~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Bookmarks - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-22T20:08:10.000Z

My copy of Stephen King’s On Writing has been sitting on the shelf for a while. Why I stopped reading the book is one of those things lost to time. But about two weeks ago, I went to my bookshelves and picked out the two books that I had started but not finished yet. I could finish these now, I thought. I remembered enjoying what I had read so far.

The blue ribbon bookmark built into the book, which I had placed at the page I had read last, let me pick up where I left off. At first I was a bit hesitant: would I remember where I left off? I quickly got back into the book, though; given the book is autobiographical in nature, I didn’t need to keep looking back to pick up the story.

I’m glad I started reading the book again. I am learning so much!

This week a friend said something that made me write down that bookmarks are a way of understanding where you are. A bookmark, sticking out at the top or the bottom of the book, lets you know how far along you are relative to all the pages. You have some bearing of your progress. But just as true is that bookmarks are a way of noting where you left off so that you can come back later.

There are topics I want to write about but for which I don’t yet have the words; I need to do more thinking, more reading, or have more conversations to help me figure out how to get started. It’s almost as if some of my ideas are mental bookmarks. When I come back to an idea, I can think oh, yes, this really interests me! and get back to thinking. Maybe there is no change and I leave the bookmark where it is. Or maybe the bookmark leads me to a story for which I am now ready.

Icebreakers - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-22T19:55:52.000Z

This evening I hosted an online event about writing and writing on the web. “Writing” is a broad topic, so I wanted a way to help get the discussion going. A few weeks ago, I tried an ice breaker question in an event which went well, so I decided I’d try one again this evening.

At first, I wasn’t sure what question I wanted to ask, but I had a few criteria in mind. I wanted a question that any participant could answer. To me, this meant the question had to be resonant to the audience (writers), approachable, and not too daunting.

For this event, I didn’t want to have a schedule – that would be too structured. I didn’t think we would need a schedule, ether: writing, as I mentioned earlier, is such a broad topic. I was confident there would be things to talk about. However, moving from the event introduction into the first topic of discussion without an agenda can be tricky (and for long running events may encourage the same few people who are more confident to speak first).

I came up with the icebreaker question “What do you like to write about?” After introducing the event, I asked the question. I didn’t ask anyone in particular to answer because I think a key part of an event on writing – especially online – is for people to talk when they feel comfortable. A few people answered, which both got the discussion going and allowed us all to learn a bit about each other.

Then the thing happened that I was secretly hoping would happen: the discussion would naturally flow from there. And it did. In the following 90 minutes, we covered many topics, from writing as art to the use of emojis in writing to many more topics.

I am hoping to do another writing event in December. If you'd like to join, let me know and I can email you when the next event is scheduled! My email is readers [at] jamesg [dot] blog.

Alexandra Wolfe - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-21T12:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca.

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

I’m a viviparous, mammalian, carbon-based biped — a veritable fossil from a bygone age sometimes referred to as the Good Old Days. Though, to be honest, that’s debatable to the nth degree. I was born in Germany to British parents and moved across the planet every 2-3 years, all of which seemed very natural to me at the time. Apart from studying for 3 degrees (I never finished any of them) I did several years in the military ostensibly as an air traffic controller. I then somehow stumbled from there into the print & publishing trade and made a comfortable living working on books and magazines. I even rubbed shoulders with a few names over the years, which in and of itself, was pleasantly entertaining.

Being in the publishing trade allowed me to indulge in a number of my fav hobbies, including publishing a couple of scifi ezines over the years, run a Star Trek club, hang out at several scifi and comic cons, and meet the stars and writers of many of my fav scifi shows.

I still have the photographic evidence to prove it.

What's the story behind your blog?

I didn’t so much as decide to blog as stumble into it, like many back in the days of LiveJournal and MySpace, we all just followed the crowd. It then seemed logical (at the time) to upgrade from a MySpace account to bumbling around with HTML creating a static website that was then quickly superseded by me creating an official ‘Blog’. At that point I was using the then new Wordpress software. It was, for me at least, revolutionary. Suddenly, everyone was blogging about everything.

It’s at that point I think I bought my first domain name: wrywriter and used the dot com version till right up till a few years ago when I added the dot ca version and, sadly, let the dot com version lapse. Though now, I wish I had kept it.

Now, I still have the name, but have moved away from Wordpress and blog ‘lightly’ using Bear Blog and Micro Blog to scribble and share my thoughts on. Clean, small, simple and more focused on the actual writing and less on the tweaking and tinkering. Both platforms suit my current needs.

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

I’m not sure I have a process per se. I don’t plan posts, and don’t jot down ideas. I’m more of a pantster, I stare at the blinking cursor only when I feel like I have something to say. Whether that be some random thought I had over breakfast, a news item I want to respond to, or a response to someone else’s post. I don’t do research, or make drafts, or have endless notebooks full of ideas. Unless we’re talking about short stories or ideas for novels.

Blogging, for me, is more about spontaneity.

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

I would have to say that physical space can and probably does influence how anyone writes. And that we all have our own particular quirks and eccentricities when it comes to our writing environment. I like mine to be quiet, clean, and minimal. There are a few toys I have at hand I play with, but other than that, it’s me and the keyboard, and a large screen.

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

You’re asking a dinosaur who somehow lived long enough to stumble into a Jetson’s future what my Tech Stack is? Excuse me while I consult someone smarter than I am about what a tech stake might look like.

Oh, you mean where did I buy my domain name and that sort of thing? I want to say Porkbun because I just love saying Porkbun. But no such luck, I sourced my domains here, in Canada, with WHC.ca and, at one time I had hosting with them, that is, till they kept putting their prices up. I also got very disillusioned by Wordpress so moved full time to Bear Blog and Micro Blog.

I use Bear for more long form rambling posts and post my daily thoughts over on m.b. which is more suited to sharing said drivel on social media.

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

I find this a bit of an odd question, my experience is based on what I went through, that ‘living’ experience of places and spaces that no longer exist, so of course, in the here and now, it would all be different. I would probably start off with a simple blog on Bear or the Pika platform and skip the likes of Blogger and Wordpress altogether.

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 web might be obsessed with money, but I’d say most bloggers are not. I’m not interested in monetising my blog, nor am I interested in reading blogs that are focused on making money. I avoid them like the plague. If someone quietly, and respectfully asks me to support their writing, however, with a discrete ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button, then I’m almost always happy to make a donation.

