Latest Posts (20 found)
Manuel Moreale 4 days ago

On open protocols

It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “ Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on? ” by Ploum ( also featured on P&B ). I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly don’t even care about the outcome of this situation. I’m just an external observer in this context. Quick summary of the situation: I can’t stress enough that this is just a quick summary, and you should read the original post . There’s also a discussion happening on Mastodon , if you want to see what others are saying. I can see where Ploum is coming from, his concerns are definitely valid, and he’s motivated by good intentions. At the same time, though, I find his position a bit perplexing. Isn’t the point of an open protocol, like ActivityPub, to provide a structure that can be used by others to build whatever they want? If someone wants to build a service, on top of AP, that only displays content of a certain type, they should be able to do so. Granted, they should make it very clear to the people who sign up for it that some filtering is happening, but if those same people are cool with that, then I don’t see the issue. If tomorrow I wake up and I want to make an AP-based service that only serves audio content and is designed to encourage people sending voice messages to each other , I should be able to do so, without being required to also implement everything else that’s available on the protocol. In his post, Ploum uses the idea of a TextFed service “that will never display posts with pictures”. If you ask me, that would be a totally reasonable project, especially if you want to build something that is not very resource-intensive, since you’re only dealing with text, and you don’t want to mess with media content. Why shouldn’t you be able to build such a thing on top of AP? Why should you be forced to accept videos and images coming from the rest of the Fediverse if that’s not what you want? Also, it’s hard for me to square this whole line of argument with the concept of moderation. If you can’t trust a user to figure out by themselves that by signing up to something like Pixelfed, they only get a subset of the content available on the fediverse, then I don’t see how you can’t trust them to understand that, depending on which server they join, some other servers might be blocked. Does that mean the Fediverse should not have moderation? A protocol is either open or it is not. And if it’s open, we should accept that some people might use it in ways we do not agree with. And that’s ok. But again, I'm not a fediverse user, so maybe my intuition here is entirely wrong. So feel free to reach out to let me know why I'm wrong. 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 Pixelfed is a decentralised Instagram alternative built on the ActivityPub protocol and focused on images and videos In order to do that, the app is designed to silently drop content that doesn’t contain images or videos, and so text-only content is not displayed on people’s timelines In his post, Ploum is arguing that this is wrong because, in doing that, Pixelfeed is not behaving in a way that is in line with the rest of the Fediverse and can undermine the whole ActivityPub endeavor

open-source Open Source
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Manuel Moreale 5 days ago

Come on John

For all I know, John O'Nolan is a cool dude. He’s the founder of Ghost , a project that is also really cool. You know what’s also cool? RSS. And guess what, John just announced he’s working on a new RSS app (Reader? Tool? Service?) called Alcove and he blogged about it . All this is nice. All this is cool. The more people build tools and services for the open web, the better. Having said all that though, John: If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of undefined scope, I'm sharing live updates of progress on Twitter, here. You are on your own blog, your own corner of the web, powered by the platform you’re the CEO of, a blog that also serves content via RSS, the thing you’re building a tool for, and you’re telling people to follow the progress on fucking Twitter? Come on John. 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

web-development Web Development open-source Open Source web Web
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Manuel Moreale 5 days ago

