~hedy's blogroll - BlogFlock

Five least favourite tech topics - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-18T19:20:00.000Z

The other day Kevin sent me a preview link of an upcoming post for his Overkill site, and I jokingly replied to him that «Home servers are probably the second least appealing tech topic for me».

I then started thinking about what my least favourite tech topics are, and I thought it would make for a fun blog post, and so here we are, my five least favourite tech topics.

5: In-car technology

From infotainment screens to car OS, I’m bored to death by everything that has to do with screens in a car. Some car-related tech is cool, don’t get me wrong, but it usually has nothing to do with screens.

4: Everything audiophiles find interesting

Headphones, earbuds, hi-fi systems, you name it. The only thing I find amusing about that entire world is how bizarre some of the products are. I dive into this topic maybe once every 5 years when I have to change headphones, and that’s about it.

3: Wearables

I own a watch that’s just barely smart enough to be considered a smartwatch. I use it to track my hikes and to have offline maps. That’s the extent to which I’m interested in the world of wearables. Everything else I find boring as hell. Don’t care about smart glasses, don’t care about AI pins, don’t care about smart rings, don’t care about internet-connected intelligent butt-plugs. I already have a hard time dealing with a smartphone; that’s more than enough.

2: Home servers

I not only have very little interest in home servers, but I also don’t have a use for them, which is probably why I find the whole topic so unappealing. Every time I read something about this topic, my only thought is that it seems like a lot of work and a lot of unnecessary headaches. And it also seems to become a second job, which is definitely something I don’t need in my life.

1: Smart homes and home automation

The reason this is at the top of the list is because not only do I find smart appliances to be terribly boring, but also because it’s probably the only tech “innovation” I’m actively fighting against. I want my home dumb. I don’t want to charge my doorbell, I don’t want to flash a firmware on my lightbulbs, I don’t want to set up a home server to deploy some open source software to make sure my new light switch shows up on my phone. That sounds like a nightmare to me.

There you have it, my least favourite tech topics. Wait, no AI? Yes, no AI. AI tech is kinda cool, it’s the whole circus around it that I find insufferable. How about you, though? Do you have a least favourite tech topic?

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

Typewriters and labyrinths - James' Coffee Blog

2025-10-18T14:07:05.000Z

This morning started as many this year have done: should I get up and explore, or stay in bed for one more hour. The warmth of bed, especially as the days get cooler, is comforting. But I know how great I feel when I get up on time and start the day. I am trying my best to get back into a daily routine. On my second-to-last alarm – set for five minutes to seven – I got out of bed and started the day.

After breakfast, I walked past the park in the University of Edinburgh campus and noticed the gate was open. The park is usually open only on weekdays (when I am working!) so I haven’t been able to visit more than once or twice. I learned this year that there is a labyrinth path in the park – one of those circles that has a single path on which to walk to get to the middle. I have wanted to walk on there for a while. Today I finally got the chance.

As I walked the labyrinth, my mind calmed. I started thinking about the labyrinth itself. Labyrinths are definitionally convoluted. The path to the centre is rhythmic but, unless you have seen the path from a clear view, unpredictable. You weave from side to side, ebbing between getting closer to and further away from the centre. The labyrinth is less about the destination than it is about the process: putting one foot forward after another and letting the path take you to the centre. The path is the direction. I can relax while following the set direction and, in the process, let my mind wander.

Direction is especially calming right now; the last few weeks have been a bit more tumultuous than normal. October is historically a month in which I tend to make more changes in my life. I am unsure why. Perhaps seeing all the change in the environment around me – the trees going from green to wonderful reds and ambers and yellows, the temperature going from warm to cool – gives me confidence to change. Maybe the changes in the seasons helps me better internalise that change is natural.

The labyrinth let me put one foot in front of another and make progress without having to choose the direction. When I got to the centre, I felt great – calm and excited for reaching the end of the journey, and excited to continue with my day.

And continue with my day I did! I took a walk to the other end of town to a shop that sells books and has a large collection of vintage typewriters on display. Today was my first time visiting.

The bookshop – Typewronger Books – has a Royal 10 typewriter on which customers are welcome to type. I asked the shopkeeper a question about how to get started with typewriters and, after answering, he encouraged me to try out the typewriter. The shopkeeper was so kind. Before answering my query, I overheard some customers from the United States say that a friend from Oregon wanted to say “hi!” to the shopkeeper; they then proceeded to say they had come to the shop on their friend’s recommendation. The owner then gave them a tour through the shop, to which I listened along and found great joy in the shopkeeper’s enthusiasm for encouraging people to write.

Surrounded by words, typewriters, discussions about the joys of writing, embracing physical spaces, risograph art, and more, I found myself most at home. I felt grounded, like I did in the labyrinth earlier that day. In both cases, I was somewhere new, but felt at home among the familiar – in Nature and among words, respectively.

In response to my question about getting started with typewriters, the shopkeeper gave me some advice, among the most prescient of which was that typewriters need to be pressed much more firmly than a computer keyboard. As I typed, I realised that some of my letters were not showing up. I made several typos, too. With that said, I proudly wrote a few lines of text, and confidently signed it - james.

As I typed, I smiled. This is amazing! I thought to myself. I was making something physical. I left with the intent to go around a few charity shops in the coming weeks to see if I can find myself a typewriter that I could use. A few bloggers whose writing I enjoy have type-written blog posts. I would love to do the same!

Alice - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-17T11:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alice, whose blog can be found at thewallflowerdigest.co.uk.

Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter.

The People and Blogs series is supported by Benjamin Chait and the other 122 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 Alice, I'm currently 37, I'm from the East Midlands in the UK, and have lived in the region all my life. I live with my husband (whom I married in June) and our two cats. They are the best cats.

At university, I studied English Literature because I never had any idea what I wanted to do for a career! I really enjoyed my time at university. Looking back, it was such a luxury to have all the time dedicated to reading books and thinking deeply about them (even if I was always too shy to contribute much in seminars!). I can't say an English Lit. degree has ever been beneficial in a practical sense, but I'm happy that I've started to dust off some of the cobwebs on it with my book blog!

My work and my blog are separate, but I think the fact that it exists at all is a result of the way my career went, or rather didn't go! I got a Master's degree in Information and Library Management, but failed to ever get a proper professional job.

Plan A was University Librarian, but I didn't get the graduate trainee placement I needed, and, with that, I was forever locked out of university libraries. I never saw a job posting that didn't require "at least 5 years of experience in an equivalent role", and social anxiety hampered the development of networking skills. I was a library assistant at a university for a while, where a good portion of my colleagues were in the same boat as me!

Plan B was a School Librarian, purely because it was the only job I got offered. I was ill-suited to it, never really enjoyed and the school I was in had little interest in supporting the Library or developing a reading culture. I did that for about 4 years, the whole time trying to come up with an alternative plan.

Eventually, Plan C presented itself, and I ended up in a little niche of library management systems, where I worked on data migrations for special libraries, and eventually moved into archives and museums. This is a job that really suits me. It turns out my true love all along was actually databases, information retrieval and the challenge of solving all the puzzles that involved!

If I could go back in time to 18-21 years old, knowing myself as I do now, I would make different decisions! But, for now, I am happy where I ended up, and I'm still making a little contribution to the cultural sector!