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 great blogs about at the moment, but some of my current fav reads are:

David at www.crossingthethreshold.net
Sylvia at sylvia.buzz
David at forkingmad.blog
Kimberly at kimberlykg.com
Robert at robertbirming.com
Annie at anniemueller.com

I would humbly suggest you ask David Johnson of Crossing The Threshold for an interview. David lives in Hawaii and always has some thoughtful posts to read on his blog.

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

There are many things I’m always working on when it comes to writing projects. I do love to scribble. You can find more over on Alexandra Wolfe (alexandrawolfe.ca) and read my daily posts over on the Wry Writer (wrywriter.ca).

For those of you out there who love reading fantasy, I stumbled upon a great series by Robert Jackson Bennet starting with, The Tainted Cup and followed by A Drop Of Corruption. I sincerely hope there’s more in the series.

Some fun websites people might like to check out:

My life in Weeks weeks.ginatrapani.org
Notebook of Ghosts notebookofghosts.com
Shady Characters shadycharacters.co.uk

And finally, I would like to extend a big thank you to Robert Birming for suggesting me to join in this amazing series, People & Blogs, and an even bigger thank you to you, Manu, for asking me to take part. I feel honoured to be among such an esteemed alumni.

Much love,
Alex

Keep exploring

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If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 116 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Matt Stein and the other 125 supporters for making this series possible.

Winter sunset - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-20T15:48:52.000Z

A dusting of snow blankets hills in the distance, left over from the snowfall two evenings ago. There are thin light clouds above the hills through which the sky peeks. On the horizon, separating the snowy white hills from the light grey clouds, there is a hint of a pale red, cast from the sun setting at the opposite end of the sky.

The sun is setting, I think to myself. Knowing that it will soon be the evening, I stand by the window and gaze out the window so I can see as much of the hills as possible before sunset. Will the snow be there tomorrow? I wonder. Whatever the case, the snow is beautiful right now.

On another hill, a few streaks of sun shine through gaps between the clouds, illuminating strips of a green hill – whose snow has already melted – with an amber colour. At the bottom of the hill, the treetops are dark green, occasionally interspersed with a few trees whose leaves are still orange – all trees change with the seasons at different paces. As autumn turns to winter, the orange sky and the remaining orange treetops complement each other well.

Most trees have lost their leaves, moving into their winter phase. A few leaves hang on to the trees near me, memories of the vitality of summer while I exist in a sea of Nature’s calls for rest that come in winter – the sleepy hills coated in snow, quieter streets.

The sun has set over the hills; yellow and orange colours are cast onto a few clouds, but the rest of the sky is light blue. Soon, the blue will change. We will cycle through gradient of all the colours that come in evening. I leave to look at the opposite end of the sky and see a warm pink hue envelops the clouds on the horizon, above which there is a fluffy line that goes from pink to light blue. I wonder if I will see the purple in the sky this evening, I think to myself.

I consider how much I love winter sunsets, and how much easier it is to notice them in winter for they happen much earlier in the evenings. I wonder for how long the sky will be pink, I think to myself as I continue to look out at the horizon in awe.

Resonance - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T12:12:11.000Z

I have been listening to a podcast interview between Ezra Klein and Brian Eno. In it, Eno referenced the concept of the “premature sheen.” I stopped what I was doing, paused the podcast, and started to think about what those words meant.

I wanted to learn more about the concept, so I searched for “preamture sheen” on the web. DuckDuckGo returned an info card of Martin Sheen at the top. Not quite the result for which I was looking, then I realised that there was a typo in my query and maybe that had something to do with it. ¹

The second result was Adactio’s blog post called “The premature sheen”. This looks familiar, I thought. I clicked on the result and realised that it was through Adactio’s blog that I first found this podcast episode.

I saw the post in my web reader, clicked through to Adactio’s blog, clicked on his link to the podcast, and that’s how I got here. Then a web search engine took me back to his blog. All of this is something of a cycle in finding information, a cycle in which personal websites are at the heart. I discovered the podcast through a personal website. I kept up to date with the personal website through a web reader tailored for following blogs.

I haven’t yet read about the concept of “premature sheen” for the serendipity of finding the blog post on which I originally discovered the podcast swept me away. The web is both wide and small. The web is full of potential. The web is wonderful.

I have been thinking for a while of making a list of “reasons to be optimistic about the web.” I tried writing that post but the writing felt a little bit forced, almost as if I was trying to apply sheen before I knew exactly what I wanted to say. I kept my writing as a draft. Now, I wonder if the form of that idea is a list of stories that emerge as I experience wonder with the web – stories like the one I shared above where I had a full-circle experience involving personal websites. A story where the next place to learn about something I heard was from a friend, on the web.

On a similar note, I read Y’all are great by Manuel earlier today, in which he noted “with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying.” Another personal website that is beaming hope into the world about the web can be!

The web is indeed not "dead." With every voice publishing on independent platforms, and every link between websites, the web shines. With every blog post, story, and note, the power of connection that the web makes possible is illuminated. We can build the web we want.

If you are looking to make something for the web today, I have a prompt for you: What stories do you have of times recently when the web has felt alive?

[1] Typo tolerance is one of my favourite features of search engines. Fun fact: when you add spelling correction in the background to a search engine, the engine becomes significantly more delightful to use. I don’t think Martin Sheen should have come up in the search result, but I’ll take any excuse to think for a moment about the West Wing.

Routines - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T11:14:25.000Z

Over the last few weeks I have been working on rebuilding my morning routine.

I used to be regimented in my morning routine – everything scheduled down to the minute. I then ebbed the opposite way: my routines became unstructured, my mind every morning exerting itself to remember everything I need to do to start the day. With the experience of both of these extremes – regimentation and structurelessness – I feel like what would serve me best is a middle path: something in between.

I started by asking myself how I would like to start the morning. I decided that I wanted to do a bit of reading, even 15 minutes worth, before starting the day. Reading helps me ease into my day. I am reading Best Wishes from the Full Moon Coffee Shop right now. Because it is winter, the mornings are relatively dark so I light up my room with my fairy lights – my day starts and ends with reading under the fairy lights. At least as much as possible, for within routines there are fluctuations.

