next?

Have you spoken to Anne-Laure Le Cunff from Ness Labs? Her posts on mindful productivity is a must-have here.

Final question: Is there anything you want to share with us?

I’d love for you to check out my favorite words I’ve ever written on my blog. You can also find me on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn if you’d like to connect.

I’m always excited to meet new people and have virtual coffee chats, so feel free to reach out! 😁 See you online!

This was the 71st edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Pauline. Make sure to follow her blog and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Colin Walker (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — İsmail Şevik (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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We could really go deep on this metaphor talking about how you can add too much to a sentence or poorly construct it and lose the meaning, but you get the idea.

This is my issue with the use of JS on the web today, an issue that can be summarised with the good old “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should”. So many websites out there are goddamn impossible to use these days. Every item on the page has to be animated, things have to slide or fade in as you scroll, and things can’t stay still apparently for more than 5 seconds. So much scrolljacking and cursor hijacking for literally no reason other than showing that you can.

I’m part of that small group that hates JS a bit. Actually, I don’t really hate JS. I hate the fact that JS is enabling people to do shitty things. But I’m also aware that it’s enabling a ton of incredible stuff as well. For example, this homepage is amazing and without JS you’d not be able to make it. But sites like this one are not the norm sadly.

But I get it, flashy designs sell well and you can probably charge more for them so I don’t see things improving anytime soon.

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I don’t want to write a long post detailing all the things I’d love to achieve in the next 365 days but I do want to set the tone for myself in this new year. And that can be expressed in one word: output.

I want 2025 to be a year where my focus is on the output, rather than on the input. Rather than being concerned with what’s happening out there, I want to focus on what I can control and that is my output, my contribution to my life and the life of others.

I also want to focus more on the analogue. As much as I love the digital world, I think I need to spend more time disconnected in order to restore some semblance of mental sanity. So books, in paper form, are gonna play a huge role in this 2025.

A year with fewer inputs, and more output. This is my hope for 2025. Happy New Year!

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I’m meditating more often and more consistently which is great.

I definitely don’t do that now and I really should. That’s one of the things I want to change in the upcoming year. But this is not the time to look forward but rather the time to look back. So, was 2024 a good year? I guess it depends. I am still alive, I’m relatively healthy all things considered and I’m not dealing with crippling debt. So I’d say the year has been pretty great!

At the same time though, I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to, I didn’t manage to save as much money as I hoped, the work side of life wasn’t great, mental health has taken quite the beating, and I have more scars on my body than John Rambo. So, you can say this has been quite a shitty year.

And that’s just the duality of life. Depending on how you want to look at things you can only see the positives or the negatives—or a mix of both! At that point, trying to judge a year becomes a pointless exercise.

Did I accomplish all the things I wanted to accomplish? Hell no. I was not even close to doing that. And there’s a ton I have to work on. But I’m slowly learning that this is what life is and it’s something I have to accept.

As for this blog though, it’s been a decent year I’d say! 121 blog posts, 16 “moments”, and 52 interviews have gone live and that’s 189 new pieces of content. Not too shabby!

I wish you all a great ending of 2024 and I look forward to reading about your New Year’s resolutions.

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But as I said, I found a solution! Apparently, it’s possible to deactivate an account on Bluesky rather than delete it. What that means is that my profile won’t show up on the site, people won’t be able to contact me there, and I won’t have to keep an eye on it but I can—apparently—still use it to log in on micro.blog and leave comments on the blogs that are hosted there. Perfect setup for my use case.

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A month or so ago I was chatting with Rob and I can’t remember why we were talking about Bluesky but I decided to register an account in order to check how long it took to set up a domain name as a username since that’s something you can do on there. It took roughly 3 minutes total if you’re curious, and it was a very smooth process.

So I did that and that was it. My account is there and I still have no intention of using it to post content. But I’m now left with the question of what should I do with a profile on Bluesky. Part of me thinks I should treat it the same way I treat email and use it just as another way for people to get in touch. At the same time though, my email client is always open so monitoring it is easy while Bluesky definitely isn’t always open so I’d probably not even notice if someone were to get in touch with me there. And that kinda sucks. Or maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe email should be the way to get in touch with me and Bluesky can be treated as a second-class citizen and if you ping me there you just have to wait to eventually get a reply? Or maybe I should delete the whole thing and forget about it.

What do you think? Do you even care about these new social media platforms? Are you on Bluesky? Or Mastodon? Or Threads?

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Kindness is a type of behavior marked by acts of generosity, consideration, rendering assistance, or concern for others, without expecting praise or reward in return.

Most of the modern online world seems to be transactional in nature. Content is exchanged for likes, hearts, starts, retweets, and reposts. Time is invested to get followers, readers, and subscribers in return. The hope is to then transform those into revenue streams.

Page views are converted into analytical numbers and those are, in turn, used to sell advertisements to businesses. Not all the web is like this, but it damn sure feels like it.

For the past 13 years, I coded websites for a living. Usually, that means trading my time and skills in exchange for money. But for the past 13 years, I also traded my time and skills in exchange for absolutely nothing.

Kindness is the reason why I’m doing this. There’s no other reason. I don’t care about getting a reward. I care about showing people that in this stupid transactional world, we can still be kind to one another. We can still help someone, even if we’ll get nothing in return.

It’s easy to be a dick online. It’s easy to take people down, it’s easy to judge, it’s easy to throw shit around. But what’s the point? Why bother doing that? Why not invest that time and energy to do something positive? There’s already so much negativity going on, why not try to insert some positivity into the mix for a change?

I’m aware of how naïve all this might sound. I’m aware that me doing this won’t change the world. But seeing even one person 1% happier, makes it all worth it.