Stephanie Stimac

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stephanie Stimac, whose blog can be found at blog.stephaniestimac.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Lou Plummer and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m Stephanie Stimac, a product manager and designer from Seattle, WA but I currently live in a small town in England. My background is in visual and web design, and I graduated at a weird time in terms of web tech. A good portion of my final year of university was spent learning about how to build websites in Flash and when I graduated, Flash quickly became obsolete, but I had a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge which helped me advance through my career. I was doing purely design work for the first part of my career before I joined the Microsoft Edge Web Platform team, where I started doing a handful of other things that were product management and developer relations adjacent. I’ve spec’d out features, analyzed data and user flows, created content for social media, performed user research to identify developer paint points, given conference talks, the list goes on. I left Microsoft for a startup that moved me to Berlin but that was unfortunately short lived due to the company folding rather quickly after hiring 100+ people. Now I live in England with my husband and work for Igalia, a technology consultancy, and I’m back in the Web Platform space. It’s sort of like my role at Microsoft but less product and more project focused. In between all this, I wrote a book that was published in 2023 called Design for Developers. It’s an evergreen guide to the basics of visual and UX design for web developers. I’m a collector of hobbies but my focus lately has been reading, baking, photography, printmaking and creating content. I’m a mountain biker and love to hike as well as paddle board. I’ve also gotten into birding in the last year or so. There are so many different kinds, it’s incredible. Depends on which blog you’re talking about! I’ve been blogging since about 2003 when I had a LiveJournal in high school. That evolved into a blogging and sharing about college life on Wordpress around 2008/2009 and went through a few iterations before I landed on the name The Hermes Homestead. I no longer blog there but am in the process of starting that sort of lifestyle blogging again and am building a new site with Astro and Netlify. As for my more technical and design focused blog, I started that in 2019 about 3 years into my career at Microsoft. I wanted a space to talk about CSS, design and web browser things. This is my most visited blog, and it is attached to my personal website and portfolio though I called it “The Web Witch’s Blog” for a long time – now there’s just a cauldron with a code mark. It’s been through a few redesigns. It was very basic in terms of styling for the longest time. I’ve slowly made incremental improvements to things over the years, but this year I did a larger redesign to try and capture a bit of my witchy vibe and wanted to include more visuals, some subtle animations and view transitions. There are a few different types of ways I post. I was doing monthly updates just covering things I had learned, big life events, what media I consumed in a month, books I read. I haven’t done this in a few months as I’m currently pregnant and was feeling burned out on everything. I’m sure I’ll pick those up again soon. I’ll also post about major career or life events. Other posts are inspired by things I’ve experienced, for example I’m in the process of writing about the worst onboarding experience I have ever had with a credit card and the brand’s website and app. Nothing quite inspires me like a poor user experience, and I hope in sharing those experiences other people will be inspired to make sure whatever user experience they’re designing isn’t terrible. I’m also not afraid to share my terrible experiences working in tech, whether that’s about encountering conference line ups that are all men or finding out my book was scraped by Meta’s AI. I also write about new CSS features that web developers can use but I have to want to write about these, so they usually need to have some sort of design focus or benefit. Those are sort of the three main categories I center posts around at the moment, but generally if it fits into general life and career, I’ll write about it. When it comes to writing the actual post, I usually just write straight in VS Code in a markdown file. I try to proofread in VS Code but I need a new spelling and grammar extension as I end up missing a few mistakes that I’ll correct as soon as I see them. Recently, I’ve started copying text over to Microsoft Word just for a quick visual to catch any misspellings. Then I hit publish. I rarely have someone else look over a post unless I am writing about something I’m little unsure about or if I’m talking about the company I work for. I don’t want to misrepresent them. Overall, my process is kind of like writing for a diary. I don’t really overthink what I’m writing about and just post it. That being said, I often come up with many ideas for things to write about, but it really depends on the type of mental space I’m in whether those get finished or not. I have a pile of started but unfinished drafts. For writing, I usually have to be at home or in a quiet space with some music. Sometimes I can write when I’m out at the coffee shop, but it is very dependent on the coffee shop and how busy it is. Physical spaces 100% influence my creativity and just overall mood and wellbeing. I like to be in a