I then make coffee. To make coffee, I start by putting water in the kettle and turning the kettle on. I put a filter paper in my coffee brewer. I weigh 15 grams of coffee. I grind the coffee with my hand grinder. I put the coffee in the filter paper, then the coffee brewer on top of my cup. I put my cup on the scale, reset the scale to 0g, and then start brewing coffee. I pour water at 50g of water starting at 0s, 100g of water starting at 40s, and a further 100g of water starting at 1m15s. I try to be as consistent as I can, striving to pour exactly 250g of water in total. I celebrate a little bit every time I pour precisely; my accuracy fluctuates.

I love making coffee. All the steps may be the same, and I may have made coffee hundreds of times, but it doesn't make the process of making coffee any less special. I always look forward to making coffee.

With coffee – and breakfast – ready, I finish the rest of my routine of all the other things you need to do to get ready. Then I start my day.

Getting to the point of having a morning routine was hard. If I wake up early enough that I will have time to read, will I not be tired? How will I stop myself from snoozing the alarm?

Despite all the looming questions on my mind, I kept reminding myself of how much it matters to take care of the essentials – getting good sleep, reading stories, and starting the day right with a good breakfast. I’m going to bed earlier too, so I feel more well rested (although coffee is still an essential in helping me find the energy to start the day!). You don't realise how true and important the advice "take care" is until you realise that you are tired all the time.

I am not regimented about having a morning routine at certain times any more – if I read a bit more or less, that’s okay. If I start breakfast a bit later than normal, that’s okay, too. I am also not sleeping in, either.

It gets easier to wake up on time because I know I have a bit of time to read my book before I have to start the day. Occasionally – like this morning – there are fluctuations where I have something scheduled that means I have to be up earlier, but no routine is the same twice anyway. I have a different routine for weekends. With that said, as long as I am going in the right direction, I am content.

With the desire to have a bit more of a routine, I’m even building a little night time routine too – when it gets to about nine o’clock, I try to read some manga or continue reading whatever fiction book I am reading.

After time with both regimented routines and ones with less structure and schedule, I find the necessity both in having a bit of structure but also not being too rigid. Embracing something in between has made me happier.

This is my submission for this month's IndieWeb Carnival on "Cycles and fluctuations", hosted by Alex.

Snow - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-19T09:54:55.000Z

The snow looks like drops of moonlight I thought to myself as the cool light from the street lamps illuminated the falling snow. It’s beautiful. I have never seen anything like it.

Earlier this week I saw light rain fall that looked almost like it was snow – the light reflected off the falling rain in a way closer to snow than water. Although I am not sure if what I saw was exactly snow, my hopes were raised that it may snow properly this week. The air has been getting cooler; the outdoors feels evermore like winter. Yesterday evening, at around 9 o’clock, my hope for snow came to reality. I looked out the window after reading a book for an hour and noticed the heavy clouds and the white drops of snow.

The last time I saw snow was more than a year ago. Despite my hope that it would snow – one I shared excitedly with people in conversation this week – it took me a moment to internalise that it was now snowing. Then, my mind turned to the beauty of the snow fall – the way that the light breeze blew the snow over the grasses illuminated only by streetlight.

Time froze. I was eager to take in as much of the snow as possible, knowing that, like all seasons and weathers, snow is fleeting. Would the snow be here in the morning? I wasn’t sure, but I knew the snow was there, in the present moment, right in front of me. All that matters is it is snowing now – drops of moonlight fall from the heavens onto the frosting countryside grass.

My gaze was focused on the areas under the streetlights, which illuminated the snow and, over time, showed how the snow was accumulating. This isn’t the kind of snow that will lay there until morning, I knew from having seen many snows growing up; maybe there would be a dusting on the next day.

This morning, I woke up and saw on the horizon a white skyline, above which was the increasingly light blue that comes at 7am in November here in Scotland. Under the white skyline, there were hills dusted in snow. The coat of snow on the hills – enveloping a few almost like a cold blanket – brought to mind last night at which I stood by the window and, for how long I do not know, gazed out and watched the snow paint the countryside with brushstrokes of white whose full beauty would appear in the morning.

Y’all are great - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-16T16:15:00.000Z

I keep hearing and reading people bitching and moaning about the web being dead, lamenting the good old days of the web, when real people were out there, and sites weren’t all about promoting some shit nobody cares about or attempting to amass an audience only to then flip it in exchange for money. And I’m sitting here, screaming at my screen «That web you’re missing is still here, you dumbdumb, you just have to leave your stupid corporate, algodriven, social media jail to find it».

This past Friday the interview with the lovely Nic Chan went live on People and Blogs. Her site has something mine does not: analytics. And they're public! That offered the rare opportunity for me to see the effect the series has on a featured blog.

That's all you, you awesome people

This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying. And see that bump on Nic’s analytics made me so happy. Because it means the series is working and doing its job. And it’s all because people like you are taking the time to read these interviews and click on those links to visit those blogs. And maybe you’re also taking time to reach out to those people and connect with them. This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive. Y’all are great.

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

A blog post written with NeoVim - Baty.net

2025-11-14T19:05:34.000Z

It’s been the kind of day where using (or trying to use) Emacs frustrates me.

I’ve spent the past few weeks adapting my custom Emacs configuration to work on Linux. I was so confident that I would be moving to Linux that I ignored anything that might not work cross-platform. I should know better.

Today I was using my Mac and fired up Emacs and of course nothing worked. I spent nearly 2 hours futzing with it and I still don’t know what’s gone wrong. Reviewing Git commits hasn’t narrowed it down, either. It’s not the fact that I broke Emacs, it’s more that I’m so capable of breaking Emacs at any time. I do it more than I care to. I’m not in the mood, ya know?

My mood today has been less than festive, so my problems with Emacs just made a bad thing worse, so I quit Emacs in a huff.

I installed the MiniMax configuration for NeoVim and I am typing this post using it. I didn’t write a line of configuration and I didn’t tweak a thing. It’s working fine, for now.

MiniMax isn’t as fancy as LazyVim, but it’s also not as seizure-inducing by default. It strikes a nice balance between friendly and frenzied.

It’s not like I’m switching permanently back to Vim, but when I’m mad at Emacs, this NeoVim setup is pretty nice. Sometimes Emacs and I get into a destructive relationship, and we take a little break. That’s probably all this is.

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Nic Chan - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-14T12:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me.

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The People and Blogs series is supported by Juha Liikala and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club.

If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.