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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello web reader from our beautiful Pale Blue Dot. I’m Jatan Mehta, an independent space exploration writer. Independent means I don’t write for other media outlets primarily and instead publish and sustain my professional writing on my own website at jatan.space as a blog+newsletter. Majorly I write about lunar exploration because our Moon has immense intrinsic value, and is something we all share, see, and cherish in our skies, day or night.

I currently live in Bangalore, a city I like for many reasons and not just because it’s the space hub of India. You must try the ‘filter coffee’ and soft idlis if you come here. And maybe join me for a game of badminton.

If I wasn’t writing about space somehow, I’d still be writing because that’s who I am deep down. When I get the time, I share musings about the Internet, life, technology, writing, and more on my personal blog called Journal J. As part of it, I digitally dispatch a newsletter for friends as a calmer way to stay in touch against the slurp—and now slop—of social media.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I started blogging in 2011, when I was 17. I had a desire to share the excitement of physics and space with people beyond my Facebook connections. That’s when I came across Blogger and was utterly fascinated by the idea that anyone can have a website to publish articles on the Internet through! No coding, technical chops, or money required. And I loved the power of linked writing.

Fast forward past my graduation and free blogging platform swaps along the way, I got my first job thanks to my blog. Subsequently I decided that I want to write about space full-time instead of pursuing space research. My blog is called “Jatan’s Space” for long now because it conveys the topic and its independence in a nutshell.

I also always had an interest in no-code consumer technology. I loved exploring blogging platforms, reading services, operating systems, apps, and so on. I would sometimes write about them too, and that’s how I’ve always had a second blog in some form that’s not about space. Over the years, I started writing on there about anything else I felt like sharing, morphing it into Journal J.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I don’t need inspiration per se because I’m almost always inspired to learn and write about space. Here’s approximately what I do every week:

• Scan and read with judgement the more than 150 websites, blogs, newsletters, and other types of sources I’ve added to my feed reader, which I’ve meticulously organized using folders and Feedbin’s search filters. I grab excerpts and take notes along the way.
• Thoroughly read the most notable things from my feed reader and elsewhere on my Kindle (sent using KTool). Take notes again.
• Use Kagi not just for fact checking and research but also to search conversations within forums and social networks for when I need to gauge people’s reactions on a topic.
• Collect all thoughts in one place and order them using Workflowy
• With that context, write and edit either on Bear or my blog’s editor
• Publish to the World Wide Web

For my personal blog, I write and publish when I feel like, and can. Often I refine and post something I’ve previously shared with friends or taken notes on. It’s an easy way to blog. Other times I write from scratch to better understand a topic, and so I research along the way. And rarely, I write to respond to someone else’s blog post. I don’t like microblogging, and don’t like to post too casually, because it tends to be so terribly contextually deprived. And so often I’ll wait until I have at least a few paras to publish.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I think writing is an act of solitude. Anything that provides a queit space is good. I also need my laptop, and ideally will not write until I can rest it on something that’s not my lap. I cannot write on a phone. My thoughts feel handicapped there. I cannot write sanely in cafés and public spaces either. Having said that, I’ve written and published articles from airports, hospitals, and trains when needed—so long as I can hunt down that one spot.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

Both my blogs are running Ghost, hosted on the wonderful and affordable MagicPages service by Jannis. I love how Ghost elegantly handles running both a blog and a newsletter as an integrated service. I view email subscriptions as a delivery option for my posts for those who don’t use or prefer RSS. And if you’re in any other field than blogging or related tech communities, practically everyone uses email and not RSS. Ghost will soon offer the Fediverse as another post delivery option, and I’m eager to see how that might help independent writers like myself.

I use the default Source theme, which I’ve personalized a bit to show nothing but a list of posts and a menu instead of wasting my time customizing site layouts and whatnot. A clean, legible reading experience doesn’t require a lot by definition. And it’s the words that matter at last. Which is also why I’m so grateful to have ditched the cruft that is WordPress and Gutenberg.

Blogging platforms I’ve used over the years: Blogger → WordPress → Medium → WordPress → Substack → Ghost

My domain jatan.space is from BigRock because it’s cheap, easy to use, and has been extremely reliable for me for years.

I use Micro.blog to auto-share my new blog posts to multiple social networks and platforms. And so, thanks to Manton, I don’t need to waste time or efforts on social media while maintaining some presence for possible discovery by potential readers.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’ll quote what Jim Nielsen said when he was your guest at People and Blogs:

The current state of my blog is a result of me experiencing the difficulties of where it was previously. […] The best part of blogging is what you discover and learn experientially along the way. I wouldn’t want to rob myself of that.

I would’ve loved to not have wasted years customizing virtually every aspect of my blogs and rethinking the various categorizations but it’s how I realized none of that matters.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’m going to say something potentially controversial here.

Each blog’s hosting currently costs me $60/year on MagicPages (referral link, if you’re inclined to go Ghost for cheap). And $10/month extra for sending emails to the large subscriber base of my space blog. My domain costs me $25/year. All the other tools I mentioned previously cumulatively cost me in the range of $20/month.

If people are not able to (fairly) monetize their freely readable blogs, then especially those like my space one crafted out of both passion & profession simply cannot exist. My space blog is community-supported through organization sponsors and individual readers, which I accept with no ads and under a strict, public Editorial Independence Policy. I think blogs are a powerful, resilient way to do independent journalism, which we direly need more of in today’s world. Denying their monetization means denying such possibilities.

Sure, you could argue I wasn’t talking about a purely “personal blog” there. But if blogs reflect your identity or parts of it, and space is an integral part of mine, is that not personal enough?