What's the story behind your blog?

The Wallflower Digest was born in 2022 because my previous job had stopped offering me stimulating challenges, and I was feeling overlooked, bored and trapped by a lack of opportunities! My self-esteem was taking a real hit, and I just needed something to give me a goal and focus.

I have had blogs in the past when bored at work! My library assistant job in my twenties was in a tiny, quiet campus library that involved some lone working evening shifts where there would be nothing to do but sit on the enquiries desk for hours! That was how my first blog started; it was mostly a TV blog called Between Screens. That was hosted by WordPress.com (I did have custom domains, though!) and is now long deleted. I used to write recaps and reviews of my favourite TV shows, movies and video games. This was mostly Made in Chelsea, Game of Thrones, Veronica Mars and Mass Effect! I also played around briefly with a fiction blog and a sewing blog, but those were short-lived.

This time around, I wanted my blog to be somewhere to exercise my writing skills and have a chance to play around with CSS and maybe other website bits if I wanted.

When I picked the name, I wasn't sure what the blog was going to be, but I think I managed to nail it. I wanted something that felt like me. I've always been very shy, but I was painfully so as a child, and someone (probably a teacher) referred to me as a 'wallflower', and that term got stuck in my young brain.

I don't know if the meaning will translate for those who aren't native English speakers, so as a definition, a "wallflower" can mean someone with an introverted personality type (or social anxiety) who will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight.

Plus, I like flowers! I recently planted some wallflowers (Erysimum) in my garden!

And then a ‘digest’ is a compilation or summary of information, and my blog is a mess of different topics. I share as I digest the things I read, learn and experience in my life.

When I got started, I spun my wheels for a bit in the mud of terrible advice for new bloggers. You know, this strange idea that a blog has to make money, and therefore has to solve problems for an audience! This is why some of my oldest posts have a recognisable Content formatting of SEO friendly headings and keywords! But I eventually realised the fun and mental stimulation I needed came from just doing whatever I wanted, and that an Audience wasn't important to me (actually, I fear that!)! And, more importantly, the blogs I was finding that I enjoyed the most were messy little personal blogs where people shared snippets of their lives.

These days, I remind myself that I can do what I want. I see it now as a loosely defined project to help me distil the things that resonate, and help me to understand myself a little better. I share whatever I want to, which currently is book reviews, updates on my life, occasionally progress with my garden (though I've been too busy this year!), and my embroidery or other craft projects.

Lately - trying to be less of a wallflower - I've been taking part in more blogging community linkups and tag memes, which have been a lot of fun to answer prompts, but also for "blog hopping" and seeing who else is out there! I'm hoping to branch out from the book-based ones to other topics and blog hop beyond the borders of the book community, or the more tech-focused folks I found on Mastodon. I am toying with the idea of creating my own if I can't find an existing one that feels right!

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

Life has been very busy recently, so the blog has really been ticking over on book reviews and joining in with the book blogger community's Top Ten Tuesday weekly link-up (currently hosted by ArtsyReaderGirl). It's hard to find the time for more "creative" posts at the moment, but I do try to put really effort into my TTT and try to find something to say about the books I choose to list.

Sometimes I get struck by inspiration - usually a topic that keeps recurring in my life somehow - and I'll start a draft, or just jot some thoughts into a note and eventually find the time to work it into something that makes sense! That is the biggest challenge when I work 40 hours a week and have to do all the other responsibilities of life, relationships and health things that come with being an adult.

I mean, I've been trying to find the time and mental bandwidth to write a full review with my analysis of the book Rouge by Mona Awad since January (I loved it, and I'm still thinking about it)! But it's still in drafts, and I think I need to read it a third time now. It's like a running joke that I'll forever talk about it and never get it posted!

I also post life updates semi-regularly. Those posts are just a catch-up on whatever is going on - how my walking/move more challenges are going, TV or movies, anything else I feel like! I love to read that kind of 'slice of life' content from other people.

Now and again, I'll share something about my social anxiety struggles. I'm always battling this, and I find writing out my experiences and feelings helps to work it out of my system.

As for the process, my drafts usually get entered straight into the Jetpack app on my phone. I used Obsidian as my digital notes app for general thoughts and inspiration, and all my book reviews and ebook highlights get synced into there, too. What I've got going on with Obsidian is its own little project (essentially as my own personal database!). Most of the time, I post whenever I've finished writing because time is too short to proofread, and that's why my blog is full of typos and errors! I do re-read things later on and correct mistakes I spot, but that's as far as it goes!

I also love to use Canva to create graphics. Every book review gets a little graphic with a summary; those originated in my short-lived attempt to get involved with Bookstagram, and I enjoyed making them so much that I've kept them for the blog. I am also a visual person, so it is important to me that I like the look of my website!

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

I think my creativity relies more on my mental state than my physical space! Definitely, my menstrual cycle comes with days where I'm buzzing with ideas and writing is easier, and I wake up with ideas first thing in the morning before the responsibilities of the day have taken over.

I do need quite though. I can't think with background chatter, I have no idea how people manage to work in noisy cafes! They make me instantly tired, and my brain shuts down.

Writing is easiest when I am on my PC with a full keyboard and dual monitors, but because I work from home full-time at the same desk, I don't like to be pinned in the same spot in my evenings, shut away from my husband, so PC time only really happens on the weekend. More often, I write on my phone; I also have an iPad, but if I'm typing on mobile, I'm faster on my phone.

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

I am hosted by Hostingr, which has been fine and easy to use for a non-techie like me. My CMS is WordPress, it came installed and I find it familiar and easy to use with a big community. I find there is usually a plugin to solve most problems!

I have no problem with the block editor, and I love that I can hook my blog up to the wider WordPress.com world to more easily connect with other bloggers. I use the Jetpack app for quick editing and posting, as well as my RSS feed, and to explore and discover new blogs through tags. I honestly think Jetpack gets underrated as a discovery tool!

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

I don't think I would change anything about my blog. With hindsight, I do wish I'd wasted less time down the SEO rabbit hole and removed the pre-installed AISEO plugin earlier! I could also have figured out how I connect my blog to WordPress/Jetpack sooner to find other bloggers.

I would not have made my thoughts on Atomic Habits so SEO friendly... it got caught in Google's net and now I regret how well it does search results. There is a crowd of James Clear fans who get upset when you don't praise it as the life-changing work of a genius they hold it up to be. Every few months, I get something that makes me consider turning off the comments.

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 got a New Year deal with Hostingr for 4 years of hosting at a ridiculous discount, so I paid that all upfront, and I think it worked out about £3 a month. I'm going to have to work out what to do when that's up for renewal! I think my domain is £8.99 a year.

That is all the cost; I don't make any money from my blog, nor do I plan to. This is just a hobby, and hobbies (just like my embroidery and gardening) often cost money! Monetising would immediately make it stressful for me and take the fun out of it.

I don't mind if other people want to monestise as long as it's not obnoxious. I don't like newsletters where they put some things behind a paywall but not everything, or they put half of it behind the paywall. Those are annoying when they come through my RSS feed, and usually I end up unsubscribing.

I've occasionally done a "buy me a coffee" kind of one-off donation to bloggers, or the pay-what-you-like subscription model, where I can just do a couple of quid a month to show support. Or if they're an artist and they have a shop, I buy something small if the postage to the UK is reasonable.