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

Hi, my name is Nic Chan! I'm a web developer and hobbyist artist who lives in Hong Kong. It's pretty funny, depending on who you ask, the audience is shocked to hear about my secret other life, since I typically keep these identities very separate. If I'm not tinkering with websites or frantically mixing paint, you might find me shitposting on Mastodon, sweating through the Hong Kong summers or volunteering at the cat shelter.

Despite growing up on the internet, I had never intended to be a web developer. I studied Fine Arts at a small liberal arts college in California, where I solidified a vaguely Californian accent that haunts me till this day. I entered the working world hoping to start a career that would somehow be arts related, but quickly decided that it wasn't for me. The art world, especially at higher levels, feels very inauthentic and performative in a way that left me constantly tired.

During that time, I managed to convince my employer that it would save them money if I also managed their website for them, and used that opportunity as a spring board to teach myself web development. Upon reflection, I have no idea how I managed to convince them that this was a good idea.

Though some engagements were longer than others, I've been a freelance web developer for around 10 years now! I'm a web generalist, but the thing I want to do more of is building sustainable and accessible websites with core web technologies. This really is the reason I continue to do what I do! I love the web as a medium, and I want to see it thrive.

What's the story behind your blog?

The reason why I started posting on my blog was basically to prove to clients that I was a real, trustworthy person. Unfortunately, to have any sort of success as a freelancer, unless you are a literal savant, I think you need to do -some- kind of marketing, and blogging is the only method that I found acceptable to me personally. (LinkedIn was still a cesspit in 2015!)

In recent years, the blog has very much drifted away from that original purpose. I now mostly post very long-form thoughts on tech industry topics, whenever I feel the need to. For some odd reason, my instructional/informative writing is not as popular as my ranting, so I will leave tech education to other folks! As far as my blog goes now, I probably spend an equal amount of time tinkering on random code parts of the site as writing blog posts.

I want to explore more topics outside of web development and the tech industry in the future. My absolute favorite bloggers are the ones who 'bring their whole selves' to their blog, and post updates on their creative hobbies or whatever is on their mind at the moment. The thing I love about the IndieWeb is mostly the people behind it, so getting to bond over the little things like shared hobbies is one of the main draws for me. Fuck the technology, I'm here for the people.

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

My blogging process is pretty simple. I might have an idea for a topic, and I'll create a file in Obsidian with as much information as I care to note down, and when I get a moment I will come back and write out the post, usually in a very linear way, in as many sittings as it takes to finish the draft.

I switched to Obsidian sometime in 2025 and it really did help me get a lot more writing done than I did in years past — cloud-based SaaS solutions are fine, but apparently, if I have to log in to a website to start writing, that does pose a significant barrier to me actually getting any writing done. Having Obsidian just be there on my desktop removes that tiny bit of friction, and I had really underestimated how important that is to the creative process.

Once a draft is done, I like to let things sit and marinate for a while, until I can read it again with 'fresh eyes.' You'll never find a super timely take on current events on my blog, I take far too long for that! I don't typically write additional drafts — call it a character flaw, but I'm far more likely to scrap an idea completely than to rework it in a substantial way.

Shamefully, I have posts from over a year ago that are still about 90% complete. They will sit until I finally manage to push through whatever reservations I might have about posting and just hit the publish button.

If I'm writing something more technical or industry-related, I will try badger some folks to do a quick read-through. Special shoutout to my buddy EJ Mason for being the person who usually suffers through this task.

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

I have a pretty particular desk setup for ergonomic/health reasons. I am physically incapable of being a laptop in a coffee shop kind of person, my fingers will start to turn numb as I use the trackpad, and I've used a custom keyboard layout for so long I can't really get work done on a traditional keyboard layout!

If I'm writing at my computer, I need to be in my home office, at my PC, with my Ergodox EZ (a split ortholinear keyboard that has served me very well over the past few years), and a drawing tablet as a pointer device. I like it to be nice and quiet when I'm writing, if there's background noise, I can't hear my internal voice over the sound of other people speaking!

Even with this particular setup, sitting at my desk does tire me out more than most people, so on very rare occasions I will draft a post with pen and paper. Unlike with computer writing, I'm completely agnostic as to what materials I actually write with, I've occasionally written post outlines on stray receipts or napkins.

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

I built my personal site with Astro and Svelte! I have a whole series on the topic of building my website if you want a peek behind the hood at how I did it. There's so much I want to do to extend the site, but I find the biggest obstacle remains creating the graphics. The funny thing is, I definitely feel a sense of dread when looking at a blank canvas, even when I know what the final product is going to look like. Maybe putting this out there in the world will be the kick in the butt I need to make progress!

Everything is managed in code and Markdown, without a CMS. Though it does have flaws and limitations when it comes to certain components, Markdown remains my favorite format for drafting pretty much anything.

My site is currently hosted on Cloudflare. I fully admit that it's not very IndieWeb of me, I do feel strongly about potentially moving off big tech infrastructure, but I'm not very good at managing servers on my own and I'm a bit scared to do so with the prevalence of bad-faith crawlers.

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

Yeah, I wouldn't write the components in Svelte. If you look back at my posts, I acknowledge that I would probably regret this decision and want to use web components later, but at the time I lacked the web components knowledge to execute the vision properly. No shade against Svelte, it's just that for something like my blog, I prefer to have to deal with less of a maintenance burden than I might willingly take on for a work project, since I'm only in the codebase for a couple of times a year. There are some features/syntax that I'm using that will likely be deprecated in future versions of Svelte, so that's a pain I will have to deal with eventually.

In my youth, I definitely had a bit of 'shiny new thing syndrome' when it came to web technologies. Nowadays, I prefer things that are more stable and slow. I've been burned just a few too many times for me to feel excited about proprietary technology!

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 for $24 USD for a domain name. I swear it used to be cheaper in the past!

I also pay Plausible and Tinylytics as I believe in paying for privacy-respecting services. I started with Plausible, and at some point I became preoccupied with having a heart button for my posts, so I added Tinylytics. It's on my long list of todos to sort this out, I definitely don't need both. I mainly keep analytics to know where my posts are being linked from — doing this has helped me find some really awesome people and blogs (badum-tsh).

Other than that, keeping the site running is free. This might change in the future, I do want to do more fun things that might require more financial resources, but I don't have any intent to monetize it, it's just a little home on the internet that I'm happy throw cash at to keep the (metaphorical) lights on.