space that inspires me, surrounded by things that inspire me. I have a hard time focusing if there’s a mess or I’m in a space that doesn’t speak to me. I like to be surrounded by an environment that has a vibe or a point of view. I work from home so most of my work happens there. My husband and I have been in the process of slowly upgrading our home to be a space we enjoy being in. It’s been a slow process over the last two years, and we’re still making changes but it’s getting there and there are spots in our home I’m starting to love. But it’s also important to change up the scenery occasionally, so we’ll go out and work from coffee shops some mornings, otherwise I get stir crazy. I also use a combination of digital and analog tools to keep track of things. I have a bullet journal I fill out every week with my calendar and personal to-do list, and I have what I consider a digital bullet journal for all my work stuff in Notion that’s formatted nicely. I do have a digital bullet journal for personal stuff I’m also starting to use again, which is helpful when I have a lot of long-term plans in the works. For the technical blog, it’s hosted on Netlify and I’m using 11ty. The domain used to be registered with GoDaddy but I’ve been migrating all my domains over to Namecheap because I find some of GoDaddy’s practices predatory or less than user friendly. The old lifestyle blog is on Wordpress and is still hosted on GoDaddy, and I’m probably going to end up paying someone to migrate it all to Namecheap for me because my migration attempts have been headache inducing. I want to keep the blog up even if it’s not active, but I’m tired of paying an exorbitant amount just for an SSL certificate compared to other providers. I think it’s criminal GoDaddy charges you the amount they do for SSL when you get an SSL certificate for free. The new lifestyle blog will be hosted on Netlify (like most of my websites), with a Namecheap domain, and I’m building it with Astro. For the technical blog, no I wouldn’t change anything. It’s tied to my name and career. I’m happy with Netlify and 11ty. For the lifestyle blog, I wouldn’t use Wordpress again. It has its benefits but for the functionality I want and need, I think it’s overkill for what I personally am trying to achieve. I like having more control over the layout and design and I’m happy to be building the new one with Astro. As for the name, I only wish I had chosen something that was a bit more open instead of something that was so aligned to a specific period of my life (The Hermes Homestead). It doesn’t fit where I’m at anymore, but I feel like the new name is more open and maybe starting with a fresh slate isn’t so bad. If I combine everything, I think it’s about $350 a year for all my blogs including URLs and hosting but I expect that to be reduced significantly once I move everything away from GoDaddy. (For reference, I just got an email from them telling me that my SSL for one of the URLs I’m letting expire won’t renew and they want £90 a year just for the SSL certificate.) On the technical blog, I do generate a little bit of revenue but not a lot. I sometimes include affiliate links, and I do run ads on the homepage, but it is one spot in the sidebar. I don’t want an intrusive experience with ads because there’s nothing I hate more than landing on a page that is so covered in ads you can’t navigate through the page (looking at all you food blogs.) I was recently on a food blogger’s page and went to the print recipe page to try and read the instructions more easily and they had even put ads on the print page. I don’t want to replicate that experience, so I try to keep things as minimal as possible. I really don’t mind if people are trying to monetise their content unless it’s so overwhelming full of ads that I can’t view the content. At the end of the day, I don’t know what a person’s situation is, and we live in a rather precarious and unstable time for many people when it comes to employment. Monetising could help someone reach a goal more quickly or give them a little more freedom or room to breathe in their budget. I’ve been given product in exchange for writing a review and I don’t mind that kind of partnership. I think affiliate links are a great way to monetise without being intrusive. I use Carbon Ads for my technical blog and don’t mind their style because it’s very minimal. In terms of supporting other bloggers, I’ll click an affiliate link or engage with their content but I’m not currently paying anyone via Patreon or a subscription, though I have in the past. I love Henry Desroches’ content over on henry.codes and stillness.digital . Olu Niyi-Awosusi also has a lovely blog over at olu.online and I love reading their work. Maggie Appleton’s Garden is also full of incredible writing. If you’re a developer trying to level up your skills outside of code, my book Design for Developers, is available on Amazon and Manning . My colleagues host an interesting podcast that covers a range of technology topics called Igalia Chats . On the more casual side of things, I’ve been vlogging and trying to improve my video editing abilities over on YouTube . Typically sharing my life in England and more style focused content over there. And a final shoutout to my husband, who is constantly building absolutely wild things with CSS. He’s working on getting his blog up but for now he’s got a few links on his website . 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 118 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Manton Reece and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.