In any case, even when people say they don’t monetize their non-professional blogs and appreciate others not doing it, the earnings to cover its costs are still being offloaded somewhere. It could be their day jobs, family wealth, savings or stocks, technical chops, or whatever else. So I consider those claiming and evangelizing an ethical position against fair monetization of blogs to hold a privileged position.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• Root Privileges, where Mukunth surfaces the intersection of science, science communications, journalism, and civic duty in a blunt manner—and that’s how we need it.
• Annie Mueller, who writes poignantly about parts of our emotional being.
• Derek Kedziora, because he thinks differently.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

Thank you, Manu, for creating and running People and Blogs. I think it’s a great way to meet blogs over coffee and discover their people.

Thank you also for having me here. I sincerely appreciate this, and my connection to you. Despite blogging being so integral to my life, I’ve often felt alienated by people in “blogging communities” because of my choice to use certain tools or services they varyingly keep disapproving of for ideological reasons. Never mind that I chose what I did because I needed something less technical that just works and that I have modest budgets, constrained further by purchasing power parity. The reason I call this out is to request one thing of all the people who want more people to blog:

Don’t associate people with their tools and platforms unless they own it. Be more inquisitive and empathetic about where people are coming from. Rant less, help more. Most of all, encourage people not to start a blog but to write longform with links. Having a blog is an outcome, not a goal.

This was the 70th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Jatan. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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I have a growing hatred for AI-generated images in blogs. It makes me wonder if the text in the blog posts is AI-generated to some extent. It’s always disappointing seeing these images in blogs run by individuals. I expect this from corporate blogs but not indie blogs.

I’ll go one step further Nelson, I have a growing hatred towards pointless images in blog posts in general, I don’t even care if they’re AI-generated or not. If they’re there as part of the content then by all means use them but if you’re just adding a stock image from unsplash to make the page “feel” more interesting then you’re just part of the broader problem that’s plaguing the web.

Put some effort into making your page lean and only serve me what’s necessary. And no, your 2MB stock image doesn’t fit that description.

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Hosting, domain, and mail

All my domain names are currently managed by Hover. They’re not the cheapest but I like that they don’t try to upsell crap at every possibility and the UI of the admin interface is nice. At first, my site was hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS but after a few years I moved over to Hetzner. Up until a few weeks ago it was hosted in a US datacenter but I moved it back to Europe and it’s now sitting in a datacenter in Germany. It’s also the first time I’m using an ARM-based VPS and so far everything is working perfectly. If you care about specs the VPS has 2 VCPU, 4GB of RAM, 40GB of SSD space, and 20TB of bandwidth. Costs me around 4€/month.

I am not a sysadmin, I don’t enjoy spending time configuring servers so all my VPS are managed using Runcloud. I currently have 15 servers in my admin interface and I run them for myself, for friends, and for clients. Runcloud costs me 190$/year.

My email is hosted using what’s now Google Workspace, but I started using it when it was called GSuite. I have one email account there with a bunch of aliases set up. I pay 11.50€/month and the reason why I upgraded to the Business Standard plan is because of the 2TB of Google Drive space since I can use it to backup my site automatically thanks to the backup feature that’s built into Runcloud.

The CMS

As I wrote many, many times before, this site runs on the Kirby file-based cms. Currently running on v4.5.0 (on an NGINX server running PHP 8.3) I think I started I believe on v2 but I could be wrong. I started my career on WordPress but at some point I switched over to Kirby because it’s a much better tool for the type of work I do and never looked back.

I designed and coded the site myself and the current version is honestly not much different from the one that was online in 2018. Over the years I made small changes here and there to accommodate a growing archive and subsequently to have a place for the People and Blogs series but other than that things have remained stable and I don’t plan to make changes anytime soon.

I still love the structure, still love the design. I do want to rewrite my entire CSS though because the current version was written using SASS and I plan to go back to native CSS but that’s a task for 2025 me.

How I write my content

I still write all my posts using iA Writer both on Mac and on iPhone. I never considered looking for a different tool in all these years. Still does everything I need and I still love the minimal interface. I don’t do revisions, I don’t do drafts or any of that stuff. I am not a serious writer, I don’t really care about creating good pieces of literature. My blog is for myself, I’m fine pushing out posts with typos and broken English because that’s who I am.

How about AI?

Generative AI tools can go to hell.

How I decide what to write about

My blog doesn’t have a theme and it’s by design. I write about the things I find interesting and that’s usually the intersection between web, tech, and people. But I also sometimes post a random haiku or a photo of my dog. Sometimes I also use the blog to do quick therapy sessions when I’m not in a healthy mental space—happens a lot lately—and it’s been great for that.

I do have a list of blog post ideas that I almost never use. Every now and again I add something in there and then I forget about it because that’s how I roll. Usually, a blog post is born because I’m either talking with someone about something or I read something online and I think I have something to say on that particular subject and in that case I open iA Writer, I write it down and then I publish it.

There’s not much planning around my writing, I write when I feel like doing it and I want it to stay like that.

Connections with the fediverse and social

This blog is designed to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to integrating with the social web. If you look at the source you’ll see that I have almost no meta tags. I have a title and a meta description and that’s about it. I also blocked all incoming Mastodon requests to my server because their implementation of link previews is so stupid that deserves to be blocked. And there’s nothing to be fetched here anyway since my posts don’t have a social media sharing image or other meta information.

I have multiple RSS feeds available and I usually send out my posts via email to the people who enjoy consuming content that way. That’s more than enough I’d say. I don’t automatically post links to my content anywhere and the more I follow the social media landscape the more I’m convinced I’m blessed to be someone who doesn’t give a shit about all that crap.

Closing thoughts

That should cover basically all there is to say about my site and the way I run it. If for some reason you still have questions feel free to ping me via email at hello@manuelmoreale.com and I’ll be more than happy to answer whatever question you have.