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

In no particularly order, here's a list of blogs I've been really enjoying. I think there will be some level of overlap with the People and Blogs folks, as I've been a long-time reader and found many folks worth following through this series, so thank you Manu!

Like Keenan, who I found from this series and is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite bloggers. Keenan is a true wordsmith, and an incredibly kind human. They're so good at what they do, that they managed to completely break some assumptions I had about myself, like I thought I hated the podcast format of 'two friends chatting' until they started one with Halsted!
Ethan Marcotte has been absolutely killing it lately. His work is quiet and thoughtful, but in a wonderfully understated way that sticks in your brain for a long, long time.
I've never seen anyone write as much as Jim Nielsen does and still have as many awesome posts. Come on, what's your secret Jim?
Melanie Richards is one of the main reasons I want to start blogging about my other creative hobbies a bit more. She also has one of the prettiest blog designs I have ever seen!
Everything I know about web sustainability, I have probably learned directly from Fershad Irani's blog.
Eric Bailey writes the kind of posts that I send to every single person I know in the industry as soon as I see them hit my feed.
Robert Kingett's website tagline is 'A fabulously blind romance author', what's not to love? Robert has written numerous pieces that have completely reshaped how I feel about certain topics. His writing style is persuasive with a heaped tablespoon of humor for good measure.
The final two folks don't post that regularly, but they are my friends so I am allowed to nudge them in the hope it will make them post more often. Jan Maarten and Katherine Yang have blogs that are so unapologetically them. More posts, please!

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

After rambling on for far too long for most of this, I'm finally at a loss for words. I'd be much obliged if you visited my site but you can also follow me on Mastodon if you have a hankering for some shelter cat pics.

I have a submission coming out for the 'Free To Play' gaming-themed zine under Difference Engine, a Singaporean indie comics publisher. It's a collaboration with the narrative designer & writer Sarah Mak, I hope you'll check it out when the time comes!

Keep exploring

Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 115 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Seth Larson and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible.

Following up on input diet - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-14T09:40:00.000Z

Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic. It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting for me next to the bed.

In my post, I wrote that «the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume.» and that is exactly what I did yesterday morning. The total number of feeds on my RSS reader went down from hundreds to exactly seventeen. I stopped at nineteen initially, but later in the day, I decided to remove two more after realising I should follow two simple rules:

My RSS consumption should have a hard cap at 25 total feeds.
All the content in there should come from people I either know in person or have interacted with directly at some point.

Time will tell if this setup works or not, but I think it’s a good starting point to reshape my digital diet. And speaking of ingesting digital content, I will not pass on this opportunity to mention that Jatan—also featured on P&B—has published a poetry book to celebrate his Moon Monday newsletter passing both 5 years of digital existence as well as 10000 subscribers. The book is available pretty much everywhere a book can exist, and in I think all possible formats, which is very impressive, I have to say.

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

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Monet - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-13T11:57:20.000Z

On the ground floor of the Musee de l’Orangerie in Paris – a long building by the river banks of the Seine, and at the start of the Jardin des Tuileries – there is an exhibit of eight Monet paintings. The museum website introduces the paintings like so:

Offered to the French State by the painter Claude Monet on the day that followed the Armistice of November 11, 1918 as a symbol for peace, the Water Lilies are installed according to plan at the Orangerie Museum in 1927, a few months after his death.

The exhibit spans two rooms: each an oval. The two ovals connect together in a figure-of-eight. The walls of the rooms are white, each adorned with a wide-canvas Monet painting. When you are in either of the oval rooms, you are surrounded by colour: reds and yellows and blues and purples. You get a feeling that there is more detail than you can possibly comprehend, but you do your best to take in the works. From up close and afar, you study, appreciating the colours, the gradients, the trees, the reflections.

The painting on the left as you enter shows a gradient as if the sun is rising or setting – you don’t yet have a perfect grasp of how to distinguish between the two moments of day in art, and so you see both: a beginning and an end. You proceed further and see blue skies and white clouds reflected on the pond – blue a theme of several of paintings, you will later realise. What does it mean to appreciate a work?, you consider. Do I need to understand every detail? The answer to this question reveals itself as a smile adorns your face for reasons that you cannot quite put into words. Maybe the colour is brightening your mood. Or maybe the realisation that the more you look, the more you see satisfies a certain part of your mind that loves details.

You walk around the two rooms once and then realise you want to keep going. You keep walking. You look at all of the works with a new perspective – the perspective of having seen all that comes before and after each individual painting. You wonder if there are themes between the works, and you start to think more about whether the painting to the left as you entered was of a sunrise or a sunset.

In the back of your mind, you think about how the structure of the rooms – the two ovals – encourages you to keep going. You are in a place that encourages you to walk in circles. You learned from the plaque on your way in that this was designed: that the place is intentionally a figure-of-eight, the symbol of infinity.

At one point, after spending some time looking at a painting, you realise that there is a colour you didn’t notice before. You realise that there is an infinite amount to appreciate, and that you don’t feel an obligation to understand everything for the colours and the vastness of the paintings and the context in which they were offered – as a symbol for piece – take your breath away.

You realise that you don’t need to understand all the details of the works for them to have an impact, to leave you with some feeling.

I left with a sense of wonder. I came back the next day.

Input diet - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-12T15:00:00.000Z

Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361—thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote

We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them there by never looking away. (...) Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins.

The topic of who is getting my attention these days is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. Because time and attention are a precious resource, one we probably take for granted way too often. A resource that’s been abused by the modern economy to the point where people seem unable to focus anymore, with the sole goal of selling us crap we likely don’t need.

The other piece I’ve been thinking about is Ridgeline #217, where Craig wrote:

The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms. The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.

I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal. How to get there, that I don’t know, but I feel like it’s a worthy goal to pursue. And I think this goal is gonna be part of a broader push towards really curating the inputs in my life. By inputs, I mean everything I consume. Because I realised my mental health is deeply affected by what I consume, day after day. The books I read, the posts and blogs I scroll through, the news I ingest, the music I listen to. Everything contributes to how I feel, and I think I’m only now realising how much more strict and diligent I should be with my input diet.