css CSS career Career html HTML
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Double opt-in PSA

As of today, I run three different newsletters, all powered by Buttondown: there’s my recently announced Dealgorithmed , my outdoors-focused From the Summit , and the People and Blogs series. I also send my blog posts via email , if you prefer to consume content that way. They all require double opt-in. Which means that if you signed up for one of them, you should have received a second email, asking you to click a link to confirm your subscription. Sometimes those land in the spam folder, sometimes they don’t arrive at all. That’s just the unfortunate reality of emails in 2025. I just checked, and a solid 10% of the people who have signed up for Dealgorithmed have not confirmed their address. This is a reminder to check your inbox and click the confirmation link otherwise, you will not receive the first edition when it goes out on January 1st. 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

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

On eating shit

You’re sitting at a table. In front of you, a series of plates. They’re full of shit (like some people). Not the same shit, mind you. It’s different types, produced by different animals, in different quantities. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that you have to eat the contents of one of those plates. Yeah, it sucks, I’m sorry. But you just have to. So you understandably start going through the thought process of figuring out which one is the “best” one. You start examining the shape, the texture, the animal that produced it. You start finding reasons to pick one over another. You start rationalising, trying to justify your decision to the other people who, like you, also need to pick which one to eat. It’s a process. A shitty one, I might say. But in going through this ordeal, you start losing track of the only thing that really matters: this situation fucking sucks, and there’s no good answer. The only reasonable thing to do is to pick the plate with the least steamy, smelly, nasty pile of shit and then figure out a way not to find yourself in that situation ever again. Sometimes eating shit is unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make it as painless as possible. 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

culture Culture writing Writing
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Karen