Happy holidays 🎄

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hey, I'm Zinzy! In early August, Manuel invited me to be a guest in his wonderful People & Blogs series. I'm writing this and it's late October now; here I am.

In many ways, I'm a very Dutch person: I like cheese, flowers, milk, and not standing out. I am also Afropean, gay, non-binary, and neurodivergent, which means there's always something about me that stands out. This is why I'm blessed to call Amsterdam home, where everybody is a little different all the time.

I love puzzles, I live with unrelenting curiosity, and I like helping people find what they need. I suppose this is why, despite academic adventures in linguistics and theology, I eventually became a designer by day, and a community builder by chance. One of my favorite projects right now is All Saints Amsterdam, a radically inclusive and very young Episcopal church.

First and foremost, though, somewhere, I'm still the kid who taught herself to build websites at age 11. I am an advocate for an Internet that is open, independent, transparent, cozy, and small.

What's the story behind your blog?

I like to think of the personal website as one of the corner stones of the Internet. I treat them as rooms, as homes that I get to enter, motherfucking websites that can hopefully stand the test of time, unlike so much of what we see on the Internet today. In many shapes and forms, my personal website has always attempted to fulfill these roles.

Zinzy.website is an all-in-one place, your one-stop shop for learning about me on the Internet. I've tried, in the past, to maintain a personal website and a professional one, but I've always experienced this setup as disingenuous. (This is not to say that you, reader, are disingenuous for having different websites for different parts of your life.) I suppose it stems from my continued nostalgia for a time on the Internet when the personal was professional, and the professional personal.

I taught myself to build websites in the mid 90s. Seeing things appear on a screen felt like looking through a mirror at my hand drawing an object. I could not have been more fascinated. Soon, it became a way to experiment with the art of self-publication. It helped me explore the Internet, interact with others, and look far and wide beyond my little bedroom at home.

As a teenager, I made the first of what I'd consider to be a blog: a collection of dated posts the visualization of which required no manual alteration to be refreshed beyond publishing a post. My blog has known many names in the past, most of which I've forgotten. The parts of it I do remember are archived on zinzy.website/museum, my favorite still being DoYouLikeMyTightSweater.com.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Simone Silvestroni in his own People & Blogs interview summed up quite nicely what happens on my website: "She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn't enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website."

My website is at the mercy of constant pruning, reshaping, reimagining. On our own websites, we have full control over what our words look like; form and content are in perpetual interplay. On zinzy.website, I tell stories with words as much as I do without them. I've tried maintaining a changelog of what I modify on the website, but it was a ridiculous effort. Whenever I feel the itch, I'll get started on a redesign that's usually finished within an hour or two.

I collect fleeting thoughts and oneliners with whatever's ubiquitous, on a sheet of toilet paper if I must. When I feel the itch to turn it into something, I sit down to hover around a first paragraph for a while until I find myself asking: "what am I trying to say here?" Some of the long-form content that I write brushes up against the lyrical essay, so tone and cadence are what I initially focus on. My writing starts because I think something sounds good, and then I spend the rest of the process trying to figure out why.

The majority of my writing sits in the category slices of life: an ode to the mundane ongoingness of my time in the world. It may be an experience I had, something I didn't understand, something that irked me, media I consumed, something I value, an idea I have, what I'm up to now. It's what I like to see on personal sites, and it's my rejection of the design industry's unwritten rule that every designer should try to be a thought leader. I'm not just a designer, and my website reflects that.

One of the reasons it took me three months (sorry Manuel!) to answer a simple set of questions is that I returned from a transformative trip and found myself rethinking what I was actually doing with my life, which is to say what I was doing with my website. Lately, I've been struggling even more with performativity and self-presentational techniques common amongst IT professionals. Turning my front page into a photo blog has helped me return to the small and simple.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I web master best in public togetherness that honors how hell is other people. I love a good coffee place: me, a screen, and people around me who leave me alone. Noise-cancelling headphones with an endless Spotify loop of those ridiculous lo-fi instrumental beats that underscore the Plan with Me garbage I watch on YouTube. Website tinkering usually happens on Saturday morning at our local Coffee Company.

My writing environment depends on the content I'm writing. Since it usually accompanies a certain level of unrest, I do it wherever I find myself: at work during my lunch break, at home in the kitchen, on the tram. Early-stage writing happens anywhere, editing always happens in the same place.

When I feel a piece is almost there, I move to Visual Studio Code and fire up my localhost, so that I can see what it looks like in the browser. I often run my localhost over my IP address so that I can see it on my smartphone as well. To iron out any typos or mistakes, I listen to a blog post with Speechify (referral link), my text-to-speech software of choice. I think the most profound part of my writing happens when I look at it in the browser.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I build my website with Hugo, it lives in Github, and is served through Netlify. My domains have been with bHosted, a tiny Dutch company, since the early 2000s.

On touch devices, I like Working Copy, and on my machines I use Visual Studio Code. It's important to me that what I put on the Internet begins on my website, and because the Micropub standard and I aren't the best of friends, I do enjoy the iOS shortcuts that let me post notes and photos to my website in just a few seconds.

I use CSS framework Tailwind for styling purposes; not because my website needs it, but because it helps me collaborate with engineers on my team. I can't believe we ever wrote vanilla CSS.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I'll answer this by telling you about my most important Internet-related values and how I acquired them.