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

My favourite blogs are the ones where I can feel the person writing it, and their personality and passions come through. I want to read human thoughts, not Content! I like details about people's lives with the things they love (books, TV shows, comics, flowers, whatever!), or might share that they're having a hard time with something and how they're coping.

Michael at My Comic Relief writes wonderful, passionate and compassionate posts about his favourite TV shows, movies and comic books. When Doctor Who and The Acolyte were on, I was watching my RSS feed for these thoughts every week! I always find his perspective interesting and his enthusiasm infectious.

Dragon Rambles is a mix of personal posts and book reviews written by Nic in New Zealand. I think she's been blogging for many years. I really love it when she shares new books she finds for her collection of retro science fiction and fantasy! I have no interest in ever reading any of them myself, but I love to read about them and her collection!

I also enjoy reading Elizabeth Tai. She is based in Malaysia and was one of the first bloggers I found on Mastodon in my super early days, and it was through her that I learned popular Indie Web concepts like digital gardens and POSSE. I enjoy the fact that she writes about all kinds of things! I am actually surprised she's not been featured yet!

I think Michael, Nic or Liz would be great to interview. Michael and Nic, I found in the land of WordPress, and may not even be aware of this project!

My other 3 favourites you've already featured, but I'll mention them because I think they're great!

Veronique has been a favourite for a long time! Her writing always feels intimate, and I love the little snippet she shares from her life, her artwork and her passion for zines. She also mentioned my blog in her interview, and I can't tell you how thrilled I was! I had to try to explain the whole thing to my husband, who does not read blogs!

Winnie Lim is another long-time favourite of mine. Her blog is also very intimate and thoughtful, and I am always eager to read about her life and little adventures.

And also Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden is like what I think I'd like my blog to be, if I had the time and inclination to properly organise myself! I know she's also had a P&B feature because that's how I found her. I love her weekly notes. I don't know why I enjoy reading what music she listened to and what meals she had that week, but I do!

This one is a silly one, and maybe a bit of a blast from the past because I used to follow Cake Wrecks way back in the day (like 15 years ago!), and when I was collecting RSS feeds of blogs again a couple of years ago, I was so happy it was still around! Unlike Regresty, RIP (and RIP to what Esty used to be!). Anyway, there is something about badly decorated cakes that I find deeply hilarious (and bad art in general), and these collections of wonky cakes made by so-called professional bakers are a regular source of joy.

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

I don't have anything in particular to share. I am just so excited to have been asked to take part!

I hope everyone keeps on doing what they love and blogging about it in the way that they want! I am thankful to have found that the 'blogosphere' is still alive and well, and for me, it's such a peaceful refuge away from the overwhelming noise of social media.

I am also hugely appreciative of projects like this that make it easier for bloggers to find each other, so thank you, Manu!

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 111 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Travis Schmeisser and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

From the Summit 2.0 - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-17T06:30:00.000Z

TL;DR: I have rebooted my From the Summit newsletter. It’s gonna be all about life outdoors, and there’s gonna be a lot of pretty pictures. If this sounds appealing, go sign up for it. If you were previously a subscriber, you’ll have to sign up again since I deleted the whole list and started from scratch.

Back in 2019, a couple of years into my blogging journey, I wanted to start a newsletter. And since I’m an odd person who loves weird ideas, I came up with the concept for “From the Summit”, a newsletter written and delivered only when I was standing on top of mountains. I didn’t know what I was doing at the time (and I still don’t), but I had a lot of fun writing and sending those emails.

It was very infrequent, I think I sent 19 newsletters in 6 years, and for the past year and a half, it was just sitting there, gathering dust and subscribers. But recently, while I was out for a walk, I had an idea: let’s reboot that newsletter and turn it into a newsletter that’s actually focused on being on a summit. Let’s make it a newsletter about spending time outdoors, a newsletter about nature, and mountains, and rivers, and lakes, and trees, and flowers, and, well, you get the idea.

And that’s how From the Summit 2.0 came to be. If you were already a subscriber of the previous incarnation of this newsletter you have probably received an email a couple of weeks ago, announcing this move. But after sending that, I realised that making it opt-out for previous subscribers didn’t feel right which is why I deleted my whole list and started from zero. I consider this a brand new newsletter which just so happens to have the same name as the old one.

So, if you want to join me as I attempt to spend more time outdoors, you can sign up for From the Summit on Buttondown. This new version is gonna be at least monthly but I might send out more, depending on what I end up doing away from the screen. And I’m gonna attempt to include a lot more pictures this time around. No AI, I promise you.

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

On concrete examples - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-16T15:25:00.000Z

I had some great conversations via email over the past couple of weeks with a bunch of different people, discussing all sorts of things that I’ll for sure end up writing about. Today I wanted to briefly touch on the topic of examples, which was part of the lovely conversation I had with Leon.

I recently wrote a blog post, titled “My issue with the two sides”, and in there I used a completely made-up, totally over-the-top example to illustrate the point I was attempting to make. As part of our conversation, one of the questions that came up was Why not make an actual, real example to illustrate my point? Which is an absolutely fair question.

The reason why I almost always use made-up examples in my blog posts is because the example itself is not important. It’s just a tool to illustrate a broader point. But using an actual example carries the risk of distracting people into thinking that the topic of the example itself is what matters. And that’s very rarely the case here on my blog. This is because I’m more interested in what I can only describe as meta-problems: I’m not interested in the topic that’s being discussed; I’m more interested in how we can make sure the discussion itself can happen and be productive, regardless of what’s being discussed.

This approach has an obvious drawback: sometimes people will try to fill in the gaps and will come to their own conclusion as to what I was actually referring to, which is not ideal for all sorts of reasons. But I’ll also keep stressing that my inbox is very much open and the easiest thing to do, if you have any thoughts about anything I wrote on this space over the past 8 years, you can email me and I’ll be more than happy to discuss in detail pretty much whatever you want.

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

Saturday, October 11, 2025 - Baty.net

2025-10-11T10:38:39.000Z

I’m still finding things that I’d changed in my PaperMod fork that I kind of need now that I’ve switched to the stock version. The Reply-By-Email button, for one. My improvement to image rendering from yesterday doesn’t work in the RSS feed because it uses a relative URL for the image. I had fixed this in my fork, so I copied that over. I also tried adding the reply button there, also.

Here’s an image to test the RSS version of the link:

Founders Brewing interior (2025) / Nikon FE2

✍️ Reply by email

Linda Ma - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-10T11:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Linda Ma, whose blog can be found at midnightpond.com.

Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter.

The People and Blogs series is supported by Chad Moore and the other 120 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?

Hey, I’m Linda. I grew up in Budapest in a Chinese family of four, heavily influenced by the 2000s internet. I was very interested in leaving home and ended up in the United Kingdom—all over, but with the most time spent in Edinburgh, Scotland. I got into design, sociology, and working in tech and startups. Then, I had enough of being a designer, working in startups, and living in the UK, so I left.

I moved to Berlin and started building a life that fits me more authentically. My interests change a lot, but the persistent ones have been: journaling with a fountain pen, being horizontal in nature, breathwork, and ambient music.

What's the story behind your blog?