The other day, I reopened my RSS reader after my small break from media consumption, and I was both over- and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed because I follow quite a lot of blogs, and so there were thousands of posts waiting to be read in there. Underwhelmed because after a quick scroll through all those entries, I realised there wasn’t much I was genuinely excited to read. Which isn’t to say the content in there wasn’t interesting, quite the opposite. I follow a lot of people who write a lot of interesting content. But I realised it was not content that really resonates with me, at this point in my life. And I came to the realisation that the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume. And in doing that, this time around, I should be a lot more deliberate, a lot more careful in what I add. Because now more than ever, in this age of infinite digital abundance, quality really is more important than quantity.

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What’s in my inventory? - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-12T13:51:33.000Z

Wherever I go, I usually bring my backpack. In it, I always keep a few things. First, I try to always bring a book with me. I usually pack a book to read before I leave the house, for the book I am reading is either at my bedside or next to my chair. Right now, I am reading the art of explanation by Ron Atkins, a book about how to communicate clearly written by a senior reporter at the BBC. If I am out and about, I might read in a cafe, on the train, or really anywhere that I can sit down and relax.

I bring my AirPods wherever I go, as well as my phone (I wish my phone were lighter though). I can’t read in noisy environments; the AirPods noise isolation feature is thus useful. I also enjoy listening to music where I go – songs by Taylor Swift, Lorde, Florence and the Machine, Oh Wonder, MisterWives, and several other artists are among those I listen to the most. I love podcasts, too.

I also bring a notebook in which to write. This is essential. Sometimes I need to write something down or sketch it out. My notebook is where I will write down a few ideas that I want to explore on paper rather than jotting down on my phone. I draw wireframes for web pages. I write stories. My notebook has a sticker of my blog mascot on the front, a little bit of personalisation.

I bring a few pencils. I don’t think I bring a pen anywhere; I prefer to write with pencil in notebooks. I like to use Blackwing pencils, which have a rubber – is “rubber” widely understood outside the UK? An alternate term is an “eraser” – on the end. I bring a pencil sharpener, too – all stationery is kept in my pencil case.

I bring some stickers where I go, in case I run into friends to whom I want to give stickers. I bring hand sanitiser – absolutely essential.

I bring various charging cables, some that I use and others that I keep in case someone needs them. (I once went on a trip abroad and forgot a charger converter. A friend kindly lent me a spare they had. Ever since then I try to keep a few cables.)

I also bring all of myself where I go – my thoughts, my hopes, my dreams, my anxieties, my ideas.

This is my submission for the Bear Blog Carnival this month, hosted by Absurd Pirate on the topic “What’s in my inventory?”.

I’m going to study art history - James' Coffee Blog

2025-11-12T09:08:00.000Z

Over the last few months, I have been taking a part-time online course with the V&A focused on the history of art. The course has taken me through eras from Classical art and sculpture all the way to Impressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism. With every lecture, I feel like my mind is being opened, both by the pieces of art I study and the context around the art – the cultural commentary that arose from pivotal art works, how technology changed art, and more.

With that said, I have an announcement to make: Starting in January next year, I am going to be studying for a bachelor’s degree in History of Art. I’ll be studying with the Open University, a university based in the UK that specialises in distance and online learning.

It’s a big change for me: for the last six years, I have been a technical writer, focused on documentation and tutorials of all kinds. I moved straight from secondary school to work. I had an eagerness to start my career, and, looking back, I feel I made the right decision by not starting with university.

But this year in particular, I felt like I was no longer growing as much as I wanted to. I was yearning for a new challenge. I started thinking about new things to do, and, looking back on what brought me the most joy this year, my time in art galleries was close to the top of the list. I could study art history, I thought.

When I am in galleries, I love trying to understand an artwork. I love looking for details. I love the moment where you realise a new detail after studying an artwork closely for ten minutes. I love noticing patterns between different paintings – whether themes or icons or common objects. Over the last year, I have found myself being able to understand paintings more as a result of spending more time in galleries, but there is so much more I want to learn – a realisation that fills me with great excitement.

Last week, in my part-time course, I learned how to interpret a Cubist painting, which has helped me appreciate that period to a much greater extent. I learned that Cubists strive to paint a picture of a space by showing you only the minimum details you need to build your own image of the space. An occluded part of a musical instrument and a glass may indicate the scene is in a bar, for example. An hour of learning helped open my eyes to a form of art I found interesting but was unable to appreciate to a great extent. Cubist paintings make me consider the questions What is essential to create an image? And how do I know?

After many months of thought, the idea of studying turned into a reality. My blog home page now reads I'm a soon-to-be art history student., a statement I added fuelled by the excitement I feel for the coming months. Despite this big change, one thing is for sure: I will continue to be here blogging as normal – indeed, writing, like analysing art, excites me to an extent that may take a lifetime to encapsulate in words.

Robb Knight - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-07T12:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me.

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The People and Blogs series is supported by Pete and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club.

If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.

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

I'm a developer and dad to two girls living in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK. By day I work for a SaaS company and in my own time I work on my many side projects. In a previous life I worked at a certain clown's restaurant which is where I met my wife some 15 years ago.

Although developer is what I get paid to do I'm trying to move towards more making; websites, stickers, shirts, art, whatever. I have no idea what that looks like yet or how it's going to pay my bills. I have a whole host of side projects I've worked on over the years; they're not all winners but they all serve, or served, a purpose. If I get lucky, they resonate with other people which is always nice.

What's the story behind your blog?

I've had a lot of blogs over the years, most of which would get a handful of posts before being abandoned. There was a version that ran on Tumblr which I did do for at least a year or two — any interesting posts from that have been saved. The current iteration is by far the longest serving and will be the final version. There's no chance of me wiping it all and starting again.

This current version is part of my main website which is where I put everything. My toots on Mastodon start life as a note post, I post interesting links I find, and I log all the media I watch/play/whatever (I don't want to say consume, that's gross) in Almanac, which itself is on the third or fourth iteration.

As I said above, I had done a few posts on the Tumblr-powered blog but if I look at my stats for posts, it was around 2022 when Twitter started to fall apart that I started to blog more. I was moving away from posting things directly onto social media sites and getting it onto my own site.

I started writing more posts that just had a short idea or helpful tip because I realised not every post has to be some incredible think piece. My analytics show that these posts also tend to be the most popular which probably says more about the state of large, ad-riddled websites than it does about my writing. For example this post about disconnecting Facebook from Spotify is consistently in the top five posts on my site but you're never going to read that post unless you specifically need it. It's not a "good" post, it just exists.

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

To call what I have a process would be a very liberal use of the word "process". If I have nothing to write about I just won't write anything, I have no desire to keep to a schedule and write just for the sake of it. Usually, I'll get prompted by something someone asks like "How did you do X on your website?" or I feel like I have something to say that would be interesting other people.

I write my posts in Obsidian, then when they're ready to go I'll add them to my site. If I'm on my ~~proper computer~~ laptop I use my CLI tool to add a new post. If I'm on mobile, I use the very haphazard CMS I built.

I'll proof read most things myself before posting and I rarely ask for anyone else's input but if I do want a second opinion it's going to be previous P&B interviewee, Keenan. Usually I'm able to get out what I want to say fairly succinctly without too much editing.

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

A proper keyboard and ideally a desk to sit at is what I prefer when I'm writing (or coding) but I can live with just the keyboard. My desk setup makes some people's skin crawl because there's so much going on but I like having all the trinkets and knick knacks around me.

I deeply dislike using my phone for most things outside of scrolling lists, like social media so I rarely write long posts on it. The small form factor just doesn't work for me at all but I also kind of need it to exist in the world.

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

All my domains are registered with Porkbun and I manage the DNS with DNSControl - my main domain, rknight.me, has nearly 50 records for subdomains so managing those without DNSControl would not be a fun activity. Speaking of DNS I use Bunny for my DNS management and also use their CDN for images and other files I need to host.

The website itself is, as are many of my side projects, built with Eleventy. Eleventy gives me the flexibility to do some interesting things with the posts and other content on my site which would be much harder with some other systems.

The site gets built on Forge to a Hetzner server whenever I push an update to GitHub either via command line, or through the aforementioned CMS, and is also triggered at various points in the day to pull in my Mastodon posts.

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

Assuming I actually had to the time to do it, I think I would start with the CMS first, before building anything of the actual site. It is a pain to update things when I'm not at my laptop but jamming features into my CMS is equally frustrating.

If I wanted something off the shelf and easier to maintain I suspect I would choose Ghost or Pika.

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?

Many of these costs are part of my freelancing so are bundled with other sites I run and somewhat hidden but I'll do my best to outline what I do use.

I have a single server on Hetzner that serves my main site as well as another 30 or so side projects so the cost is negligible per-site but it costs about $5 a month. Forge costs $12 a month to deploy my site along with other sites. The domain is $20 a year I think but that's it.

I have a One a Month Club here and I have a handful of people supporting that way. I also use affiliate links for services I use and like which occasionally pays me a little bit.

I think monetising blogs is fine, if it's done in a tasteful way. Dumping Google ads all over your site is terrible for everyone but hand-picked sponsors or referrals is a good way to find new services. Just keep it classy.

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

I want to read sites that are about the person writing them. Photos of things people have done, blog posts about notebooks, wallpaper, food, everything. Things people enjoy.

This is the second time I'm going to mention Keenan here because they write so wonderfully. They also have a podcast with Halsted called Friendship Material which is all kinds of lovely and joyful and everyone should listen.

Alex writes some really interesting computing-related posts, like this one about using static websites as tiny archives.

Annie is so smart and honest in her writing it brings me joy every time I see a new post from her. This post is a masterpiece.

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

I'd be a terrible business boy if I didn't at least mention EchoFeed, an RSS cross posting service I run.

I also have a podcast that used to be about tech but is now about snacks.

Keep exploring

Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 114 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Paolo Ruggeri and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible.

A moment with a decidedly less gloomy church - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-11-04T16:05:00.000Z

If you’re subscribed to my From the Summit newsletter, you might recognise this church. It’s the same one I wrote about in the most recent missive, only this time there was a lovely sunny day and the whole place was not engulfed in the fog.

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

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No work is ever wasted - James' Coffee Blog

2025-10-31T13:01:12.000Z

This morning, I ended up on chsmc.org’s “Applying Pixar’s rules of storytelling to writing” post. At the bottom, he quotes:

No work is ever wasted. If it’s not working, let go and move on – it’ll come back around to be useful later.

I knew I had to come back to this point. No work is ever wasted.

These words have multiple meanings to me, but among them is the pressure I sometimes feel for my writing to be destined for this blog. This is in contrast to writing something like a journal entry which is only for me. I would never say that any of my writing is “wasted”. But I do know how difficult it feels to think that what I write should be here on this blog.

With the ease of publishing on the web, I have felt and feel pressure to write something that could be a blog post. I haven’t written many journal entries, in part because I know they are not something I want to publish. I could be using that writing time to do something for my blog, I reason. Except inspiration doesn’t work that way, I am learning.

I haven’t felt much inspiration to write blog posts recently, for I am in the midst of the excitement and trepidation and anticipation and potential of a change. As such, I have had lots of inspiration to write in my journal, where I can think and process and imagine by myself. Journaling occupies a different space in my life. Journaling is just for me; blog posts, meanwhile, are for everyone.

In using my typewriter, I have once again been journaling. I love the writing I am doing. I am not trying to stick to the blog post form, with a title in mind and a topic to cover. Sometimes I meander between topics such that every paragraph is something new. Sometimes I stare out the window and have an idea that I don’t have much to say about but that I know I want to write down anyway, and so I do. I have found that when I write one sentence, another seems to follow – what seemed like part of an idea is starting to take shape.

I have read and, likely, in the past myself have talked about, the idea of “writing as thinking.” I honestly have never been able to internalise these words. Writing, as thinking? Maybe the best summary is what I touched on at the end of the last paragraph: when you put one sentence on the page, you may realise you have another one to write.

The typewriter feels conducive to writing reflective notes because it occupies a different space in my life. To write on the typewriter, I go to the other room, sit on the floor – for I do not yet have a desk for my typewriter – and start typing. My computers are a room away. When I’m writing, it’s just me and the typewriter.

Alone by my typewriter, I feel that I can be more vulnerable. I can explore topics where I do not yet have a cohesive enough narrative to be able to write something ready for someone else to read.

Some of my paragraphs in my journal have mistakes; the flow is off; the punctuation isn’t quite right. Whereas I actively edit my words when I write on my computer – something one of my friends first observed when we wrote a blog post together – this is not possible on my typewriter. So I do what feels right: I embrace the direction I’m going in. Sometimes I reach a dead end, in which case I start a new paragraph and begin again; other times, I realise there is more to a direction than I first realised.