• Tools do not matter: still disgruntled over all the writing I lost before I began properly backing things up in 2005, I believe strongly in the value of a simple computer folder with a set of text files. If I were to start today, I'd move heaven and earth to maintain that folder as my single source of truth.
• Own your data: aside from the data we owned but lost, there's the data we never really owned to begin with. The easier it is to transport data from one portal to the other, the more relevant the archive we build over time. If I were to start today, I'd do my best to publish things on my website, and (manually) syndicate to Hyves, MySpace, Facebook, Google Plus, Instagram, TikTok, or whatever platform was there to make us feel suboptimal about our choices.
• To be yourself is all that you can do: I can't verbalize the cringe I feel at all the pretentious paths down which I walked in my time on the Internet. That time I called myself a "digital story architect" is but an example. If I were to start today, I'd attempt to hold myself to a much more authentic standard.
• No numbers: At work, I'm the founder of the Data Ninjas, a club promoting data-driven product development. On my website, I reject metrics as much as possible. I don't employ cookies, display likes, or engagement metrics of any nature. I don't know you've been on my website unless you tell me.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I had to look up the one expense my website requires: a domain at 40 euros per year. I don't monetize my website, even though there's a "buy me coffee" link hidden on some page somewhere. The websites I most like to visit are personal websites created for the sheer gratification of having brought something personal to the Internet. The moment a personal website turns into a fulltime job, I've found I tend to lose the reason for coming there. I don't spend money on anybody else's blog, but I've subscribed to a handful of Patreon tiers of people who are, for example, independent researchers who happen to also have a website. Andy Matuschak is a good example of this.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I'm a visual thinker (my partner calls me a super recognizer), and websites are best in their natural state where I can see them for what they are. I can't even find enjoyment in using an RSS reader, so I just have a long list of websites I like on my Bookmarks page. I don't really care if you published a new post. Sometimes I just want to be around you for a bit. Top of my head, three of my favorites include eatock.com, matthewsmith.website, and patrickrhone.net for the way they tell me about their makers, and the surprises I encounter there.

One thing that makes me not like other girls is that I have a bad day if the Wayback Machine is down. Sure, it's awesome that Kottke is still around making "fine hypertext products since 1998", but remember those blue lines from 2013?! And remember that very naughty 1095-day photo project that Naughty James completed in 2006? Whatever happened to that guy?! And what about Heather Champ's blog, with those Polaroids that were the last known to man at the time? When I think of it, the fact that some genius thought to archive the internet as early as he did, I'm overcome with gratitude and humility.

Okay, so the previous paragraph made me so nostalgic that "who do you think I should be interviewing next" only elicits a disappointing response. I miss Aaron Swarts. I want to know what he'd think about the Internet today, what he'd be writing about, what his website would look like. (Isn't is sad that the link under his name doesn't even have https yet? Where does time go?) I miss Dooce and the candor, wit, and vulnerability with which she welcomed the Internet. I struggle with how I learned so much about her, and how I'll still never know what she was thinking and feeling in her last moments in the world.

On a happier note, I want to hear from Patrick Rhone, Derek Powazek, from Maggie Mason. The bloggers from before responsiveness. People who were publishing slices of their lives so that we can publish slices of our lives. What's it like to still have a personal website today? Do you miss the good old days? How has your website changed over time? How has the Internet changed for you?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

To everyone taking it upon themselves to find ways, continuously, to share parts of who they actually are on the Internet for everyone to see, unfiltered: thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I feel this thing of ours is a rare dialect at risk of extinction.

To everyone not reading this because they're on some street corner balancing their phone on a bench so they can record a poorly performed dance for TikTok: no.

This was the 69th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Zinzy. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Colin Walker (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Zenpen — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

One thing I became aware of recently is that I’m quite incapable of asking others for pretty much anything important or consequential. I’m incapable of asking for favours when it comes to important things, I’m incapable of asking for money, and I’m especially incapable of asking for help, even if I feel that some help might be needed. And this is not a pride thing mind you. It’s not because I think I don’t need help and I can do everything by myself. The opposite is true actually. I do like a good challenge but I also don’t really have a high opinion of myself and more often than not I find myself thinking that I’m not the best person for the job at hand.

But that’s not the main reason why I’m incapable of asking for help. What’s stopping me is usually an irrational fear of disappointing others. And I say irrational because if I stop and think about it I understand that at a conceptual level, there’s nothing wrong in asking for help and I know that people around me would probably be happy to help out. But a part of me refuses to do it for some reason. And it’s been like that since I can remember.

Asking in general is something I struggle with. Almost exactly a year ago I came up with the idea of the one a month club and to this day I sometimes still struggle to accept that it’s there and people donate. And what’s funny is that when the roles are reversed I jump at every possible opportunity to help others even if helping can become a burden for me. I just refuse to pass on the opportunity to help another human being if can be helpful in some way.

And no, this is not some weird Christian mindset, I’m not trying to earn a spot in paradise, I’m not baptised, I couldn’t care less about that stuff. I just think that if we’re not helping each other out when we can, then what even is the point of living on this wet rock, floating in space?

I know, my mind is weird. Maybe all minds are. Who knows. Anyway, another therapy session done, time to get back to work!

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Also, social media updates! I joined Bluesky…kinda. I created a profile for People and Blogs and also created a starter pack with all the P&B guests I managed to find on the platform. I don’t plan to be very active there and I think it’s just going to be another way for me to inform people about the new interviews. It costs me nothing and if I can drive more people towards the interviews and that can in turn result in more traffic to other people’s blogs that’s great because it’s the entire point of the series. Have a great Sunday everyone!

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

Hello, I'm Chris DeLuca. I was raised in northern New Jersey in the United States, and now live in New York City. I'm a software developer, and regularly perform improv comedy.

Growing up, I wanted to be a comedy writer. I wasn't the funniest kid in my friend group, but when I was funny, it was elating, like I had cracked a code to connecting with others. I was hungry for it, desperate, even. I loved being creative with my friends, so it seemed like an ideal life to be funny and creative with other people. However, I didn't know anything about the entertainment industry or anyone who worked in it, so my plans on entering it were vague at best.