I was struck by a sudden need to write in public last year. I’d been writing in private but never felt the need to put anything online because I have this thing about wanting to remain mysterious. At least, that’s the story I was telling myself.

In hindsight, the 'sudden need' was more of a 'wanting to feel safe to be seen.' I also wanted to find more people who were like-minded. Not necessarily interested in the same things as me, but thinking in similar ways.

Through writing, I discovered that articulating your internal world with clarity takes time and that I was contributing to my own problems because I wasn't good at expressing myself. I write about these kinds of realizations in my blog. It’s like turning blurriness and stories into clarity and facts. I also do the opposite sometimes, where I reframe experiences and feelings into semi-fictional stories as a way to release them. I enjoy playing in this space between self-understanding through reality and self-soothing through fantasy. I also just enjoy the process of writing and the feeling of hammering on the keyboard.

I wanted the blog to be formless and open-ended, so it didn’t have a name to begin with, and it was hanging out on my personal website. The name just kinda happened. I like the sound of the word “pond” and the feeling I get when I think of a pond. Then I thought: if I were a pond, what kind of pond would I be? A midnight pond. It reflects me, my writing, and the kind of impression I’d like to leave. It’s taken on a life of its own now, and I’m curious to see how it evolves. Nowadays, it seems I’m interested in writing shorter pieces and poems.

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

I get a lot of inspiration from introspection, often catalyzed by conversations with people, paragraphs from books, music, or moments from everyday life.

In terms of the writing process, the longer blogposts grow into being like this:

I'll have fleeting thoughts and ideas that come to me pretty randomly. I try to put them all in one place (a folder in Obsidian or a board in Muse). I organically return to certain thoughts and notes over time, and I observe which ones make me feel excited.

Typically, I'll switch to iA Writer to do the actual writing — something about switching into another environment helps me get into the right mindset. Sometimes the posts are finished easily and quickly, sometimes I get stuck. When I get stuck, I take the entire piece and make it into a pile of mess in Muse. Sometimes the mess transforms into a coherent piece, sometimes it gets abandoned.

When I finish something and feel really good about it, I let it sit for a couple days and look at it again once the post-completion high has faded. This is advice from the editors of the Modern Love column, and it’s very good advice.

I occasionally ask a friend to read something to gauge clarity and meaning. I like the idea of having more thinking buddies. Please feel free to reach out if you think we could be good thinking buddies.

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

Yes, I do believe the physical space influences my creativity. And it’s not just the immediate environment (the room or desk I'm writing at) but also the thing or tool I'm writing with (apps and notebook) as well as the broader environment (where I am geographically).

There’s a brilliant book by Vivian Gornick called The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative and a quote in it: “If you don’t leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.” It’s her comment on one of the example pieces she discusses. This writer was talking about how he couldn’t write when he was too close or too far from home. It’s an interesting perspective to consider, and I find it very relatable. Though I wouldn’t have arrived at this conclusion had I not experienced both extremes.

My ideal creative environment is a relatively quiet space where I can see some trees or a body of water when I look up. The tools I mentioned before and my physical journal are also essential to me.

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

My site is built with Astro, the code is on GitHub, and all deploys through Netlify. The site/blog is really just a bunch of .md and .mdx files with some HTML and CSS. I code in VS Code.

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

I wouldn’t change anything about the content or the name. Maybe I would give the tech stack or platform more thought if I started it now? In moments of frustration with Astro or code, I’ve often wondered if I should just accept that I’m not a techie and use something simpler. It’s been an interesting journey figuring things out though. Too deep into it, can’t back out now.

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 only running cost I have at the moment is the domain which is around $10 a year. iA Writer was a one-time purchase of $49.99. My blog doesn’t generate revenue.

I don’t like the idea of turning personal blogs into moneymaking machines because it will most likely influence what and how you write. But — I am supportive of creatives wanting to be valued for what they create and share from an authentic place. I like voluntary support based systems like buymeacoffee.com or ko-fi.com. I also like the spirit behind platforms like Kickstarter or Metalabel.

I started a Substack earlier this year where I share the longer posts from my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this subscription thing, but I now use the paywall to protect posts that are more personal than others. I’ve come across a lot of writing I enjoy though and connected with others through writing.

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

Here are a few I’ve been introduced to or stumbled upon:

Lu’s Wikiblogardenite — Very real and entertaining blog of a "slightly-surreal videos maker and coder".
Romina’s Journal — Journal of a graphic designer and visual artist.
Maggie Appleton’s Garden — Big fan of Maggie’s visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology.
Elliott’s memory site — This memory site gives me a cozy feeling.
Where are Kay and Phil? — Friends documenting their bike tours and recipes.

Interesting, no-longer-active blogs:

brr — Blog of an IT professional who was deployed to Antarctica during 2022-2023.
The late Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog — She started this at the age of 81 in 2010.

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

I like coming across sites that surprise me. Here’s one that boggles my mind, and here’s writer Catherine Lacey’s website.

There’s also this online documentary and experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimous Bosch that I share all the time, and Spencer Chang’s website is pretty cool.

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 110 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Ben Werdmuller and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.

My issue with the two sides - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-10T08:35:00.000Z

One fairly common concept you’ll inevitably stumble upon if you spend any modicum of time reading discussions on the web is the idea of “two sides”. Some will tell you that the two sides are not the same and one is clearly better than the other, others will argue that not taking one side means that you’re tacitly supporting the other, while someone else will tell you that trying to argue that maybe more nuanced positions exist, in addition to the two sides, is wrong and you’re a bad person for doing that.

All this is fair, and I’m more than happy to concede that, in some circumstances, one side is indeed clearly better than the other. I’m also happy to concede that again, in some circumstances, not expressing a preference for one of the two camps, when one is clearly better than the other, can be seen as tacit support for the worse one. I’m also more than happy to agree that sometimes dragging a discussion into the mud that is the infinite fractal world of the fine details is not really all that helpful.

Having said all that, I still think way too often conversations on the web have the tendency to completely obliterate any level of nuance. Which is understandable, considering most conversations are taking place on social media platforms that aren’t designed to have nuanced conversations in the first place. There are ideas and concepts that demand more than 300 characters to be expressed fully, but unfortunately, sometimes even saying that can be seen as problematic in some circles. And that is unfortunate.

It is unfortunate because progress can only be had if people have enough space and time to express themselves fully and then have their ideas challenged constructively. And yes, I’m already hearing you screaming that some racist bigots out there don’t deserve to have their views treated respectfully and be given time and space. I get it, and I understand it.

The problem I see with this, though, is that the internet is a weird place. A lot of people aren’t vocal. Most of them are just lurking around, absorbing content and forming ideas in their head and maybe discussing things in person with close friends and family. And amongst them, there probably are a lot of people who would be more than happy to support and join the good one of the two sides, but are probably kept at a distance because of the insanity they see unfolding.

I’m gonna pick a stupid example to make this point a bit clearer. Let’s imagine the topic of the day is “kicking puppies”. One camp is happily going around supporting the kicking of puppies because it’s a fun thing to do, and puppies are worthless and annoying, while the other camp thinks puppies are adorable—they are—and they are living creatures and deserve to not be kicked and instead loved and adored. It’s fairly easy to see that one camp, clearly, is better than the other, and if you are a sane and decent person, you should not have a hard time figuring out which camp is worth siding with. And sure, you might be one of those people who might argue that in some cases, puppies can be problematic because maybe they are puppies of a terrible invasive species that will destroy the solar system in 3 years if we don’t kick them all now. But, generally speaking you should find it easy to side with one of the two sides, even if only with some asterisk attached.