As I experiment, I get that same feeling when I try to add my own twist to a song I’m playing on the piano: I’m learning. Sometimes I press a note that doesn’t fit and realise that I am further away from the spirit of the song than I want. Other times, I press a note that fits with the chord progression and I end up taking the song in a whole new direction.

I suppose this is the blog post I could imagine myself wishing I had, the one where I say to myself, with the greatest care: writing for yourself is never wasted. Not everything needs to be a blog post.

Frank Chimero - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-31T11:05:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com.

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The People and Blogs series is supported by Noahie Valk and the other 123 members of my "One a Month" club.

If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.

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

I’m Frank Chimero, I design and write from my little apartment in New York City. I’ve been doing this for a long time, mostly for technology and media companies. Other than work, I’m interested in the same things many other people are: my partner, my dog, visiting museums, movies, paintings, reading, cooking, stimulating conversation, and long walks. A lot of those have a tendency to go together, especially here in New York, which is nice.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started teaching design shortly after finishing undergrad and had a great time with it. My students and I had so many stimulating conversations in the classroom, and their questions really forced me to think about my presumptions and beliefs about design in a way I wouldn't have without the prompting. So, after class, I'd type them up and was eager to share, and thus my blog was born.

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

Writing is generally a way to scratch an itch in my brain. Sometimes it is an annoyance or disagreement with something else I read, or responding to an idea I came across in my reading that captivated me in some way, and trying to figure out why it grabbed me. Most first drafts are brain dumps in front of the keyboard or going for a walk and using speech to text on my phone. These things are incredibly rough, and take a bit of polishing until they end up on the site, but I enjoy that process too. It’s nice to nudge, tweak, and expand on parts and feel things get stronger or more clear. I try to have some interesting reference or idea at the heart of each post I make, because it’s what I want to read. The web I am interested in is the insights and ideas of individuals.

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

Some people will think I’m a barbarian, but I don’t think tools matter that much. I write in TextEdit. If it’s by hand, it is typically on loose copier paper and a pen I stole from a hotel. I’m sensitive to spaces and love a beautiful room and good lighting, but I think it is more worthwhile to learn how to write well in spite of the environment rather than because of it. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The trick, for me, is to seek out those beautiful places and experiences and try to hold on to the internal environment they create in me, then find ways to get it down onto the page later. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.

A few years ago I wrote a book called The Shape of Design. I’d book trains from New York City up to Albany to enjoy the views of the Hudson Valley from the train window. The trip was about 8 hours there and back home. I got so many words down, something about the momentum of the view creating a velocity in the writing. But you know what? Once I stacked that writing up next to all the other writing I did in libraries, at the kitchen table, or coffee shops, I never could pinpoint where what was written.

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

This is going to be underwhelming. I have an off-the-rack Macbook Pro M4. There is pretty much nothing installed on it except Figma, my fonts, and just enough of a local dev environment to make my rickety Jekyll deployments. If you were to close your eyes and imagine the first five sites you’d need for work, I have those, too. I have last year’s iPhone with YouTube and NTS Radio on it. I’ve stripped most everything out. It makes no difference. I just type and typeset.

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

I’m not certain. I have no clue how one would grow an audience in 2025 without betraying some of my values about respecting people’s attention. My current mindset is to enjoy my audience, respect them, and make no presumptions about it growing.

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 site either costs $60 or $0, depending on how you look at it. It’s served via Github Pages, which requires a subscription, but it also pays for other things like private repos, etc. I’ve never tried to make money with the writing on my site. Even the book I wrote is available in full online for free. This isn’t necessarily a moral stance, it is simply that the economics of it wouldn’t pay enough to justify the headspace it’d occupy. If others want to do something different, I say go for it.

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

I focus most of my reading time on books, and most of my digital reading is happening through newsletters these days. On the blog side of things, I mostly check up on friends’ writing by manually going to their site. “I wonder what Naz is up to?” and that kind of thing. I know there is RSS, but seeing the site is half the point. You’ve already interviewed a lot of them, but I think you would get a kick going through Rob Weychert’s obsessively maximalist life-documentation-as-blog. It is exactly the opposite of my own tendencies (“anything you don’t remember must not be that important”), and I have a lot of admiration, confusion, and respect for what he’s done.

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

I want to take a moment to give a shout out to libraries. Librarians are god’s people. I think there is a strong ideological kinship between digital personal publishing (blogs) and libraries (self-expression, availability of information, capitalistic counterpoint, community and connection, and the overall “this is for everyone” vibe the web was born from). So, go check out your local library. Get a card, check out a book, enjoy the space, and maybe ask about what other services they have to offer besides media. Good communities come from good people and good spaces. Supporting your local library may be a way to nudge the world toward your vision of how it should be. Or it could just be a nice way to spend an afternoon.

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Creating posts for Zola in Emacs - Baty.net

2025-10-29T15:32:20.000Z

Creating blog posts from Emacs is my prefered method. I had a whole setup built around doing this for Hugo, but since I just switched to Zola I needed to move things around.

Here’s where I ended up:

(defun jab/zola-new-post (title &optional)
  "Create and visit a new post for the prompted TITLE."
  (interactive "sTitle: ")

  (let* ((slug (s-dashed-words title))
	 (default-directory (concat (jab/zola-content-dir)
                                    "posts/"
				    (format-time-string "%Y/%m/")))
	 (fpath (if (y-or-n-p "Make Bundle?")
		    ;; If y create directory using slug and add index.md to path
		    (progn
		      (make-directory (concat default-directory (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-") slug "/") 'parents)
		      (concat default-directory (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-") slug "/index.md"))
		  ;; Otherwise just use the slug for the filename
		  (progn
		    (concat default-directory (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d-") slug ".md")))))
    
    (write-region (concat
                   "+++"
                   "\ntitle = '" title "'"
                   "\ndate = " (format-time-string "%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S%:z")
                   "\nslug = \"" slug "\""
                   "\n[taxonomies]"
                   "\n  tags = [\"misc\"]"
                   "\n+++\n\n")
                  nil (expand-file-name fpath) nil nil nil t)
    (find-file (expand-file-name fpath))))

This prompts for a title then asks me if I want to create a standalone file or something like blog-post-title/index.md. It creates the file with all the appropriate front matter (using TOML, yuck) and then I’m off and running.

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