I ended up attending Hofstra University, majoring in creative writing, and doing a lot of sketch comedy, short films, and a comedic play outside of academics.

What's the story behind your blog?

I was diagnosed with Leukemia, a chronic type of cancer of the blood, in 2009, not long after I graduated college. The economy had crashed. I was tutoring kids at my local community college, and reading scripts for a relatively small film company, in an attempt at starting my career and getting out of my parent's basement.

Cancer changed all that.

I went through drugs, chemo, and a stem cell transplant, and then a complicated recovery that kept me highly immunosuppressed for about half a decade. The situation was so dire at one point, that after I surprisingly made it through, my doctors published a paper about it.

I have a large extended family and circle of friends, so while I was going through treatments I got tired of re-explaining the latest medical updates to everyone I knew. I thought, why not start a blog, and then I won't have to repeat myself so much. Turns out, readership was sporadic at best, and I ended up having to say the same information the same amount of times. However, I found the process of writing about my situation therapeutic, even if it was a sanitized account, and designed to make the reader feel better.

The first iteration of my blog was hosted on Wordpress, and I almost exclusively wrote about my Leukemia experiences. As my health improved, I started writing about other things—games, creative projects, the blight of social media. Once I started a career writing software for the web, a lot of my posts became technical explainers.

I migrated to Github pages and Jekyll probably around 2012, and switched domain names from the free Wordpress subdomain I had to bronzehedwick.com, which was my handle most places online. My post frequency slid down over the years, but never went away. I migrated to a self hosted Hugo site around 2014, transitioning domain names again to what I have now, wanting something that used my real name instead of a handle.

After backing Manton's micro.blog project on Kickstarter, and eventually integrating with micro.blog's social feed as an independent blog, my post frequency shot up, largely because of microblogging. It's no real surprise—it's less time consuming to write short posts than long ones, but I started writing longer posts more frequently as well; turns out, when you write more, you write more.

Last year, I migrated my blog to micro.blog hosting. The migration was somewhat painful, as the auto import didn't generate redirects from my old URL scheme to the micro.blog ones as advertised, so I had to manually create them for every page. Long and tedious, but it was a nice opportunity to review and revisit old posts. Other than that, I have been very happy with micro.blog.

I decided to move at first because I wanted a posting interface I could easily access on my phone, and I wanted to post more photos, something that would end up being less economical on a small VPS. I ended up really enjoying the cross posting functionality. The newsletter feature is also a great feature for me; several people only experience my blog that way.

I post a lot more omnivorously now, with life updates, observations, jokes, personal essays, fiction, reviews, sketches, and whatever else all thrown together. It's wild and usually embarrassing to go back and read older posts, and I'm often tempted to delete them. I largely don't, however, since while I wouldn't write like that now, or even stand by some ideas I had back then, it was all things I did say, and all part of me getting here. Deleting feels like hiding, presenting a myth of arriving at my current state without so much as a stumble.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

My posts always follow my interests, which shift as time passes. I take a highly "vibes" based approach to ideas. As I'm observing the world or introspecting, an idea might come, and I'll hold it in my mind for a bit. If, after turning it over a while, it still feels like something I want to put my name on publicly, I'll write it. If it's a short post, I'll usually use my phone to post it right then. If it's a longer idea, I'll add it to my to do list of potential blog ideas.

For longer posts, I'll spend time, usually in the evenings, alone writing on my laptop. They take two or three sessions to complete, slowed down by perfectionism and editing while I'm writing. I'm working on that, and over time I have thankfully reduced their hold on me.

With more emotional, personal pieces, I like to write by hand in a notebook. This takes a lot longer overall, since I need to first write it, then type it up, but the feel of the work is changed. The flow of writing with a pen is so much different than a keyboard, and can create a different feeling project. Sometimes, I need to be away from the screen, especially when feeling something out. When typing up the piece, I inevitably make tweaks and edits, and usually do another pass or two, sometimes dropping and rewriting whole sections, until the clay feels molded. Or, at least molded enough. I've been practicing publishing things before I feel they're ready, because I'm never satisfied in the moment of creation.

Sometimes, when I go back and read my old work, I feel like I nailed it.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

If it's not a short post, I need at least an hour to write in solitude. I'm trying to practice writing with less time, but I really need to be alone to properly focus. I live with roommates and in one of the world's busier cities, so that's not always easy. I find it takes some emotional effort to carve out time to write, time I could be spending with others, doing something active, being out in it, man. It's hard, but I feel I need to write, and if I don't for too long, it's like a tear in my brain, nagging me until I express myself on the page.

I have found physical space is important. For me, it goes back to solitude, but also comfort and ideally boring. If I'm not comfortable, I'll invent excuses to do anything else pretty quickly. These days, I mostly write from my IKEA Poang chair, and find it alarmingly comfortable. If I'm this at ease, how will I find an excuse not to write? I guess I'll just have to, then.

A more recent discovery is a boring space works well for me. Or rather, a familiar one, so that it's nuances are not distracting. Even being outside on a beautiful day, while it sounds idyllic, can be so wonderful that I don't want to bend my hand to the labor of writing. The easiest space for that for me is my bedroom, where I have the chair, although I've been productive in other, similar spaces.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I host my blog on micro.blog, which runs on Hugo under the hood. My blog was previously on Hugo, so a good amount of the migration was pretty simple. I host my domain on Namecheap, where I buy all my domains. I started out with a predefined theme from micro.blog, after having written my own for my previous, self hosted iteration, and have tweaked the templates and stylesheet to the point where it has my own personality now.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

This is the question I asked myself last year before I migrated to micro.blog hosting, prompting that decision; I was tired of doing sysadmin work for not as many features, so the move was a no-brainer.