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Karen, whose blog can be found at chronosaur.us . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Pete Millspaugh and the other 127 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hello! My name is Karen. I work in IT support for a large company’s legal department, and am currently working on my Bachelors in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance. I live near New Orleans, Louisiana, with my husband and two dogs - Daisy, A Pembroke Welsh Corgi, and Mia, a Chihuahua. Daisy is The Most Serious Corgi ever (tm), and Mia has the personality of an old lady who chain smokes, plays Bingo every week at the rec center, and still records her soap operas on a VHS daily. My husband is an avid maker (woodworking and 3D printing, mostly), video gamer, and has an extensive collection of board games that takes up the entire back wall of our livingroom. As for me, outside of work, I’m a huge camera nerd and photographer. I love film photography, and recently learned how to develop my own negatives at home! I also do digital - I will never turn my nose up at one versus the other. I’ve always been into assorted fandoms, and used to volunteer at local sci-fi/fantasy/comic conventions up to a few years ago. I got into K-Pop back in 2022, and am now an active participant in the local New Orleans fan community, providing Instax photo booth services for events. I’ve also hosted K-Pop events here in NOLA as well. My ult K-Pop group is ATEEZ, but I’m a proud multi fan and listen to whatever groups or music catch my attention, including Stray Kids, SHINee, and Mamamoo. I also love 80s and 90s alternative, mainly Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Garbage. And yes, I may be named Karen but I refuse to BE a “Karen”. I don’t get upset when people use the term, I find it hilarious. So I have been blogging off and on since 2001 or so - back when they were still called “weblogs” and “online journals”. Originally, I was using LiveJournal, but even with a paid account, I wanted to learn more customization and make a site that was truly my own. My husband - then boyfriend - had their own server, and gave me some space on it. I started out creating sites in Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver (BEFORE Adobe owned them!), and moved to using Greymatter blog software, which I loved and miss dearly. I moved to Wordpress in - 2004 maybe? - and used that for all my personal sites until 2024. I’d been reading more and more about the Indieweb for a while and found Bear , and I loved the simplicity. I’ve had sites ranging from a basic daily online journal, to a fashion blog, to a food blog, to a K-Pop and fandom-centric blog, to what it is today - my online space for everything and anything I like. I taught myself HTML and CSS in order to customize and create my sites. No classes, no courses, no books, no certifications, just Google and looking at other people’s sites to see what I liked and how they did it. My previous job before this one, I was a web administrator for a local marketing company that built sites using DNN and Wordpress, and I’m proud to say that I got that job and my current one with my self-developed skills and being willing to learn and grow. I would not be where I am today, professionally, if it wasn’t for blogging. I’ll be totally honest - I don’t have a writing process. I get inspiration from random thoughts, seeing things online, wanting to share the day-to-day of my life. I don’t draft or have someone proof read, I just type out what I feel like writing. When I had blogs focusing on specific things - plus size fashion and K-Pop, respectively - I kept a list of topics and ideas to refer back to when I was stuck for ideas. That was when I was really focused on playing the SEO and search engine algorithm game, though, where I was trying to stick to the “two-three posts a week” rule in an attempt to boost my search engine results. I don’t do that now. I do still have a list of ideas on my phone, but it’s nothing I am feeling FORCED to stick to. It’s more along the lines of that I had an idea while I was out, and wanted to note it so I don’t forget. Memory is a fickle thing in your late 40s, LOL. My space absolutely influences my mindset for writing. I prefer to write in the early morning, because my brain operates best then. (I know I am an exception to the rule by being an early bird.) I love weekend mornings when I can get up really early and settle into my recliner with my laptop and coffee, and just listen to some lofi music and just feel topics and ideas out. I also made my office/guest bedroom into a cozy little space, with a daybed full of soft blankets and fluffy pillows and cushions, and a lap desk. In all honesty, my preferred location to write is at a coffeeshop first thing in the morning. I love sitting tucked in a booth with a coffee and muffin, headphones on and listening to music, when the sun is just on the cusp of rising and the shop is still a little too chilly. That’s when the creative ideas light up the brightest and the synapses are firing on all cylinders. Currently, my site is hosted on Bear . I used to be a self-hosted Wordpress devotee, but in mid-late 2024, I got really tired of the bloat that the apps had become. In order to use it efficiently for me, I had to install entirely too many plugins to make it “simpler”. (Shout-out to the Indieweb Wordpress team, though - they work so hard on those plugins!) Of course, the more plugins you have, the less secure your site… My domain is registered through Hostinger . To write my posts, I use Bear Markdown Notes. I heard about this program after seeing a few others talking about using it for drafts, notes, etc. I honestly don’t think I’d change much! I really love using Bear Blog. It reminds me of the very old school LiveJournal days, or when I used Greymatter. It takes me back to the web being simpler, more straightforward, more fun. I also like Bear’s manifesto , and that he built the service for longevity . I would probably structure my site differently, especially after seeing some personal sites set up with more of a “digital garden” format. I will eventually adjust my site at some point, but for now, I’m fine with it. (That and between school and work, it’s kind of low on the priority list.) I purchased a lifetime subscription to Bear after a week of using it, which ran around $200 - I don’t remember exactly. I knew that I was going to be using the service for a while and thought I should invest in a place that I believed in. My Hostinger domain renewals run around $8.99 annually. My blog is just my personal site - I don’t generate any revenue or monetise in any way. I don’t mind when people monetize their site - it’s their site and they can do what they choose. As long as it’s not invading others’ privacy or harmful, I have absolutely no issue. Make that money however you like. Ooooh I have three really good suggestions for both checking out and interviewing! Binary Digit - B is kind of an influence for me to play with my site again. They have just this super cool and early 2000s vibe and style that I really love. Their site reminds me of me when I first started blogging, when I was learning new things and implementing what I thought was cool on my site, joining fanlistings, making new online friends. Kevin Spencer - I love Kevin’s writing and especially his photography. Not only that, he has fantastic taste in music. I’ve left many a comment on his site about 80s and 90s synthpop and industrial music. A Parenthetical Departure - Sylvia was one of the first sites I started reading when I started looking up info on Bear Blog. They are EXTREMELY talented and have an excellent knack for playing with design, and showing others how it works. One of my side projects is Burn Like A Flame , which is my local K-pop and fandom photography site. I actualy just started a project there that is more than slightly based on People and Blogs - The Fandom Story Project . I’m interviewing local fans to talk about what they love and what their feelings are on fandom culture now, and I’m accompanying that with a photoshoot with that person. It’s a way to introduce people to each other within the community. Two of my favorite YouTube channels that I have recently been watching are focused on fashion discussion and history - Bliss Foster and understitch, . If you like learning and listening to information on fashion, I highly recommend these creators. I know a TON of people have now seen K-Pop Demon Hunters (which I love, and the movie has a great message for not only kids, but adults). If you’ve seen this and are interested in getting into K-Pop, I suggest checking out my favorite group, ATEEZ. If you think that most K-Pop is all chirpy bubbly cutesy songs, let me suggest two by this group that aren’t what you’d expect: Guerrilla and Turbulence . I strongly suggesting watching without the translations, and then watching again with them. Their lyrics are the thing that really drew me into this group, and had me learning more about the deeper meaning behind a lot of K-Pop songs. And finally, THANK YOU to Manu for People and Blogs! I always find some really great new sites to check out after reading these interviews, and I am truly honored to be asked to join this list of great bloggers. It’s inspiring me to work harder on my blog and to post more often. 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 117 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Benny and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.

html HTML writing Writing culture Culture css CSS career Career
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Dealgorithmed

TL;DR: I hate having spare time, and I decided to launch another newsletter called Dealgorithmed . Will start on January 1st, delivered every 1st and 15th of every month. It’s gonna be a discovery newsletter focused on the personal/independent/whimsical/indie web. I spent the last 15 years of my life working on the web, coding all sorts of sites for all sorts of people. Part of me loves the web, while another part of me hates what the web is becoming. One thing I refuse to do, though, is give up on it. This idea I see floating around that the web is dead and we should just give up the whole project and start from scratch makes absolutely no sense to me. Yes, a huge chunk of the web is unbearable to use at the moment. Yes, an enormous percentage of sites are impossible to navigate without ad blockers. And yes, AI is not making the situation any better and also yes, I am so goddamn tired of hearing AI talk nonstop everywhere all the time. All that is absolutely true. But that’s not all the web there is out there. The web is vast. It’s probably impossible to say with certainty how big it really is, but the Internet Archive recently celebrated 1 trillion pages archived . Yes, that’s trillion with a T. You know how long it would take to count to a trillion if you could count one number every single second without ever stopping? 31000 years. The fact that people keep browsing the same 3 sites, day after day, getting served content by algorithms controlled by 3 companies is such a shame. Because there is so much interesting content out there ready to be discovered. And discovering new content also means connecting with new people, getting exposed to new ideas, different cultures. That’s by far the best quality of the web if you ask me. The problem many people are facing is how to find that content, how to escape the algorithmic bubble. I think the only answer to that is curation. The vast majority of people on the web are lurkers which means someone has to spend time herding content and collecting it somewhere for others to consume. Over the years, I realised that it is probably the only reasonable contribution I can give to this cause. I’m already doing this with People and Blogs, slowly composing a list of people—and blogs—worth following and engaging with. And I’m also collecting content both on the blogroll and on the forest . If I already have these, why start something new you might be wondering. There’s a reason for this. Two actually. The first reason is that I hate having spare time, apparently. And if I have to burn myself to the ground in front of a screen, I might as well do it while doing something fun and useful. The second—and more serious—reason is that all those projects have some limitations. P&B moves slowly. It’s a weekly series, which means you’re discovering at most 5 new blogs a month. Yes, there are links on those interviews, but still, this is a slow-moving project. The forest and the blogroll, on the other hand, require intention. Those are sites you need to visit in order to discover new content, and we all know it’s a lot more convenient when content comes to you, rather than the other way around. Which is why I decided to start another newsletter. The goal with Dealgorithmed is to provide interesting content gathered from all around the web in a convenient package delivered in your inbox twice a month. Content that you can then use as a starting point for your own internet explorations. If all this sounds compelling to you, feel free to sign up . The first email should land in your inbox on January 1st. 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

culture Culture web-development Web Development
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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

A moment in yet another memorial

There’s something unique about visiting WW memorials. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s a strange mix of awe, sorrow, gratefulness, and many other feelings all bunched together. 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

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Alexandra Wolfe

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Piet Terheyden 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. There are so many great blogs about at the moment, but some of my current fav reads are: 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. 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: 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 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 116 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Chuck Grimmett and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible. 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 My life in Weeks weeks.ginatrapani.org Notebook of Ghosts notebookofghosts.com Shady Characters shadycharacters.co.uk

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Y’all are great

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. 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

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Nic Chan

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Numeric Citizen 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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! 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. 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! 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! 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 Luke Dorny and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible. 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!

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Following up on input diet

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

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Manuel Moreale 4 weeks ago

Input diet

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. 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

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Robb Knight

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Hans 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 . 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. 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 . 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. 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 James Reeves and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

A moment with a decidedly less gloomy church

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

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Frank Chimero

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Sal 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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 113 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Henrik Wist and the other 123 supporters for making this series possible.

writing Writing design Design
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

IndieWeb Carnival: On Ego

Ego is one of those words that’s difficult to parse. I find language to be an imperfect tool in the quest to describe the inner workings of the mind, because in there, things tend to be fuzzy, while words are often sharp, pointing to distinct concepts that are seldom found in someone’s brain. «I don’t have an ego» , some claim. How that is even possible remains a mystery. I suspect it all comes down to how one defines the word ego, and what concepts are associated to it. Personally, I find the whole concept of trying to “give up” one’s ego to be quite futile. Take this definition as a starting point: In philosophy, the self, or the ego, is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes. If we use this definition of ego, I don’t see how you can ever get to giving it up. Unless by giving it up one means killing themselves, which personally I don’t find to be a compelling answer to this question. Because to give up something, someone has to be there to be the subject of the giving up. But if nobody’s there anymore, nothing is given up, because there’s nothing that can be given up. Do I make any sense? Ego gives us many other words: from egoism, to egotism, to egocentrism. Those are all words that carry a bad reputation; nobody likes to be called an egoist. As social creatures, as part of the larger group of billions of human beings currently living on this earth, we find these constant inward-looking traits to be undesirable. That said, though, I find the idea of always living experiences in the service of others, in an attempt to suppress one’s ego, to be an unhealthy way to go about spending the time we have available on this planet. Attempting to completely annihilate the things that make you you, in order to better fit with the rest of society, is not worth it. It’s not healthy to spend time on this planet thinking you’re the absolute best at everything and nobody can teach you anything ever. That’s obvious. But the opposite is also not healthy: living your life thinking you’re worth nothing, that you know nothing, that everyone knows more and is worth than you and that they should be the ones to talk, to teach, to do, to earn. If there’s one lesson I try to carry with me, it's that extremes are bad. And the goal should be to keep the pendulum swings to a minimum, and spend as much time as possible at the centre, where things are balanced. And you might think I’m saying this to you, but I’m actually talking to myself. Because the ego is still there, the inner dialogue continues, and the personal struggles will persist. 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

culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Romina Malta

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Romina Malta, whose blog can be found at romi.link . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Piet Terheyden 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. I’m Romina Malta, a graphic artist and designer from Buenos Aires. Design found me out of necessity: I started with small commissions and learned everything by doing. What began as a practical skill became a way of thinking and a way to connect the things I enjoy: image, sound, and structure. Over time, I developed a practice with a very specific and recognizable imprint, working across music, art, and technology. I take on creative direction and design projects for artists, record labels, and cultural spaces, often focusing on visual identity, books, and printed matter. I also run door.link , a personal platform where I publish mixtapes. It grew naturally from my habit of spending time digging for music… searching, buying, and finding sounds that stay with me. The site became a way to archive that process and to share what I discover. Outside of my profession, I like traveling, writing, and spending long stretches of time alone at home. That’s usually when I can think clearly and start new ideas. The journal began as a way to write freely, to give shape to thoughts that didn’t belong to my design work or to social media. I wanted a slower space where things could stay in progress, where I could think through writing. I learned to read and write unusually early, with a strange speed, in a family that was almost illiterate, which still makes it more striking to me. I didn’t like going to school, but I loved going to the library. I used to borrow poetry books, the Bible, short novels, anything I could find. Every reading was a reason to write, because reading meant getting to know the world through words. That was me then, always somewhere between reading and writing. Over the years that habit never left. A long time ago I wrote on Blogger, then on Tumblr, and later through my previous websites. Each version reflected a different moment in my life, different interests, tones, and ways of sharing. The format kept changing, but the reason stayed the same: I’ve always needed to write things down, to keep a trace of what’s happening inside and around me. For me, every design process involves a writing process. Designing leads me to write, and writing often leads me back to design. The journal became the space where those two practices overlap, where I can translate visual ideas into words and words into form. Sometimes the texts carry emotion; other times they lean toward a kind of necessary dramatism. I like words, alone, together, read backwards. I like letters too; I think of them as visual units. The world inside my mind is a constant conversation, and the journal is where a part of that dialogue finds form. There’s no plan behind it. It grows slowly, almost unnoticed, changing with whatever I’m living or thinking about. Some months I write often, other times I don’t open it for weeks. But it’s always there, a reminder that part of my work happens quietly, and that sometimes the most meaningful things appear when nothing seems to be happening. Writing usually begins with something small, a sentence I hear, a word that stays, or an image I can’t stop thinking about. I write when something insists on being written. There is no plan or schedule; it happens when I have enough silence to listen. I don’t do research, but I read constantly. Reading moves the language inside me. It changes how I think, how I describe, how I look at things. Sometimes reading becomes a direct path to writing, as if one text opened the door to another. I love writing on the computer. The rhythm of typing helps me find the right tempo for my thoughts. I like watching the words appear on the screen, one after another, almost mechanically. It makes me feel that something is taking shape outside of me. When I travel, I often write at night in hotels. The neutral space, the different air, the sound of another city outside the window, all create a certain kind of attention that I can’t find at home. The distance, in some way, sharpens how I think. Sometimes I stop in the middle of a sentence and return to it days later. Other times I finish in one sitting and never touch it again. It depends on how it feels. Writing is less about the result and more about the moment when the thought becomes clear. You know, writing and design are part of the same process. Both are ways of organizing what’s invisible, of trying to give form to something I can barely define. Designing teaches me how to see, and writing teaches me how to listen. Yes, space definitely influences how I work. I notice it every time I travel. Writing in hotels, for example, changes how I think. There’s something about being in a neutral room, surrounded by objects that aren’t mine, that makes me more observant. I pay attention differently. At home I’m more methodical. I like having a desk, a comfortable chair, and a bit of quiet. I usually work at night or very early in the morning, when everything feels suspended. I don’t need much: my laptop, a notebook, paper, pencils around. Light is important to me. I prefer dim light, sometimes just a lamp, enough to see but not enough to distract. Music helps too, especially repetitive sounds that make time stretch. I think physical space shapes how attention flows. Sometimes I need stillness, sometimes I need movement. A familiar room can hold me steady, while an unfamiliar one can open something unexpected. Both are necessary. The site is built on Cargo, which I’ve been using for a few years. I like how direct it feels… It allows me to design by instinct, adjusting elements visually instead of through code. For the first time, I’m writing directly on a page, one text over another, almost like layering words in a notebook. It’s a quiet process. Eventually I might return to using a service that helps readers follow and archive new posts more easily, but for now I enjoy this way. I don’t think I would change much. The formats have changed, the platforms too, but the impulse behind it is the same. Writing online has always been a way to think in public. Maybe I’d make it even simpler. I like when a website feels close to a personal notebook… imperfect, direct, and a bit confusing at times. The older I get, the more I value that kind of simplicity. If anything, I’d try to document more consistently. Over the years I’ve lost entire archives of texts and images because of platform changes or broken links. Now I pay more attention to preserving what I make, both online and offline. Other than that, I’d still keep it small and independent. It costs very little. Just the domain, hosting, and the time it takes to keep it alive. I don’t see it as a cost but as part of the work, like having a studio, or paper, or ink. It’s where things begin before they become something else. I’ve never tried to monetise the blog. It doesn’t feel like the right space for that. romi.link/journal exists outside of that logic; it’s not meant to sell or promote anything. It’s more like an open notebook, a record of thought. That said, I understand why people monetise their blogs. Writing takes time and energy, and it’s fair to want to sustain it. I’ve supported other writers through subscriptions or by buying their publications, and I think that’s the best way to do it, directly, without the noise of algorithms or ads. I’ve been reading Fair Companies for a while now. Not necessarily because I agree with everything, of course, but because it’s refreshing to find other points of view. I like when a site feels personal, when you can sense that someone is genuinely curious. Probably Nicolas Boullosa Hm… No mucho. Lately I’ve been thinking about how fragile the internet feels. Everything moves too quickly, and yet most of what we publish disappears almost instantly. Keeping a personal site today feels like keeping a diary in public: it’s small, quiet, and mostly unseen, but it resists the speed of everything else. I find comfort in that slowness. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 112 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Jim Mitchell and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

web-development Web Development design Design music Music
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Look, another AI browser

Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top. I code sites for a living (allegedly), and I honestly cannot overstate how uninterested I am in all these new browsers. Because these are not new browsers: these are Chromium frames with AI slapped on top. The thing I found more interesting about the whole OpenAI announcement was Sam Altman tweeting: «10 am livestream today to launch a new product I'm quite excited about!» . This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work, where we’ll all have a super intelligence always available in our pockets, ready to dispense infinite wisdom. And yet he’s quite excited about a fucking Chromium installation with AI slapped on top of it. I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle 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

ai AI web-development Web Development
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

10 pointless facts about me

Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave , here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Coffee in the morning, tea (sometimes) later in the day, not enough water the rest of the time. Did I mention I’m terrible at being consistent? That includes drinking enough water. Right now, I’d say flip flops, even though they are a terrible choice when you have to walk around the woods. Probably Crema catalana . It’s the one dessert I’m resisting the temptation to buy what’s needed to make it myself at home because I know I’d end up eating it every day, three times a day. I say hi to the dog that’s for sure sleeping somewhere near. From a purely physical perspective, I’d say 22. If I have to consider all factors, I’d say 36. And I’m 36. Do beanies and toques count as hats? Because if they do, then I own 7 hats. If they don’t, then I’m down to 3. It’s from a walk with the dog the other day: clear sky and some tree branches and leaves illuminated by a lovely light. Most of my gallery looks like that. I don’t watch TV, and the last time I watched a TV series, I think it was in the dark days of the COVID shutdown, which happened what, 32 years ago? I don’t even know what’s on TV these days. The oldest memory I have of a job I wanted to do was car designer. I remember loving seeing yellow FIAT Coupé around. Funny because now I couldn’t care less about cars. 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

writing Writing
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