But what if the pro-puppies camp you hear from online doesn’t stop at "puppies should be loved" but also argues that people who kick puppies should all die now and be dissolved in acid and their families be shot into the sun? You clearly are supporting the puppies' cause, but you are definitely not on board with all the rest of the nonsense.

What do you do then, when someone screams at you, asking which side you are siding with? You clearly love puppies, but you also don’t want to support drowning people in acid. So you’re fucked. You could try to explain your position, but nobody got time for that. Chances are, you say nothing, and you silently move away from the public discourse space, never to be seen or heard again.

I don’t know about you, but I think that’s bad. It’s bad when a lot of people are scared to express what they think because they are scared of the repercussions. Because you can’t have a healthy society without open dialogue. And I don’t even know how we fix this at the internet level. I don’t think there even is a way to fix this to be perfectly honest with you. It’s up to the individuals to go through the effort of giving other people time and space to express themselves and engage in dialogue. And if that's the only way out, well, shit.

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

Thursday, October 09, 2025 - Baty.net

2025-10-09T14:04:31.000Z

Aaaaand, we’re back.

Sometimes I really like WordPress. It lasts a week or two.

I cleaned a few things up around here. The big one is that I’m now using the stock PaperMod theme rather than the mess I made in my own fork. I’ll probably tweak, but I don’t want to maintain my own theme.

I also removed /notes from the navigation. I don’t need them. I may find some other way to indicate/present shorter posts, but for now it’s all either a post or a daily note.

Who knows if I’ll end up back there. Some of the cool upcoming ActivityPub stuff might draw me. For now, though, it’s Hugo at Baty.net.

Safari and iOS 26: PSA and a rant - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-08T07:25:00.000Z

The new iOS is bad in so many ways that writing a post highlighting them all is quite pointless. By the time I’d be done typing, they’d have likely released iOS 27 (and hopefully fixed most of this nonsense). So I’m not gonna waste time doing that and simply focus on one single thing that was so bad when I first upgraded that I was genuinely considering changing career: the new iOS UI.

This thing is an abomination

Look, I don’t really care about new UIs; I’m not one of those people who complain simply because things are different. I know software changes over time, that’s fine. But this UI is bad for one simple reason: you can’t access all tabs when using the phone one-handed in a convenient way. And before you start typing «Hey idiot, have you tried tapping that button with the three dots?» I can tell you that yes, I did. I know the missing options are there. But this means that literally every operation now takes two taps instead of one, and I also have to sit through an excruciatingly slow animation every time that stupid menu opens up.

If, like me, you hate this, I just wanted to let you know that there is a solution.

Why is the browser UI grouped with Tabs settings? Nobody knows

Go into settings -> apps -> Safari, scroll down a bit till you find the Tabs section and in there, there’s an option to change the UI with something that’s so much better.

This is not perfect, but it’s so much better

This is the end of the PSA. Now, let me rant.

Look, I don’t think I’m an amazing designer. Or a designer at all these days. But I think I do possess at least one redeeming quality: some design-related common sense, thanks to a professor who, for 5 years, bashed me in the head constantly while I was studying design.

The main purpose of a browser is to provide access to the web. You do that through a paradigm called tabs. It’s been like that for decades. Creating a tab, closing a tab, and moving through tabs are the minimum functionalities needed to have a proper browser UI. Ok, I guess you also need to have an address bar where to type something, but I consider that part of the tab.

You cannot hide the controls for those interactions inside a menu. You just cannot. Imagine if the shutter button in your camera app was hidden behind a pop-up menu. You’d chuck that piece of shit of an app in the digital hell it belongs to. And for good reasons.

If I’m using a browser, I need to be able to create a new tab with just one click. I need to be able to access all the open tabs in one click. That’s a non-negotiable imo. And this alternative Safari UI is not perfect, mind you. The new tab button is still hidden behind an extra tap, while the middle spot in that UI is taken up by a completely useless share button, because Apple is apparently run by people with infinite wisdom.

And this is not fucking rocket science. Basically, every other browser out there is managing to do this just fine. New tab in the middle, arrows to navigate on one side, all tabs button on the right.

Firefox, Chrome, and Edge all doing it right

The point of a UI in something like a browser is not to wow or to provide joy. The point is to fucking work. How about you first do that, and then you figure out how to pour all your stupid molten glass on top of it?

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

On public online behaviour - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-05T13:05:00.000Z

I’m currently in “digital fasting” mode, trying to consume as little content as possible here on the internet. But I do have to be here for work, and so I still end up reading a few things here and there. Some of that content is sent to me via email by random people (always appreciate that) while other is just because I have to open links to blogs that are submitted to blogroll.org. And even though I am not on any social media platform, some of the nonsense that’s going on there still manages to reach me, albeit indirectly. Which is quite impressive, I have to say. It’s incredibly hard to both have an online presence and also completely seal yourself away from social media nonsense. And this is something that’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because the idea of a fediverse is blurring the line that separates these worlds.

One thing that’s fun to observe, though, as a very passive and disinterested spectator, is how some patterns of behaviour seem to be platform agnostic. Which is just a very polite way for me to say that dickheads are omnipresent. It doesn’t matter what tech stack they have behind them: if you give them a public way to express themselves, they’ll inevitably shit on everything and everyone and just be despicable human beings, no matter what.

And I really do believe that this is a byproduct of the public nature of social media. I sincerely doubt that they do this in private, because I don’t think it’s as rewarding. By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone. Then pat yourself on the back and get ready to join the next mob.

This is something that’s entirely absent when interactions are moved to private channels of communication. I think it’s incredibly rare for a mob to try to pile on you via email. You can just keep marking everyone as spam, not even bothering to open their messages. And they get no kick out of it. There’s no personal reward to be found in sending a shitty email to someone.

And that is why, even though I had nothing but enjoyable exchanges with everyone I crossed paths with online, I’ll still stick with email and DMs as the way to interact with the rest of you out there. And if you think you have a good argument to make to prove I’m wrong, I wanna hear it. My inbox is 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

Blake Watson - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-03T11:00:00.000Z

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Blake Watson, whose blog can be found at blakewatson.com.

Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter.

The People and Blogs series is supported by Ray and the other 120 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?

Sure! I’m Blake. I live in a small city near Jackson, Mississippi, USA. I work for MRI Technologies as a frontend engineer, building bespoke web apps for NASA. Previously I worked at an ad agency as an interactive designer.

I have a neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It's a progressive condition that causes my muscles to become weaker over time. Because of that, I use a power wheelchair and a whole host of assistive technologies big and small. I rely on caregivers for most daily activities like taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating—just to name a few.

I am able to use a computer on my own. I knew from almost the first time I used one that it was going to be important in my life.

I studied Business Information Systems in college as a way to take computer-related courses without all the math of computer science (which scared me at the time). When I graduated, I had a tough time finding a job making websites. I did a bit of freelance work and volunteer work to build up a portfolio, but was otherwise unemployed for several years. I finally got my foot in the door and I recently celebrated a milestone of being employed for a decade.

When I'm not working, I'm probably tinkering on side projects. I'm somewhat of a side project and home-cooked app enthusiast. I just really enjoy making and using my own tools. Over the last 10 years, I've gotten into playing Dungeons and Dragons and a lot of my side projects have been related to D&D.

I enjoy design, typography, strategy games, storytelling, writing, programming, gamedev, and music.

What's the story behind your blog?

I got hooked on making websites in high school and college in the early 2000s. A friend of mine in high school had a sports news website. I want to say it was made with the Homestead site builder or something similar. I started writing for it and helping with it. I couldn’t get enough so I started making my own websites using WYSIWYG page builders. But I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of page builders. Designing sites felt clunky and I couldn’t get elements to do exactly what I wanted them to do.

I had a few blogs on other services over the years. Xanga was maybe the first one. Then I had one on Blogger for a while.

In 2005, I took a course called Advanced Languages 1. It turned out to be JavaScript. Learning JavaScript necessitated learning HTML. Throughout the course I became obsessed with learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually, in August of 2005—twenty years ago—I purchased the domain blakewatson.com.

I iterated on it multiple times a year at first. It morphed from quirky design to quirkier design as I learned more CSS. It was a personal homepage, but I blogged at other services. Thanks to RSS, I could list my recent blog posts on my website.

When I graduated from college, my personal website became more of a web designer's portfolio, a professional site that I would use to attract clients and describe my services. But around that time I was learning how to use WordPress and I started a self-hosted WordPress blog called I hate stairs. It was an extremely personal disability-related and life journaling type of blog that I ran for several years. When I got my first full-time position and didn't need to freelance any longer, I converted blakewatson.com back into a personal website. But this time, primarily a blog. I discontinued I hate stairs (though I maintain an archive and all the original URLs work).

I had always looked up to various web designers in the 2000s who had web development related blogs. People like Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Jason Santa Maria, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.

For the past decade, I've blogged about web design, disability, and assistive tech—with the odd random topic here or there.

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

I used to blog only when inspiration struck me hard enough to jolt my lazy ass out of whatever else I was doing. That strategy left me writing three or four articles a year (I don’t know why, but I think of my blog posts as articles in a minor publication, and this hasn’t helped me do anything but self-edit—I need to snap out of it and just post). In March 2023, however, I noticed that I had written an article every month so far that year. I decided to keep up the streak. And ever since then, I've posted at least one article a month on my blog. I realize that isn't very frequent for some people, but I enjoy that pacing, although I wouldn't mind producing a handful more per year.

Since I'm purposefully posting more, I've started keeping a list of ideas in my notes just so I have something to look through when it's time to write. I use Obsidian mostly for that kind of thing.

The writing itself almost always happens in iA Writer. This app is critical to my process because I am someone who likes to tinker with settings and fonts and pretty much anything I can configure. If I want to get actual writing done, I need constraints. iA Writer is perfect because it looks and works great by default and has very few formatting options. I think I paid $10 for this app one time ten or more years ago. That has to be the best deal I've ever gotten on anything.

I usually draft in Writer and then preview it on my site locally to proofread. I have to proofread on the website, in the design where it will live. If I proofread in the editor I will miss all kinds of typos. So I pop back and forth between the browser and the editor fixing things as I go.

I can no longer type on a physical keyboard. I use a mix of onscreen keyboard and dictation when writing prose. Typing is a chore and part of the reason I don’t blog more often. It usually takes me several hours to draft, proofread, and publish a post.

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

I mostly need to be at my desk because I have my necessary assistive tech equipment set up there. I romanticize the idea of writing in a comfy nook or at a cozy coffee shop. I've tried packing up my setup and taking it to a coffee shop, but in practice I get precious little writing done that way.

What I usually do to get into a good flow state is put on my AirPods Pro, turn on noise cancellation, maybe have some ambient background noise or music, and just write. Preferably while sipping coffee or soda.

But if I could have any environment I wanted, I would be sitting in a small room by a window a few stories up in a quaint little building from the game Townscaper, clacking away on an old typewriter or scribbling in a journal with a Parker Jotter.

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

I've bounced around a bit in terms of tech stack, but in 2024, I migrated from a self-hosted WordPress site to a generated static site with Eleventy. My site is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN)—a shared hosting service I love for its simplistic homemade admin system, and powerful VPS-like capabilities. My domain is registered with them as well, although I’m letting Cloudflare handle my DNS for now.

I used Eleventy for the first time in 2020 and became a huge fan. I was stoked to migrate blakewatson.com. The source code is in a private repo on GitHub. Whenever I push to the main branch, DeployHQ picks it up and deploys it to my server.

I also have a somewhat convoluted setup that checks for social media posts and displays them on my website by rebuilding and deploying automatically whenever I post. It's more just a way for me to have an archive of my posts on Mastodon than anything.

Because my website is so old, I have some files not in my repo that live on my server. It is somewhat of a sprawling living organism at this point, with various small apps and tools (and even games!) deployed to sub-directories.

I have a weekly scheduled task that runs and saves the entire site to Backblaze B2.

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

You know, I'm happy to say that I'd mostly do the same thing. I think everyone should have their own website. I would still choose to blog at my own domain name. Probably still a static website. I might structure things a bit differently. If I were designing it now, I might make more allowances for title-less, short posts (technically I can do this now, but they get lumped into my social feed, which I'm calling my Microblog, and kind of get lost). I might design it to be a little weirder rather than buttoned up as it is now. And hey, it's my website. I still might do that.

Tinkering with your personal website is one of life's great joys. If you can't think of anything to do with your website, here are a hundred ideas for you.

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 money from my website directly, but having a website was critical in getting my first job and getting clients before that. So, in a way, all the money I've made working could be attributed to having a personal website.

I have a lot of websites and a lot of domains, so it's a little hard to figure out exactly what blakewatson.com itself costs. NFSN is a pay-as-you-go service. I'm currently hosting 13 websites of varying sizes and complexity, and my monthly cost aside from domains is about $23.49. $5 of that is an optional support membership. I could probably get the cost down further by putting the smaller sites together on a single shared server.

I pay about $14 per year for the domain these days.

I pay $10.50 per month for DeployHQ, but I use it for multiple sites including a for-profit side project, so it doesn’t really cost anything to use it for my blog (this is the type of mental gymnastics I like to do).

I pay $15 per month for Fathom Analytics. In my mind, this is also subsidized by my for-profit side project.

I mentioned that I backup my website to Backblaze B2. It's extremely affordable, and I think I'm paying below 50 cents per month currently for the amount of storage I'm using (and that also includes several websites).

If you also throw in the cost of tools like Tower and Sketch, then there's another $200 worth of costs per year. But I use those programs for many things other than my blog.

When you get down to it, blogs are fairly inexpensive to run when they are small and personal like mine. I could probably get the price down to free, save for the domain name, if I wanted to use something like Cloudflare Pages to host it—or maybe a free blogging service.

I don't mind people monetizing their blogs at all. I mean if it's obnoxious then I'm probably not going to stay on your website very long. But if it's done tastefully with respect to the readers then good for you. I also don't mind paying to support bloggers in some cases. I have a number of subscriptions for various people to support their writing or other creative output.

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

Here are some blogs I'm impressed with in no particular order. Many of these people have been featured in this series before.

Chris Coyier. "Mediocre ideas, showing up, and persistence." <3
Jim Nielsen. Continually produces smart content. Don't know how he does it.
Nicole Kinzel. She has posted nearly daily for over two years capturing human struggles and life with SMA through free verse poetry.
Dave Rupert. I enjoy the balance of tech and personal stuff and the honesty of the writing.
Tyler Sticka. His blog is so clean you could eat off of it. A good mix of tech and personal topics. Delightful animations.
Maciej Cegłowski. Infrequent and longform. Usually interesting regardless of whether I agree or disagree.
Brianna Albers. I’m cheating because this is a column and not a blog per se. But her writing reads like a blog—it's personal, contemplative, and compelling. There are so very few representations of life with SMA online that I'd be remiss not to mention her.
Daring Fireball. A classic blog I’ve read for years. Good for Apple news but also interesting finds in typography and design.
Robb Knight. To me, Robb’s website is the epitome of the modern indieweb homepage. It’s quirky, fun, and full of content of all kinds. And that font. :chefskiss:
Katherine Yang. A relatively new blog. Beautiful site design. Katherine's site feels fresh and experimental and exudes humanity.

I'd like to take this opportunity to mention Anne Sturdivant. She was interviewed here on People & Blogs. When I first discovered this series, I put her blog in the suggestion box. I was impressed with her personal website empire and the amount of content she produced. Sadly, Anne passed away earlier this year. We were internet buddies and I miss her. 💜

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

I'd like to share a handful of my side projects for anyone who might be interested.

HTML for People. I wrote this web book for anyone who is interested in learning HTML to make websites. I wrote this to be radically beginner-friendly. The focus is on what you can accomplish with HTML rather than dwelling on a lot of technical information.
A Fine Start. This is the for-profit side project I mentioned. It is a new tab page replacement for your web browser. I originally made it for myself because I wanted all of my favorite links to be easily clickable from every new tab. I decided to turn it into a product. The vast majority of the features are free. You only pay if you want to automatically sync your links with other browsers and devices.
Minimal Character Sheet. I mentioned enjoying Dungeons and Dragons. This is a web app for managing a D&D 5th edition character. I made it to be a freeform digital character sheet. It's similar to using a form fillable PDF, except that you have a lot more room to write. It doesn't force many particular limitations on your character since you can write whatever you want. Totally free.

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 109 interviews.

Make sure to also say thank you to Lars-Christian Simonsen and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.

When your website makes you smile - James' Coffee Blog

2025-10-02T15:57:03.000Z

For most days of the year, the name of my website – James’ Coffee Blog – is followed by a coffee cup emoji. But, on some days, the coffee cup emoji changes. I have a calendar of events for which the emoji changes, including International Day of Peace (September 21st), Burns Night (January 21st), and Web Standards Day (November 30th).

I don’t think about the emojis most of the time. It is only on those occasional days when I go to my site and realise that the emoji has changed that I am intrigued, delighted, or otherwise fascinated. I don’t know International Cat Day off the top of my head, but my website does. As I read my list of seasons, apparently Crisp Sandwich Day is coming up (October 25th). I will surely have to celebrate with a crisp sandwich.

I went to my website today and noticed there is a pumpkin. Why is there a pumpkin? I thought. Oh! It’s the month of Halloween. (Part of me now thinks that the emoji should be the autumn leaves for the first half of the month! I love autumn.)

My website is full of tiny things I made that I occasionally think about or re-discover with joy, like my (occasionally updated for various technical reasons too long to explain here) retro page that shows a (ahem dubiously) “retro” version of my home page. Or my Unicode-character-whose-name-I-can’t-remember-but-brings-me-joy page.

This week, I added another feature to spark joy. Hover over the cat icon and its eyes will open. It’s a small animation, but it makes all the difference.

Happy autumn!

Making things obvious - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-10-01T17:10:00.000Z

Back in February 2024, I published a blog post about my new—at the time—site. One of the things I mentioned in that post was that this site had a guestbook.

Quick aside: a guestbook, for those of you who might not know, is something that used to be fairly common on the web of the late 90s, early 2000s, but slowly fell out of fashion as more and more people moved to social media and people stopped caring about personal sites for the most part.

This site doesn’t have comments, and the only way to interact with me is to either send me an email (I love those) or to ping me on iMessage if you’re on the Apple ecosystem. But I wanted to give people a way to leave a mark of their passage, which is why I implemented a guestbook. I think guestbooks in general are awesome, and some are so much fun to browse. I mean, just look how fun Eva’s guestbook is.

Anyway, I mentioned I had a guestbook, and a link to it has been sitting at the bottom of every post ever since. It’s also linked at the bottom of every post if you read this site using RSS. And I mentioned it in passing every once in a while inside my posts. And yet, I still often get messages from people telling me they didn’t know this site has a guestbook. Which is totally fine, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to spend their days on my site, but it makes me wonder how many other things I assume are obvious to everyone who visits this site but actually aren’t.

For example, do you know I have a weekly series called People and Blogs and every Friday for the past 2+ years, I have published an interview featuring an amazing person and their personal site? It’s mentioned everywhere on this site, all the 100+ interviews are in the archive down below, but maybe some people don’t actually know that?

Do I have to mention that in addition to this site, I also maintain blogroll.org? And that if you have a personal site, you can submit it to it?

And do I also have to mention that everything I do is very generously supported by some super kind and awesome people who have signed up for my One a month Club? An idea that has its own dedicated website, thanks to Jarrod.

Every time I mentioned these things, a part of me cringes and feels bad because it sounds so self-promoty, but then I get those emails and I’m reminded that the only way for people to know the things you do exist is if you remind them that they do, in fact, exist.

And if you already knew about all these things, I’m sorry.

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'll be over at baty.blog for a bit - Baty.net

2025-10-01T09:21:58.000Z

I’m bored with baty.net right now. I need a break from the SSG style of blogging. I just want to type some words, drag in an image or two, and hit a Publish button. I want comments without jumping through hoops. I want free analytics built-in. I want an ecosystem. I want to be able to change themes without spending hours doing complex find-and-replace operations to get my front matter correct.

Anyway, for now: 👉 Baty.blog is the place.

I like the default WordPress theme I’m using. Gutenberg isn’t my favorite thing, but it’s fine for the most part. I’m also playing with Dave Winer’s Wordland tool for easily posting to a WordPress blog.

You’ll notice that I’m not replacing baty.net with WordPress. We all know that I’ll likely be back here in a week, so I’m just saving myself some time in advance.

See you there! Oh, the RSS feed is https://baty.blog/feed/.

New site, kinda - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-30T16:20:00.000Z

If you’re reading this blog using RSS or via email (when I remember to send the content via email), you likely didn’t notice it. And if you’re reading my blog in the browser but are not a sharp observer, chances are, you also didn’t notice it. A new version of my site is live. At first glance, not much has changed. The typeface is still the same—love you, Iowan—the layout is still the same, the colours are still the same. For the most part, the site should still feel pretty much the same.

So what has changed? A lot, especially under the hood. For example: I have rewritten the entire CSS, and I’m no longer using SASS since it’s no longer needed; interviews are now separate from regular content at the backend level and have their own dedicate URL structure (old URLs should still work, though); the site is now better structured to be expanded into something more akin to a digital garden than “just” a blog.

Since I had to rewrite all the frontend code, I took this opportunity to tweak a few things here and there: quotes have a new style, the guestbook has been redesigned (go sign it if you haven’t already), typography has been slightly tweaked in a couple of places, and the site should now scale much better on very big screens.

More importantly, though, P&B interviews now have a more unique design—and a new colour scheme—something that makes me very happy. There are so many things I want to do for this series, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to this, so I’m happy to have at least managed to give them a more unique identity here on the site.

This space is still a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress, so expect things to change over time as I fine-tune minor details here and 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

CalDAV to my Emacs Diary - Baty.net

2025-09-29T21:33:37.000Z

Please, there must be a thousand ways to do this that I haven’t discovered. If you know of anything simpler, I’m all ears. The following is a quick-and-dirty summary of how I did it.

I use the Emacs Diary all the time. I prefer it to using only Org-mode dates in my agenda. The tricky piece is getting the stuff from my CalDAV (Fastmail) calendar into the diary.

Hanno’s post, Managing calendar events in Emacs got me started. Their post is more geared toward Org dates, but it gave me a good leg up.

Basically, it’s this:

Sync using vdirsyncer
Convert using khal
Include converted entries in my diary file

I installed vdirsyncer and khal via Pacman (Omarchy)

Here’s my ~/.config/vdirsyncer/config:

[general]
# A folder where vdirsyncer can store some metadata about each pair.
status_path = "~/.vdirsyncer/status/"

# CALDAV
[pair jack_calendar]
a = "jack_calendar_local"
b = "jack_calendar_remote"
collections = ["from a", "from b"]

# Calendars also have a color property
metadata = ["displayname", "color"]

[storage jack_calendar_local]
type = "filesystem"
path = "~/.calendars/"
fileext = ".ics"

[storage jack_calendar_remote]
type = "caldav"
url = "https://my.caldav.account"
username = "nerd@example.com"
password = "averylongpasswordreally"

I ran vdirsyncer discover once and then vdirsyncer sync and it pulled my calendars down into ~/.calendars/

vdirsyncer creates .ics calendar files, which aren’t useful for Emacs Diary. That’s where khal comes in.

My ~/.config/khal/config file:

[calendars]

[[main]]

  path = "~/.calendars/699f44f9-799a-4325-9328-aff622023096/"
  color = dark green

[[other]]
  path = "~/.calendars/2e7d0c52-d5c7-4e6a-aa2e-01f8eb84a515/"

[locale]

  dateformat = %Y-%m-%d
  timeformat = %H:%M

That tells khal where the calenders are, and sets up a usable output format for use in the Emacs Diary. The following command is where I landed.

khal list --format "{start-date} {start-time}-{end-time} {title}" \
      --day-format "" \
      today 10d >~/.config/emacs-mine/caldav-diary

It generates a list of calendar events from today until 10 days from now and puts the results into a file that I use as part of my Emacs Diary. Just make sure that includes are enabled:

(add-hook 'diary-list-entries-hook 'diary-include-other-diary-files)

Then, in my main diary files, I added the include line:

#include "/home/jbaty/.config/emacs-mine/caldav-diary"

Events from CalDAV on my Org agenda

And boom! My Fastmail calendar shows up in my Org Agenda.

I’m not worrying about syncing the other direction, yet.

Ah, blogging - Baty.net

2025-09-29T10:15:07.000Z

You may or may not have noticed that I’ve been posting over at my experimental WordPress blog at baty.blog. I wish I had a good explanation for it, but I don’t. It may be that my current foray into using Linux has caused a bit of keyboard-and-text-only fatigue. I mean, it’s been all day in a terminal or TUI or NeoVim for everything. I have been dealing with sync and config and updates and so on. By the time I go to write something on the blog, I’ve lost the mood, so I’ve been clicking “New Post” in my browser, typing a bit, dragging and dropping an image or two, and clicking the Publish button. It’s kind of a relief, honestly.

I still dream of having only one blog, but until I stop being so moody about it, that feels unlikely. I started this post just to see if I was back in the mood for Emacs/Hugo. I apologize for my continued tendencies to jump all over the place. I know it’s annoying. In the meantime, I’m writing mostly here, or over at baty.blog, or on the wiki.

Scoring books - Manuel Moreale RSS Feed

2025-09-27T13:25:00.000Z

Over the past couple of years, I've used Literal to keep track of the books I've read and that I’m reading. When you mark a book as completed, Literal, like probably every other site and app of this type, asks for a review, which includes a 1-to-5 star rating.

I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5.

I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.

Anyway, I find myself reflecting on this because as I’m—painfully slowly—working on an updated version of my site, I’m considering adding a books section to it and was debating what to do when it comes to ratings. I’ll likely end up doing something similar to what Netflix does (or did; I have no idea if it’s still like that, since I don’t watch Netflix).

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

Saying thanks on the web - James' Coffee Blog

2025-09-26T11:03:17.000Z

One of the things I love most about blogging is that you can write about an explore an idea as it forms, without necessarily having a specific resolution or end state in mind. With that in mind, I wanted to document a line of thinking that has been on my mind for the last week: saying thank you as a primitive of the web.

Last week, a friend who contributes to Wikipedia noted that they received a "thank you" from someone for their edit on a Wikipedia page. We learned that since 2013 the English Wikipedia has had a "thanks" button that lets you express gratitude to someone for making a contribution. The relevant Wikipedia page documenting the "Thanks notification" describes it as:

The Thanks notification offers a way to give positive feedback on Wikipedia. This feature allows editors to send a "thank you" notification to users who make useful edits – by using a small "thank" link on the history page or diff page.

This got me thinking about how many times I say thank you when it comes to the web, both directly and to myself. When a friend shares a cool link with me, I'll regularly say thank you. A new link precedes that the feeling I'm going to see or learn something new! When I see a page with lots of links, I feel grateful that someone has taken the time to prepare the list. When I read a useful blog post that helps me complete a task or a story that opens my mind, I similarly feel grateful. Thank you!

Perhaps I am thinking about this more because I have just finished reading Tim-Berners' Lee's new book This is for Everyone, from which I am reminded of how lucky we are to have an open space where we can express ideas. I am so grateful the web exists. In the book, he speaks of the potential of the web; the web now does not have to be its end state. We can make the web better.

Maybe the purpose of this post -- and all my thinking -- was to both acknowledge how cool Wikipedia's "thanks" feature is because it encourages kindness. Or maybe it was because I really needed to say somewhere on the web that I'm glad the web exists. Or maybe there is more to this line of thinking. How can we make the web kinder?

I brought up the topic of saying thanks on the web Homebrew Website Club this week. It got me thinking about the idea of a "/thank-you" page. What would that look like? A list of acknowledgements for software you use and people who made your website possible? A list of foundational resources that helped inspire different parts of your website? I'm not sure, but I love that I can ask these questions and put them on the web for consideration. What if tutorials, like Wikipedia, had a "thanks" button to express gratitude? I would love to hear more ideas!

I spend an increasing amount of my web time reading personal websites. This month I have read stories about cardinals in North America, goings-on in my local area, mixtapes, laptop bags, data residency, and more. If you have a personal website, whether it is a single page, a blog, or whatever form it takes – thank you for making it!