If I had to do everything over, I would start with my name as my domain name, instead of using a hosts's subdomain or handle. I would love to have thought of a quippy or interesting name for the blog itself, outside of my name, but that never happened, so my name is a strong second place.

If at all possible, I would have loved to have gotten a dot com or dot net domain, since those are regulated better than the privately owned dot me that I have. The price has crept up over time, so I really don't love that. That being said, I haven't experienced a true price spike, so I'm hoping that continues.

From a content perspective, I would be less precious, and post more.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I pay $10 per month for premium micro.blog hosting. I pay about $20 per year for my domain name.

I thought about monetizing my blog years ago, but never wanted it to feel like a job. If I were asking for money, I'd feel obligated to deliver something specific and on a schedule. I also can't imagine I'd generate much revenue from my personal blog, so the embarrassment of asking and the pressure to deliver never felt worth it to me.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

• dinewell.substack.com
• jvns.ca
• rousette.org.uk
• kottke.org
• whatever.scalzi.com
• web3isgoinggreat.com/
• fluxblog.org

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

I do improv in New York City with the Cat's Cradle ensemble. If you'd like to see us, we post our upcoming shows to catscradleimprov.com. No show is the same, and everyone laughs a lot, so we must be doing something right.

There's some longer term writing projects I'm excited about, but are too embryonic to share yet. Years ago, my friend Shannon staged several live performances of the infamous My Immortal fan fiction, which I was a part of. I have been doing some work around that, so watch my blog for updates.

Thanks!

This was the 68th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Chris. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

Awesome supporters

You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.

Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Colin Walker (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — jsrn (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Rhodia Square — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Zenpen — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS)

Want to support P&B?

If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:

1. support on Ko-Fi;
2. post about it on your own blog and let your readers know about its existence;
3. email me comments and feedback on the series;
4. suggest a person to interview next. I'm especially interested in people and blogs outside the tech/web bubble.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

My site runs on a very basic Hetzner VPS that comes with some 20TB of bandwidth so the sudden spike in traffic didn’t bother me one bit. This site is also powered by a file-based CMS with a cache in front of it so serving content is not very demanding. The end result is that my server worked just fine, it didn’t cost me anything to get all that random extra traffic and things went back to normal. And that’s how things should be.

But this got me thinking about the concept of personal responsibilities when it comes to sharing content online. My site’s nowhere near big enough and I’m nowhere near famous enough to cause any issues to other sites when I link to them. But that’s not always the case. Some people are famous enough to potentially cause problems if they link to other sites. And those other sites might be hosted using services that offer a free limited plan but become incredibly expensive once you go over that threshold.

And so I’m wondering, if my site was big enough to cause problems, would then be my responsibility to be careful what I link to? Or should I just assume that other people out there know what they’re doing and I can keep linking without a second thought? My gut reaction tells me that it’s not really my responsibility to worry about the way other people run their sites but maybe I’m wrong and I should worry about that. I’d love to know what you think because this is one of those situations where I can see good arguments on both sides.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

¡Hola! I’m Erica, a multidisciplinary designer from Spain, currently based in Mataró, a city by the sea near Barcelona.

I like doing many different things. I've usually paid my bills working in visual design and marketing, but I always tend to gravitate towards illustration and comics.

Right now I'm mildly obsessed with photography and have been making a drawing a day for 7 months (and counting) illustrating my life's adventures.

Aside from making things, I also like listening to music, watching movies, reading, surrounding myself with beautiful objects, meeting people, cooking and eating, discovering interesting places around me... And of course, talking about all these things on my blog.

What's the story behind your blog?

When I was a teenager I got into punk-rock and alternative music. It was because I started posting on music forums that I met my friend Andrea. She was very active on the Internet and, inspired by her, I also started using platforms like LiveJournal, Fotolog, MySpace or Flickr.

In 2007, I started a blog on Blogger. On it, like on all those other platforms, I shared comics, photos, thoughts, and things I liked.

After a while of posting regularly, there always came a time when I felt the need to delete everything and start over. Sadly, I never saved my posts, so I'm grateful to Wayback Machine for letting me take a look at some of the things I wrote.

I also had a few collaborative blogs along the way, like Fresquito de cagar (Poop chills), where my friend José and I posted comic strips, Muertos de asco (Bored stiff), a webcomic series written by María Rubio and drawn by me, or Primera vez (First time), a collective project where we drew things we had never drawn before.

In 2015, I moved to a self-hosted website built using WordPress. My website has gone through many versions, with and without a blog. For years, I used my website as a portfolio and Instagram as a substitute for a blog. Then, in 2022, I felt like I needed a place outside of social media where all my work, drawings, photos, and writing could co-exist, so I added a blog again and have been posting ever since.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

I don't have a set frequency. Sometimes I post three days in a row, sometimes I go quiet for weeks. I usually get the urge to write when I have new projects to share, when I've visited somewhere interesting, or when I've been trying something new with photography.

I start my drafts in Obsidian, the app I use for all my writing. I try to make my texts as spontaneous as possible (which means there are sometimes typos). In the past, some versions of my blog were in English or bilingual, but now I write mostly in Spanish, because I feel like I edit myself too much in English. Plus, I'm funnier in Spanish (or so I'd like to think).

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I prefer to write in a quiet, calm space, so I usually write from home. If inspiration strikes I don't mind writing a draft on my phone or scribbling down some notes in the corner of a notebook, but I always write the final version on my laptop, which I rarely take out of the house.

Drawing is different though. I carry my notebooks and iPad everywhere, I like to draw in cafes and on trains, and I often listen to music or talk to friends while I draw.

But for sure, the right environment definitely does it for me. When I force myself to write or draw in a place where I don't feel comfortable, I often don't like the end result.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

My website is built on Wordpress.org, hosted by Cdmon and designed with Semplice.

Semplice is a visual and highly customizable theme that allowed me to forget about coding to make my website look the way I wanted. It is meant to be used with portfolios, so the default blog is a bit simple but fits most of my blogging needs.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

For years I was obsessed with having the right design for my blog, using the right platform, publishing the right content. What I was doing never fit with the idea I had in my head or what other people were doing.

It took me many years to realize that the only thing that matters is accepting who you are and being consistent. So I guess if I were to start a blog now, I would try to be kinder to myself.

Wordpress frustrates me sometimes, but I don't want to go through another redesign right now. However, if I were to build my website now, I would probably go with a static site generator.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what's your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I switched to self-hosting through Promsite, a Cdmon program that sponsors hosting for creatives. I've been part of this program since 2012, so I don't pay anything for hosting. I had to buy a license to use Semplice (about 150€) and I pay about 20€ a year for the domain.

Aside from the occasional donation to Ko-Fi, I don't make any revenue from my blog, but I think it's only natural to try to make a living doing something you're passionate about.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

I like to collect interesting blogs and websites in the Internet friends section on my website.

I love blogs that feel like you're reading someone else's diary, so I'm always excited when Javier and Muan post a new entry. I also enjoy reading Christoph's and Anh’s monthly posts.

And because newsletters are the new blogs of these days, some of my favorite newsletters include my friend Andrea's What I learnt from teenage films, Nazaret Escobedo's autobiographical writings on Fetén, Kristoffer’s Naive weekly, which is part postcard, part ode to the odd and poetic internet, and Abel Cuevas' El Drugstore, a newsletter about pop culture and design, mixed with autobiographical anecdotes.

I'd love to hear what each of them has to say.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

As much as I love the internet, I'm all about physical objects. I have a lot of records, books, comics, zines, clothes and designer objects. I also collect ephemera and vintage toys.

I love doing swaps and seeing other people’s collections. Maybe you can share your collection with me if you have one?

Beside my website I'm on many social networks, so don't be a stranger :)

This was the 67th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Erica. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Subscribers will also get access to full-text RSS feeds

Hell yeah, full RSS feeds are back. That said though, one thing is a big no-no:

You can now pay to get fewer ads

The correct amount of ads for a publication that’s directly supported is zero. That’s the amount we should get. I don’t care about the rationale behind it. I’m giving you money, you decided how much money I should be giving you for your product, you don’t get to double dip and also sell my data to your advertisers and earn more on the side. I’ll say it again: the correct amount of ads, in this case, is zero. Get your shit together verge people.

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The first reason is that it’s incredibly easy to get started on Substack and also very easy to get going but most non-tech savvy people don’t realise that by not owning their domain name they don’t really own anything. If you run your publication on Substack using a subdomain, Substack owns those URLs, not you. If tomorrow they have a change of hearts and they decide to pivot from being a blog platform to selling human organs and you’re like “Well, fuck that” all the content you posted is stuck there. Sure you can grab the actual content and post it somewhere else but the original URLs are gone and, as we all know, “Cool URIs don't change”. So, if you really want to use Substack, please, I beg you, get your own domain name.

That’s reason number one. Reason number two is the business model. Substack makes money when you make money. That’s their entire business model. You use the platform for free but if you start a paid publication, they get a %. Sounds reasonable right? No, not really. The transaction itself is reasonable but the problem it creates is one of incentives. Substack has to convince you to start a paid publication. It has to push people towards paywalling as much content as possible because that’s how it makes money. And you might be thinking that it is a good thing, that we need more people to earn a living in this stupid “creators economy”. That’s false.

Let me rant for a second. I’m fucking tired of living in a society where everything is monetised, where nothing is safe from speculation, where every passion has to be turned into a business. “But why shouldn’t you turn your passion into a business?” you might ask. Because this endless pursuit of money is fucking up society. The incentives you set up, when you run a platform like Substack, matter a lot. It’s not an accident that, like Kevin said, after a while people on Substack start writing about Substack. Substack has no interest in promoting the people who write candidly about their inner struggles, their dreams and hopes, and their everyday lives. They have nothing to earn from that. They would, in fact, lose money if all of you out there started using the platform simply to share what you think, and what you’re going through, with no intention of ever turning it into a side hustle.

This is why Substack is constantly nudging you to subscribe and to give them your email address. It’s why they’re slowly trying to morph into this somewhat guarded garden where people on Substack are used to promote other people inside Substack. Some people think this is a good thing, using the network effect to help blogs grow. I’m not one of those people.

And the reason why I am not is because this is a VC-backed company. And they’re playing the traditional corporate game so they need to increase revenues over time. And there’s a cap on that because there’s a finite amount of people willing to pay for premium content. So at some point, they’ll be forced to start doing shitty things in order to extract more value. And it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when. The old advice is still true “If you’re not paying for a product, you’re the product”.

Maybe I’ll be proven wrong. Maybe Substack will keep growing and evolving into a beautiful digital space. As of right now, I seriously doubt it.

Oh, one final note. In his post, Jacobs quoted Fredrik deBoer who wrote:

At some point the “own your turf” people have to recognize that the vast majority just aren’t going to roll their own platforms and services, and to insist that they do is simply to insist that a lot of voices aren’t heard anywhere.

Kinda ironic coming from someone who has his own domain name that’s already powered by WordPress and yet is running a substack publication under a substack.com subdomain.

Anyway, if you care about the web, get off social media platforms and get yourself your own piece of digital real estate. And if you don’t know where or how to start, reach out. There are plenty of people out there—including myself—who are more than happy to help you.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my awesome supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs