Latest Posts (20 found)
Manuel Moreale 2 days ago

On planting seeds

Matt asked me a question recently about the end of my People and Blogs run. The question was if I always thought I was going to hand it over at some point, and it’s an interesting question worth expanding on, which is why I told him I was going to write a post about it, rather than simply answering via email. I started and ended more online projects than I can remember at this point. I bought a dozen domain names, coded way too many sites, only to have them all inevitably bite the dust, sometimes months later, sometimes years later. But I don’t think I ever started a project with a set deadline in mind. All the projects were open-ended, always. Back in September 2021, I posted about the shutting down of my thegallery.io , a site I ran for almost 7 years, and in that post, I wrote Once the passion is gone, it is gone. There's no point in dragging things until you reach some random date in the future. When I started People and Blogs, the plan was to run it for a single year: 52 interviews, that was the plan. But then the end arrived, and people enjoyed the series, so I kept going. But at some point, I crossed the imaginary line that separates doing something because I enjoy it, and doing something because other people enjoy it. If you do something long enough, you almost always end up inevitably crossing that line. There are exceptions—there are always exceptions—but that’s what my experience taught me. And it’s weird how the process of realising that something is done works. Because at first I was simply carried forward by the momentum, by the established routines. I was sending emails, posting updates, and scheduling interviews. But the moment I considered the possibility of stopping, it was almost as if a seed got planted in the depths of my brain. This process kinda reminds me of the plot of the movie Inception. And once that seed was planted, it’s incredibly hard to eliminate. And it’s almost as if deep down I already knew the right thing to do but was too busy dealing with the routine to realise it. So to answer the original question, no, I didn’t know from the get go I was going to pass the series to someone else. But a part of me enjoys this process of seeing projects changing hands. I was happy to receive blogroll.org from Ray , and I was equally as happy to hand over peopleandblogs.com to Zach . It’s one of the many good qualities of this corner of the web I love to inhabit. The lesson I learned this time around is that projects need an endpoint! I’ll keep that in mind for the next time I inevitably start something new in a few years from now. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Connect via email :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month

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Manuel Moreale 6 days ago

Downsizing

With the 150th interview of People and Blogs now live, it’s officially time to downsize my online presence again. My digital life follows a somewhat regular rhythm and I alternate through phases of expansion, where I buy domain names, ship new projects, start newsletters, and chase a million ideas, and phases of contraction, where everything happens in reverse: domains are left to expire, projects are archived, newsletters are deleted, services are cancelled. And my recent decoupling from the web was the beginning of one of these downsizing phases. The Dealgorithmed newsletter has been deleted; the domain is not going to be renewed, and it will expire later in the year. My From the Summit newsletter and my personal newsletter have been merged into a single new newsletter called “ Thoughts and Walks ”. If you were already subscribed to one of my newsletters, you can manage your preferences from the Buttondown’s Portal and decide what type of content you want to receive. I'll write a more in depth post about my plans for the newsletter. The only project that has survived the cut—aside from this blog—is blogroll.org, and that is not going anywhere anytime soon because there are things I want to add to that site. But more on that at a later time. Decluttering is fun! It's a nice mental exercise to delete stuff and become lighter again. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

A moment with blue and orange

I was down in Sesto a few days ago for Apparat ’s concert. The new album is great, attending the event with family and a few friends was a very enjoyable experience, and the atmosphere was very blue! Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Andy Baio

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hi, my name’s Andy Baio. I’m a writer and coder living in Portland, Oregon. You might know me from my blog, Waxy.org , where I’ve written for 25 years about the internet. If you’ve never heard of it, I rounded up some of the highlights from my first decade of blogging in 2012, and the second decade in 2022. You may also know me from some of my other projects? I ran the XOXO festival in Portland for 12 years from 2012 to 2024, launched (and relaunched) the events community Upcoming.org , and I helped build Kickstarter as a long-time advisor and their first CTO. Along the way, I coined the term “ supercut ,” produced a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and got threatened with lawsuits a bunch of times. (I did some other stuff , too.) These days, I’m mostly helping my wife Ami with her game design studio, Pink Tiger Games . We’ve self-published seven conversational party games since 2017, with three more slated for later this year. Before I started Waxy.org, I mostly sent links via instant messenger to my friends who had blogs. I knew I was good at finding things online, and after the umpteenth friend told me to start my own blog, I finally did. I wanted a place of my own online, somewhere to experiment and write about weird corners of internet culture, online community, and copyright, as well as a sandbox for new experimental projects of my own. By the time I launched Waxy in April 2002, I felt like I was late to the blogging trend, which in hindsight, seems ridiculous. I was still pretty early, as it turns out. Within a year, I’d been interviewed by the New York Times and other major papers dozens of times for news stories I’d either broken or somehow found myself tangled up in. The name, Waxy.org, came from a Perl script I’d written the year before to search for available .com, .org, and .net domains using every dictionary word in the English language. (I also picked up Meaty.org, which I never ended up using, and Upcoming.org, which I did.) “Waxy” didn’t really mean anything, but I’d been using “waxpancake” as my alias for years so it seemed like a good fit. I added a linkblog, Waxy Links , to the sidebar about 18 months after launch, which became a good outlet for quick links that didn’t warrant full posts. I redesigned the site in 2008 with a cleaner design and better mobile support. After 14 years of blogging, I switched from Movable Type to WordPress in 2016, with a new redesign that I slowly improved in the years since. I recently added redesigned archives and search , which I’m pretty happy with. It’s always under construction, a work in progress — like me, you, and the rest of the internet. I used to do much more investigative journalism, but these days, Waxy is primarily a linkblog where I point to fun or interesting things I find online. Unless I stumble on a story too compelling to ignore, forcing me to pull the string and see where it leads. Those story ideas and links can come from anywhere. I’m a voracious consumer of information online, and I’ve always joked that Waxy is the natural byproduct of endlessly procrastinating from doing other things by looking at the internet. I subscribe to around 450 feeds in Inoreader, my RSS reader, and skim it all nearly every day. I follow another 1,000 or so people each on Bluesky and Mastodon, with custom lists for each so I don’t miss particular people. I’m in dozens of Discords, many with people sharing their work or pointing out good stuff they find online, and nearly 100 mostly-niche subreddits covering many of my interests. I use tools like Sill and Scour to find signal in the noise, and even built a link aggregator of my own that I used for years to find good links on Twitter, until Elon shut down the API. My frequency of posting has waned over the years, first cannibalized by social media and then by larger life and work stuff. I’ve recently found myself drawn back to it, posting more regularly, trying to wake those atrophied writing muscles. Even if I’ve slowed down, it’s hard to ever imagine stopping entirely. I used to be able to work from anywhere, typically a coffeehouse or library, and tune out the rest of the world on my laptop with a good pair of earbuds. As my eyesight’s worsened, I find that working on a large monitor is more of a necessity than a luxury for any serious length of time, especially if I’m coding. I also used to love working around others, but these days, I tend to like retreating to the quiet of my basement office. No music, no sound. Just a quiet hum of my computer and the sounds of my keyboard. I use WordPress with my own custom-written theme, using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle all the special fields necessary for my linkblog. I use a custom bot to cross-post my links to Bluesky, and a plugin called Share on Mastodon to post things there. (I stopped automatically cross-posting to X/Twitter years ago, for obvious reasons.) Everything’s hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet along with a bunch of other side projects, with Cloudflare managing the domain and DNS. I would have started collecting email addresses from the very beginning. I’ve never really liked reading newsletters by email, and I read almost every newsletter I subscribe to through my feedreader, which gives me so much control over my attention. But I never considered that people would start to shift their attention away from the web, or that feedreaders would largely go away, so I never tried to build a mailing list for my own projects. The ability to directly reach the people who care most about your work, outside of the capricious nature of social media algorithms, is essential. It’s my one big regret, and I hope to change that soon. My blog has never cost much to run, and never made much money. I used to have a dedicated server that cost $150/month, but these days, it’s running around $50/month on a shared instance with some other projects of mine. The visibility and reach from writing on Waxy opened a lot of doors for me, though. I met so many amazing creative people through blogging, and it gave me a platform for launching projects that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I met most of my friends, directly or indirectly, through the writing I did on Waxy.org. I did run ads on my blog for a few years, experimenting with Google ads from 2004 to 2005 and, in 2006, joining as one of the first members of The Deck , Jim Coudal’s pioneering unobtrusive, privacy-centric boutique ad network that helped support sites like Daring Fireball, Kottke.org , Ze Frank, The Morning News, A List Apart, and many others. It paid me a reliable $1,000/month for ten years, until shortly before it wound down in 2017. I haven’t made any direct income from my blog since then. I think anything that supports independent writers/bloggers, artists, or other creators on their own terms is a good thing, whether it’s through Kickstarter, Patreon, or more commonly, through paid subscription newsletters. I have major issues with Substack’s management, but I credit them for normalizing the idea of directly paying bloggers a recurring monthly fee. But please use Ghost or Buttondown instead. Oh, god, too many to list. Off the top of my head, Marcin Wichary’s Unsung is probably my favorite new blog, constantly updated with new insights about user interfaces and design. Nobody notices things the way that Marcin notices things. Matt Muir’s Web Curios is like a month’s worth of good links crammed into a single post every Friday. I don’t know how he’s done it so well for so long. Depths of Wikipedia’s Annie Rauwerda isn’t a traditional blogger, but spreads her curatorial eye between two Bluesky accounts , two Instagram accounts , TikTok , a newsletter , a touring live stage show , and a very good personal website . She’s just so funny and weird and good. I wish she had an RSS feed that combined it all. Maybe I’ll make one for her. I think David Friedman’s Ironic Sans is incredibly underrated, moving from a traditional blog to more of a newsletter format, with weird little side projects and games along the way. He’s been continuously great for 20 years. I’d love to see Jason Kottke interviewed. More than anyone I can think of, he’s carved out a Kottke-shaped hole for himself on the web, growing it into a sustainable living through direct reader support over nearly 30 years. Even now, he continues to refine and adapt and evolve his site in surprising ways. The last project I worked on was the permanent archive for XOXO that launched in April, collecting everything we did related to the festival. The site was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival. XOXO was a huge part of my life for 12 years, easily the most creatively rewarding and emotionally exhausting work of my career, and I’m really proud of how the archive came out. At the very least, go poke through the video archives. The featured tag highlights some of our favorites, like Cabel Sasser’s wonderful talk from our final year. 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 148 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

The AI Compass

This morning Mr Overkill sent me the link to the AI Compass test, which I guess is a spin on the famous political compass test. It’s a bunch of questions—27? 29? 15? Who knows!—and at the end you get your location on the map and your archetype, from a list of 30. It’s harmless fun, and I found the results so far to be fairly accurate. If you end up taking the quiz, let me know if your result was accurate. Or even better, blog about 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

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Books: January to June, 2026

I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026. A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine. Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December. 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

On ends

I’m sitting on a rock, in the middle of a forest. On my right, not even 30cm away from me, a dog panting like crazy, because even though it’s almost 8pm, it’s still way too warm for his liking. To be fair, anything above freezing probably fits that description. Behind me, the ruins of a church that was, and no longer is. A stone arch and a few chunks of walls are all that’s left. I don’t know what happened to this church. I could probably look it up, but I don’t need to do it. Knowing would not add anything to my experience of sitting here. Is it important to know how things end? Is it important to know when something has ended? Some things are clearly easy to know when they’re done: I have a bottle of water that’s almost empty, and the end is gonna come pretty fast. Other things are a lot trickier. When does a life end? I remember reading that the medical definition of death keeps evolving as our technology progresses and we’re able to bring people back to life. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains to the matrix and “live” forever, who knows. I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of things lately, as my mind wandered around, stressed out by a series of things not worth discussing. And thinking about the end of myself is weirdly comforting. The classic this too shall pass. Everything is transitory after all, and life itself is impermanent. We’re here now, we might be gone tomorrow. And when gone, what’s left? Maybe just ruins, traces of our past, books left on a bookshelf, photos in a box, a blog online perhaps, destined to be washed away quickly like everything else in the digital world. If you’re wondering where I’m going with this post, I’m afraid the answer is nowhere. I’m just sitting on a rock, in the middle of nowhere, thinking about death as a way to figure out how to go through life. 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

Anne Lee Steele

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in what I call the ‘open ecosystem', the first five years as a lurker and participant, the second five as a researcher and facilitator. I’ve done ethnographic studies of OpenStreetMap, was the Community Manager of The Turing Way, and have held a variety of fellowships with organisations ranging from the Internet Society to the Software Sustainability Institute. Outside of all these things, I would call myself an artist-of-sorts, maybe to say that I make art more than I embody the spirit of an artist, per say. But I sometimes throw the title around anyway. I guess I’ll say it: I’m a researcher, facilitator, and artist. I was a big ‘micro’ blogger in my teens, using platforms like Xanga, Livejournal, and Flickr to document my teenage life. Then I inevitably moved to Tumblr alongside many angsty and artsy teenager girls right as Facebook started to take off in parallel, before moving to Instagram (and using it as a kind of ‘blog’ for years). I’ve gone through the inevitable cycles of use then rejection, of deleting and reactivating all my social media accounts. My original Facebook account is gone now. When I started grad school in 2019, I started my blog as a method of sharing more about my life and research when I moved to Geneva. I think it came out of the joint desires for self-expression and a desire to get out of social media. We now collectively call this platform decay “enshittification”, but I really felt like what I was putting online was performative more than anything else. The blog felt like shouting into a voice, yes, but it was my shout, on my own website, in a void of my own creation. There’s no like button for that. I often just create a new page on Obsidian or VSCode and just start to write. Sometimes it all comes out in one go - sometimes the draft will take years to fruition (and yes - I’ll often backdate that post to when it was created, not when it was published). There’s actually a secret draft folder on Github that hosts all my drafts in progress. Out of all the creative processes, I find writing the most difficult, but also the most transformative. I rarely enjoy the process, but always feel better, or have more clarity, or understand something or myself better, afterwards. In parallel to writing, I’m very much a power user of are.na which feels like a more instinctual, affectual, and social form of thinking out loud. I think a lot of the nascent themes contained there eventually end up on the blog in some form or another. I’m a big listener of NTS radio (specifically the Breakfast Show with Flo) and use earth.fm a lot. Sounds really create a space for me - and are a way I stay grounded and aware, no matter where I might be working. If I have control over that however, I tend to need a big desk for books and papers of all kinds - maybe I need a messy desk in order to have a cleaner mind. I absolutely believe that physical spaces influence creativity. When I’m writing something long form for example, I’ll usually surround myself physically with books and visual artifacts (photos, sketches, and other detritus) related to the topic, almost like it’s a living alter to the work, or an externalised process of thinking that starts with the visual, then becomes injested and cognitive. I’ve been on the move for the past year or so, and I’ve really felt its impact on my creativity: in some ways I’m more spontaneous, but less deep and situated with my thinking. I have no doubt that this is because of my perpetual motion. My website (and blog attached to it) is very simple. I used to host my website on Github Pages, but now it’s built on Netlify (very open to alternatives - please reach out!). I used to use Heroku before it was shut down. The whole website and codebase is on Github. You can see more about the ethos of the website, and specifically the practices I am aiming to adopt better practices for accessibility and open practices on this easter egg of a page (which you can find by clicking the sticky note in the footer): aleesteele.com/design Field Notes from my Desktop is the name of both my blog and newsletter these days. I feel all sorts of ways about having a newsletter now – I’ve only sent out one so far. It’s a very different feeling to have a captive audience, some of which have been subscribed automatically after an event I’ve facilitated, or joined from the web. I don’t know if I like it, but it feels like in the age of information glut, there’s something about the inbox that remains sacred for many folks. I want to respect that, and maybe want to think of it as a seeding process... For my blog, I remain dedicated to maintaining it as is, without any real changes. Looking back, I guess I would have held myself accountable to finishing more blogs in the moment: when that whiff of an idea, or a concept, or an event or reflection has completely capitvated me and I feel the need to write about it. Unfortunately I have so many half-finished blogs not because I didn’t like the topic, but rather because it was such a struggle and a slog to finish, that I didn’t bring it fully over that crest into fruition. Maybe I should have ritualised it. At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I did the best I could at the time. Maybe the newsletter is meant to be the rhythm, and the blog is the burst of free jazz. I have no monetization plan, and currently don’t monetize anything I do for the blog. In fact, I pay to use Buttondown at the moment, and I’m debating whether to do that (currently $9 USD a month since they changed their membership plan). I pay for my domain, which is £12 GBP annually. Now I’m mixing blogs and newsletters! I’ve been such a periodic reader of a bunch of different things that I tend to save on are.na, that it’s hard to pick out a few. I’ve been a passionate reader of the Marginalian and the Creative Independent for many years. At this point, both are less blog, and more of a wiki-like resource about life, creativity, ecology, and all sorts of topics that make life meaningful and mysterious. I’ve also used read and used Open Culture for many years – which is also a blog-of-sorts. I recently learned about The Examined Mind . One person whose writing practice I look up to is Shannon Mattern , an academic anthropologist turned New York Librarian-of-sorts and my friend Jonathan Gray who has a fantastic (and consistent!) public writing process. Both of them are academics with public practices - and while I’m not an academic, I do have a research-informed process. I also love Julian Stodd’s blog on leadership and organisational practices . He’s done a lot of deep and open thinking that I’ve appreciated about the topic, and has stayed loyal to old school Wordpress. This question inspires me to bring together a more curated list of blogs I’ve read and followed over the years, and also to recognise the shortfalls of my own ‘blogging’ practice. I have saved blog instances (meaning individual blogs), but I haven’t ‘followed’ a single blogger in a really long time actually. Is that because of the newsletter because I don’t use RSS feeds? I’m developing a series of mapping meditations , based on Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations . If you have a map or a meditation to share, please reach out. I also run internet infrastructure walking tours in London, in an effort to make invisible infrastructures more embodied and playful. This year, I’ve been experimenting with a monthly walk, and you're welcome to join one using Luma . 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 147 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

IndieWeb Book Club: July 2026

I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm . I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time. If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me a link and I'll be more than happy to link it here on the blog. 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

Passing of the torch

If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected. As I wrote in a previous post , I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before officially saying goodbye to the series on July 10th. But contrary to what I wrote months ago, I decided that I’m not gonna keep the interviews archived here on the blog, and instead I’ll redirect them all to their new location. Keeping them here would be obviously good for me, it’s extra traffic that comes to the site, but I don’t care about traffic, and I much prefer to send people towards Zach’s site and help the series grow that way. I’m very happy that the series will continue on, and I’m excited to see where Zach will take it. As I said to him, this is his series now, he can and should do whatever he wants with it, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next months and years. 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

Edoardo Baldi

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Edoardo Baldi, whose blog can be found at edoardob.blog . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hello! I’m Edoardo, in my thirties, born near Milan (Italy) and raised in the Alps of the same region, to escape the boredom of too flat a horizon. I studied physics, first in Milan, then abroad in Switzerland, where I spent a little over four years on a PhD that convinced me academic research wasn’t for me – or so I thought, since I didn’t stray too far. In the following years I became a “research software engineer”, meaning a software developer who works closely with research. It took me a while to realize that, despite the many benefits, that work had become a routine I was taking too much for granted. Or better: I had lost sight of why I was staying there; why I kept choosing that configuration for my life. Now I’m trying to figure out if teaching the two subjects I’m most passionate about – math and physics – is what I want to do in the next chapter of my career. I can never get enough of hiking in the mountains, especially over multiple days – as long as my body agrees. And sharing an experience with other people who love the same thing is my ideal vacation. Books, writing – I don’t know how many experiments with novels and short stories I’ve done over the years – and puzzles of all kinds (including programming challenges, even though I’m a particularly slow coder) are some of the activities that can easily fill my free time. Having always loved tinkering with computers, I think I started writing random things online quite early. If I remember correctly, it was on LiveJournal or MySpace, prehistoric stuff now. I discovered WordPress during high school, following a guy from my same school who wrote ironic essays on philosophy topics. I tried to emulate that model, but I didn’t get very far as it wasn’t my thing. Years later, with some friends fond of cinema, again on WordPress, I started a collective blog where we wrote our opinions on the movies we watched, often together. The name of the blog – Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators – was a tribute to a classic 50s American comedy. (I’ll let you work that one out.) During my PhD, I collaborated on and managed the university cinema club’s blog. At the time, however, I also started publishing my very personal ideas on books and movies on another blog, whose name or domain I honestly don’t even remember now. I think I tried to recover something from that blog via the Wayback Machine, with no success. Fast-forward several years, I realized why none of those blogs had survived: I was writing on commission – I loved the perk of press screenings, but writing something afterwards was non-negotiable. Or I was performing for some imagined audience by covering whatever was trending, not what I actually cared about. I could say that my personal blog was born when I decided that my online space would be only a public personal journal: the only rule was to write about what interested me the most, in the way that felt most natural. This is still the reason behind my current blog. How long is it going to survive? I don’t know. It did well, so far, with ups and downs. Beyond my hiking recaps, almost everything I write starts from curiosity – a science-based question (“if I ate an apple a day for a year, how many kg of peel could I accumulate?”), something I want to understand well enough to explain, a brain teaser that sometimes keeps me awake. Since it’s often something I don’t know, a research phase almost always follows – and I admit that, sometimes, it derails my intention to write. I keep a dedicated note for each idea, where I track its evolution. When I feel like I’ve reached a conclusion of sorts, I then sketch out a structure and use it as a guide for the first draft. Curiously, all my notes are in English, but the first draft of anything I write is always in Italian. Then I translate into English, and very often rewrite some parts that don’t flow very well in the other language. And yes, I often use Claude for a final proofread: I’ve given it strict instructions on what it can and can’t touch, and how. The content is always mine, and I’m careful to keep it that way: I don’t want to end up with a voice I no longer recognize as my own. As for the tools, my personal notes live in an Obsidian vault – because they must be plain text files – and I write all my drafts almost exclusively in iA Writer. It’s been my first choice for many writing projects, at least in their early stages. One feature I particularly love is its support for authorship , without violating the plain text pact. When I sit down to write the first draft, I have only one need: to be alone in a fairly quiet environment. Honestly, I’ve never tried writing in a public place, like a café – and the few times I did write on a train, it was surely due to a deadline I couldn’t avoid. As far as I’m concerned, it’s more the act of moving through space that stimulates what I might call creative thinking – which I take to mean authentic rather than original , as in “totally new”. And I’m also convinced that the environment influences my creativity, but I couldn’t say how or why. Often I’ve only realized much later that I had visited an environment from which I returned with ideas I considered creative – whether these didn’t go very far is another, unresolved story. I think I’ve tried dozens of frameworks to create a blog, starting with the large family of static-site generators. After several attempts, intrigued by some input from Manu, I gave Kirby a chance and discovered that it met all my needs. One above all: my blog’s content must be in plain text, as I don’t want to deal with any kind of problem taking it with me, wherever it might be in the future. So, for the moment: Kirby CMS, hosted on a fairly basic server managed by Hetzner. The domain is registered on Porkbun, and the DNS is managed by Cloudflare. I’ve also written a dozen custom plugins to tweak many aspects of my website because, for me, tinkering with the mechanics of a personal blog is part of the joy of having one. I just can’t resist – and I keep telling myself “tinker less, write more”. I would probably study web design and web technologies properly from the start – I mostly stumbled into this stuff through my day job. I say this to avoid having to settle for some preconfigured service that isn’t right for me. I would love to have a domain like , but the problem isn’t availability so much as the popularity of my name. And, honestly, I’m not ready to pay $200 a year for a personal website. The maintenance costs for my blog are quite low: 4€ and something a month for the server, plus the annual cost of the domain – about 20€. Kirby CMS requires a one-time license (100€, renewed every four years), and this is the only expense I periodically re-evaluate: the moment it no longer aligns with my needs, I will have no problem planning a migration elsewhere. In fact, I’ve already done it several times as a stress test , but for now I don’t feel the need to. My website generates no revenue, nor have I ever tried to make it do so. Personally, I have nothing against monetising a personal website, provided it’s done honestly. If I were to do it, I probably wouldn’t rely on platforms like Substack – only because I like building things myself. Even today I financially support some blogs because I believe in the work of the people behind them – or to give a friend a small nudge to keep going. A good part of the blogs I follow, or like to return to from time to time, I discovered thanks to “People & Blogs” – or through “Ye Olde Blogroll” . I think it’s unlikely that anyone reading this page doesn’t know either of them; but if that’s the case, I invite you to take a look, exploring even the older, less obvious stuff. I want to mention a friend’s project, halfway between a personal blog and a photography portfolio, that I had the pleasure of contributing to . I’m very fond of it: partly for my friendship with the author, and partly because it circles a theme that has quietly followed me for years: the sense of belonging to a place, or to multiple places; the idea, the concept, the experience of what we call home . The project is “Stay Stay Stay” by Elettra Pistoni: if you’re not into reading about this topic, her pictures are well worth a look. I also think she would more than gladly welcome the opportunity for this interview, but I’ll leave the decision to those in charge. I’ve lost count of how many newsletters or feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ve reached the point where the list of online content I follow consistently has no more than ten items. Among these, two blogs and a newsletter (in Italian) that I return to quite regularly, even to reread older things: I’ll take this as a cue to share a bit of what’s going through my head – two thoughts and a side project that will maybe see the light someday. Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Manu for offering me the opportunity to share a bit of myself with this community! 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 146 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. “Useful Fictions” by Cate Hall Julia Evans ’s blog, a trove for tech enthusiasts The newsletter “It’s Friday I’m (not) in love” , partly inspired by “Modern Love”, the New York Times’ well-known column. Whenever I feel like telling someone “I don’t have time”, I stop and remind myself that it’s almost never true. In fact, never. It’s just my fear of making a commitment, or a lack of courage to admit what I really care about. I try never to hide behind this excuse with the people I really care about, because they don’t deserve it. I’ve also written a short post about it . This could be one of my guiding tenets , because I haven’t been able to refute it yet: “Actions, not words, reveal our real values” . It’s not mine , and I often struggle to accept it myself. But I’m convinced that if we actually lived by it, we would have far more genuine and satisfying relationships with other people – in whatever sense you want to take that. Being a hiker obsessed with traveling light, I started working on an app (web only to begin with) that lets me keep track of my gear and which items I decide to bring on each trip. Dozens of these tools already exist, but this is my vision of what I’d want such an app to do. I called it “Baseweight”, and I hope to have an alpha version out in the near future. If someone is curious, the app’s future home will be at baseweight.my . And if you’d like to share your thoughts on it, don’t hesitate to reach out ! Opinions and suggestions are especially welcome at this early stage.

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Manuel Moreale 4 weeks ago

Decoupling from the web

I spent a lot of time recently reflecting on the things that make me happy and unhappy. And one thing that has emerged from all this meandering inside the inner workings of my brain is that the web is making me unhappy. The web, as a whole, is a big place and as Bo said «Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found» which is both a blessing and a curse. Because even though my content diet is quite strict—compared to most people at least—I’m still fucked by the fact that I am a curious person and there’s an infinite amount of interesting things to be found out there on the web. The problem is that there’s also an infinite amount of depressing and/or enraging shit out there on the web, and even though I’m not on any social media platform of any kind, I’m still exposed to that crap. And I’m tired of that. Which is why I’m wondering if it’s possible to completely decouple from the web. I need to be “on the web” for work, since I code sites for a living, and so quitting the web entirely is not really an option at the moment. But consuming content? That is not something I have to do. And nobody is forcing me to do so. Spending more time paying attention to the way my body feels made me realize how much I neglected taking care of my mind recently. And that’s clearly not good since those two things go hand in hand, «mens sana in corpore sano» and all that. And so I might actually try “quit” the web as a source of content and see what happens. I suspect I might end up reading more books, which is good since the goal was to read at least 36 of them this year, and I’m currently 115 pages into number 25. Am I going to miss out on a lot of stuff? It’s possible. But aren’t we all constantly missing out on a lot of stuff anyway? Wish me luck. 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 4 weeks ago

Fitness Challenge: Update One

A week or so ago, I posted about my currently ongoing fitness challenge where the goal was to go down from the almost 90kg I was weighing to below the oldest measurement I had on record, which was an 85.3kg. Side note: that’s the oldest but not the lowest, because I do have an 81kg on record, but that’s honestly not a healthy weight for me. I know that day-to-day weight can fluctuate considerably, I know that body composition changes a lot when you’re dieting, and I know that weight will also change a lot depending on how much I’ll train because muscles are denser and generally speaking “heavier” than fat. As much as I enjoy being an idiot and doing random shit, I am not entirely clueless about all this stuff. All that said, I hopped on the scale this morning, as I do every morning since I started this challenge, and I guess not eating pasta and pizza is working. Now, this is just one measurement; I can be back up tomorrow, and it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I’m still figuring out a workout routine that works for my brain, and it’s an enjoyable process. But the summer is yet to start, there are 100 or so days in front of me to get in better shape, and I need to keep training. I'll be honest though: this is such a fun experiment and I'm having a blast. 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

21 down, 23 more to go

It’s 11.35am, 27°, clear sky with only a few tiny little clouds here and there. I’m standing at the same parking spot where I ended the previous walk, and I’m about to tackle segment number 5 of this 10-part loop. Contrary to what I did up until this point, this time I’m gonna try something different: I’m going to write this post as I go, rather than writing it the following day. I’m typing this in a chat with myself, on Telegram. We’ll see how this goes. If I end up enjoying the experience, I might even consider making a private group chat for the supporters and do one of these walks “live” for the people who are interested in following along. It could be a fun experiment. Ok, the route on my watch is set, off we go. Right away, we leave the parking spot behind us and we venture into the woods. Has rained quite a lot over the past few days so hopefully the trails is not a muddy mess. This whole area is quite interesting because it’s mostly forest but every now and again there’s a cluster of rocks scattered around. More than once I went looking for climbable boulders, not for myself since I’m not a climber, but for my brother. As always, we’re following the yellow and white trail marks, a reminder that we are on the right track. I always wondered if they picked the white and yellow because those are the colours of the Vatican and these walks are all about churches. I might look into that at some point. I never walked this specific trail before and walking on new trails is the main reason why I wanted to do these walks. I’m loving it. The ground is also so soft because of the rain. And it seems like we have picked up a passenger already. If you are keeping scores, mark one for team Jesus. I was thinking that one cool photography related project could be to take pictures of all of these religious shrines that are scattered all over the valleys. Could be fun, I’ll add it to my list of potential random projects. First intersection of the day. We are taking the right and going down. We need to reach a nearby town, go through it, emerge on the other side, then walk up to a ridge and most of the walk is gonna be up that ridge. I’m quite excited because I thought about walking that part of the valley for quite some time and I’m finally doing it. What a lovely day to be out in nature! And we have reached the first civilised outpost. We need to go through it and carry on in our journey down to the next village before we start climbing back up. But first, I’m gonna zip off my pants because it’s too warm for not wearing shorts. Ok legs are free, so much better now. We can carry on and walk through Cepletischis. If you’re interested in moving here, this one’s up for sale for the very high price of 15000€. Yes, I’m not missing a zero, that’s 15k. As always, there’s a monument to remember the people who died during the World War. As I said before, these are everywhere. And literally on the other side of the street, another small one. This one’s quite neat, never seen one before with a cross like that. It has a forced perspective of some sort. We’re now on asphalt for a little bit. Not a fan of walking on the road but sometimes it’s unavoidable. We’re headed to wards the next village which I believe is gonna be the last one of the walk, basically till the end. Another enjoyable aspect about these walks is how everyone is friendly. You say hello to all the people you encounter (which aren’t many) they smile and say hi back. It’s a simple thing but I appreciate it greatly. That’s a dream house right there. We’re about to reach Polava, a tiny tiny village with a Buddhist monastery that the Dalai Lama visited years ago. And what a cute little village this is. We’re still walking down but not for long because right in front of us there’s the ridge we’re gonna walk on for the next couple of hours. It’s almost time to do some cardio and start going uphill. We’re over the bridge and it’s time to climb up. Hopefully the trail is not too slippery, but I don’t hold much hope. Heart rate is going up! Which is good, need to get back into shape. The temperature inside the woods is amazing and it also smells wonderfully. Time to score one point for team… Buddha? This was unexpected. I mean, I knew about the monastery but I wasn’t expecting to find one of these out in the wild. This is so cool. Looks like the trail goes up through a dried creek. Interesting. The GPS says I’m right on track and the trail is marked but this is weird. I wonder how this looks on a rainy day. As expected, this part of the trail is both steep and slippery, which is a very unpleasant combination. But we’re almost halfway through the climb so it’s not too bad. Time for a mini break to rehydrate and this is a good excuse to talk about today’s sponsor: water. Feeling thirsty? Feeling dirty? Need to make pasta? Water is here to help you out doing that and much more. Since the beginning of time, water, always at your side. Also, a big thank you watch for warning me that “a climb is about to start”. Good job. Ufff, that was tiring. This climb was not fun, it was so, so slippery. Anyway we’re now at the beginning of the ridge. The lovely town of Toppolo is 40 minutes away but we’re headed in the opposite direction. Also, so many goddamn ticks. I’m so tired of these damn insects. But we’re finally at the sight of the first church of the walk, the church of San Martino (18/44). It’s very odd looking for being a church, it looks more like a building used by farmers more than anything. I learned that the church was used as headquarters for the Austrian soldiers during the War of Independence in 1848. Very interesting. Most of the climb is done, I still have some 100 or so meters and the rest is primarily downhill. Which, considering how slippery the trail is, is not going to be fun. But that’s how it is so down we go! I was so close to falling on my back. That would have been very unpleasant. But on our way down we have a great view of Mount Matajur. Another couple of points for our teams, we cross the road and it’s time to climb back up a little bit. It’s a lot warmer now and I’m sweating a lot. But that’s good! This is good exercise. Every time I see one of these old shacks I think at how cool it would be to turn them all into tiny cabins where people can go sleep for the night. It would be so awesome and such a nice way to encourage a certain type of tourism. This part of the trail is really beautiful, the pictures I’m taking on my phone can’t capture how nice the light is today. I really need to invest in a good camera and stop using the phone to take photos. This descent is great, there’s a slight breeze, the trail is not too steep so it’s very easy to walk and not too taxing on my knees. And it’s a lot less slippery, which is something I appreciate considering I risked falling 5 times already. And we have reached quite possibly the most beautiful church of the walk: the ruins of the church of Sant Egidio. This is not part of the 44 but I like this so much. It’s really in the middle of nowhere, at the top of a mountain. And there’s not much left other than what you see in the photo. Lovely place, I should come sleep up here one day. Only 5km left to go, we’re at the final stretch, and this is now a very enjoyable stroll into the woods. I’m not taking many pictures because the view is mostly the same and there’s nothing exciting worth photographing. Except for the second church of today’s walk! This is the church of Santa Lucia (19/44) which from afar looks more like a garage than a church. This descent is looooong, but according to my watch we have almost no meters left to climb (it actually says 10 meters but my watch can’t be trusted). I’m currently taking a quick break sitting on a rock. It’s so warm now. We don’t have a lot left to walk, some 3 and a half km but I’m tempted to eat the apple I brought with me. At the same time I don’t want to take the backpack off my back because I’m all sweaty and the sensation when you put it back on is awful. I guess the apple is gonna wait to be back at the car. Ok, getting back up and we’re walking again. All of a sudden, out of the woods and straight into a field with tall grass We’re about to get back into civilization for the final stretch of the walk. My feet hurt. Damn shoes! But I decided that I’m not gonna change them. Too easy that way. It’s a lot more fun to try make things work. There’s a lovely view from up here. And a very nice breeze. Second to last church of the day, the church of San Bartolomeo Apostolo (20/44). This is nested inside the small village and it’s a lot less bucolic than the ones we have seen earlier today. Down the main road we go. Not fun to walk on concrete my feet are not having a great time now. But thankfully we’re about to go back into the woods. We’re almost there, about 1km left to walk. I was worried I was going to walk on concrete all the way down. This is so much better. We’re almost out of the woods again and almost at the site of the final church of the walk and the end of the walk. And there’s the last church of the day, the church of San Giusto (21/44), nested in the middle of a group of houses. If it wasn’t for my watch vibrating I’d have missed it completely because the road runs underneath it. I lived close by for more than a decade and I never noticed there was a church here. Ok, only a few hundred meters left to walk. We have a bridge to walk across (so many bridges on these walks), one I walked many times before since the closest supermarket to my house is nearby. And we have arrived. And yes there’s another church in the background but that’s not part of the loop since it’s “modern”. And there you have it, we’re halfway through this series. The next walk is likely going to be the most challenging one of the bunch. But that’s a problem for future me. As always photos from the walk are available on the shared drive folder and the data from my watch is available . See you next time! You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Carl Barenbrug

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Carl Barenbrug, whose blog can be found at carlbarenbrug.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. A native Scotsman, albeit half German, living in the beautiful, cosmopolitan, and windy city of Edinburgh. I live with my partner and two Burmese cats. I’m a digital product designer, founder, and aspiring entrepreneur with a long-standing love for minimalism and rock climbing. But I’m also interested in fashion, architecture, tennis, cycling, football, and, admittedly, experimenting with AI tools too. Right now, I’m working in the field of chat communication, creative tooling such as 3D mockup production, and a bit of consultation when I have the time. Slowly preparing for a probable life where my skills are surpassed by robot while trying to figure out how to independently survive and thrive. I think I created my blog around 2011, which was pretty much focused on design curation. Predictably named after myself, I was simply sharing aesthetic things I liked and it helped shape my taste at the time. My personal site has taken on a few different forms and functions over the years, but since 2020 it’s been exclusively a blog — a digital space where I can think in public. The topics vary a bit, but typically I’ll be yapping about projects I’ve worked on, perspectives on procedural design, and the occasional lifestyle story or social experiment. I don’t write as often as I’d like or once did, and I think the main reason for this is that I’ve stopped reading and listening to books for the past year or so. Reading seems to fuel my writing, but I’m prioritising creative output over consumption right now. I reckon this will change next year though. My writing process varies depending on the topic. If I’m blogging about work I’ve done, there’s very little research I need to do. It’s just a free-flowing explanation of what I’ve made. Yet, if it’s more of a thought-piece, then I’ll make a note of the topic and some references that have inspired the thought because I also like to cite those if I can. I’ll then start drafting in iA Writer. I’ll usually leave it a few days or weeks and come back to it. When I feel like I have a decent post, I’ll share it with robot to proof and get some feedback — mostly grammar, structure, and light shaping. I tend to take a bit more care in what I publish on my blog than when I journal offline. I enjoy silence or natural sounds if I really need to use my head. It’s really the only way I can truly focus. But sometimes I love to write with instrumental music (house or techno) if I’m running with an idea that requires a little less attention. In terms of the physical environment, space matters, but I’m pretty flexible. Normally, it’s when I’m home in my office or stretched out on my sofa, locked in by my cats. And I’ll only ever write on my laptop — never on my phone. The site is built on Kirby CMS, where all my posts are published as markdown. The domain is registered with Hover and is hosted by Hetzner. I tend to follow Manu’s advice when it comes to such things, even if he insists he has no clue what he’s doing. I probably would have moved to Kirby sooner. It’s a fantastic CMS, even for a basic blog. But I also use it for my portfolio, so I feel like I get a lot out of it. And as it’s modular, it can be as light or as heavy as you need it to be. No built-in bloat. There are other super lightweight blog-specific solutions out there that I like the look of, but not enough to convince me to change. In terms of doing things differently from a writing perspective, I think we naturally express ourselves differently as life happens. Looking back, I think some of my posts might have tried too hard to be intellectual, but I think I’ve generally maintained a consistent tone of voice, which I like. I don’t monetise my blog, so it earns nothing in a tangible sense. But if it helps me connect with people, whether sentimentally or collaboratively, that’s good enough for me. The domain is $19 per year, Kirby is a one-off payment of around $115, and hosting is on a shared server, so I don’t pay anything for that. These are all worth a look: There are a few projects I’ve worked on that I’d like to share: 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 145 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it. thewonger.com davidreina.com electricgecko.de arun.is/blog Local Log : a simple offline journalling macOS app to log thoughts through text or video. The Forest : a place to get lost on the web for a while. 099 SPLY : a minimal web app for creatives to generate and download mockups.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Fitness challenge underway

A few weeks ago, I was at my brother’s place, watching NBA, and amongst other things, I was teasing him about the fact that he’s putting up weight. Which is just a fact. But he’s also in his 40s, so that’s understandable. He pointed out that I’m also gaining weight (but I’m not in my 40s), and since it was a long time since I weighed myself, I decided to hop on a scale, and the number that came out was 89.6kg. Now, I’m 190cm tall, so being almost 90kgs isn’t really a tragedy but I told him «I’m gonna get back into shape» just so that I can keep continue teasing him and he won’t be able to say shit back. Isn’t brotherly love wonderful? I gave myself the “extended” whole summer (so till the end of September) to reach two goals. The first goal is to be lighter than I was 10 years ago. I had a smart scale for more than a decade, and the oldest measurement I have logged is 85.3kg, recorded on December 21st 2015. So I need to be below that by September 30th. The second goal is to be in better shape than I was 10 years ago. Now, this is a bit harder to quantify, but I’ll let my brother determine if I reached this goal or not. I did take a “before” picture at the beginning of June. It’s my intention to take an “after” one on September 30th, and we’ll compare and see if I made any progress whatsoever. Do I have a concrete plan for how to achieve these two goals? Absolutely not. Do I have a personal trainer guiding me through a training program? Hell no. Am I following a diet prepared by a nutritionist? Nah, what’s the fun in doing that! We’re in the “vibe” era, so I’m gonna vibe training and vibe dieting, meaning I’m doing things my way, trying random shit, going for silly walks, training however I want, and having fun in the process. Gonna be a fun summer. And since we’re talking losing weight, I’m gonna mention two of my blogging pals here, one mr Kev and one mr Luigi , both of whom are going through a similar challenge (for more sane and normal reasons, unlike myself, who is fueled by spite). I believe in you guys! 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

Barry Hess

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Barry Hess, whose blog can be found at bjhess.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . People and Blogs is supported by the "One a Month" club members. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m a programmer-type from rural Minnesota. I grew up on a farm near a small town. Now I live in a bustling city of 27,000 people…surrounded by farmland. In other words, I’m still in rural Minnesota. I studied computer science at a small private college, which led to my 26-year career programming computers. First it was at an insurance company, then it was at a SaaS startup, and now it’s for myself at a little company I run with my business partner. My hobbies are mostly typical: reading, watching movies, and the occasional video game (meaning Fortnite). My favorite sport is baseball, though I’ll watch the occasional other sport. I also try to do a little woodworking, cooking, and, well, blogging. Blogging is a hobby, yes? I decided to start a blog in 2004. Personal blogs were popping up all over, and I was enjoying meeting new people through the comments section in these blogs. I also have a couple non-blogging friends that were doing their thing on Xanga . The blogs I followed were either friends, friends of friends, about the Minnesota Twins (baseball), or about U.S. news and politics. Online I generally use the handle bjhess. That was what my college gave me for my first ever user account. Toward the end of college I was looking for a domain name, and unfortunately there was already a techy person with my first and last name who grabbed that obvious option. (They still have the domain to this day!) So bjhess.com it was, and the name stuck. I blogged via b2evolution and WordPress in the early days, probably at Dreamhost. In the early 2010s I switched over to a self-hosted and customized install of Scanty , and I ran that for a long time. In 2022 I switched to an HTML-only site . That lasted about a year before I and my colleagues built Pika. I don’t have a system or process for blogging. My inspiration is generally from interesting things happening in my life. That can be a vacation, a recent discovery, an experiment that I’m trying, or a feeling that I’m feeling. Most of my posts are written in a single session, with a couple rounds of editing for grammar, tone, and flow. There’s only been one occasion where I asked others to read my writing before posting. I’ve recently tried the “weekly update” format of posts, which to this point has been me adding links and notes to a draft leading up to finalizing the post on Friday or Saturday. I’m toying with updating the draft post daily throughout the week before publishing, but then if I’m doing that I wonder if I should…just post those daily updates daily? Inspiration comes and goes, but I generally prefer to have quiet while writing, whether that’s natural or simulated via headphones. Aside from that basic need, I don’t strongly believe that physical spaces influence my creativity. However, I’ve been noticing that my office is in a state of constant clutter…and I’m starting to believe. Now the question is whether that clutter impacts the mind or whether the cluttered mind leads to a physical manifestation? A little of both, I think. Today, and for the rest of my life, my blog is hosted at Pika . I write my posts directly in the web editor. I would start my blog on Pika, naturally! I believe pretty strongly that most bloggers probably would be better off not rolling their own static site generators or CMS installations. For those that want to play in that world, though, there’s nothing like it. For the rest of us there are a number of small, independent blogging platforms that make things quite a bit easier. They all tend to play nice together, offering exporting and importing options if you ever find a different platform to be a better fit for your style. If I were paying for my Pika account, it would be $60 per year, and my domain is $13 per year. Not bad for a favorite hobby! I pay $9/month for Plausible analytics, though I’m not entirely sure why. As a programmer, I think it’s mainly that I want a place to look to see any weird happenings to make sure nothing is amiss. If traffic to my blog disappeared, I’d be curious if I did something wrong technically to cause it. All’s fair for monetizing. I don’t do it, but I know affiliate links and such make sense in some contexts. Let me dial up my feed reader here. Okay, for a selection… I’m not sure how Chris Glass keeps his daily photo journal going, but it’s great. Rafał Pastuszak does fascinating things at Untested . Adam Keys is usually thinking . Since Luke moved away from my area, I like to read what’s going through his mind on recursion . I travel vicariously through MacPsych. Maique gives me all the photo inspiration . Holy cats, Jamie Todd Rubin is an avid reader . Brendon Bigley provides cool video game news . Annie lends me insight . Davey and Jamie share lives well lived. I also like to keep up with Derek Sivers , Hugh Howey , Craig Mod , and Cabel Sasser (I still need to read the 2025 snacks rundown). Oh, and, boy howdy, Mike Monteiro . Any of the above who haven’t been interviewed would be a great option to interview next! I won’t be shy–I’m working on Pika and I would greatly appreciate it if you gave Pika a look. Our biggest project at the moment is The Pika Pulse , which will be a great help to discover Pika blogs. I think that’s a good thing for the readers of People and Blogs! Mostly, though, I’d like more people to blog. I want people of all ages and backgrounds sharing their experiences at their own domain online. Whether you do that via Pika or any other setup or service (yes, even WordPress), I’ll be excited! See you online! 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 144 interviews . People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

A moment with chemicals

It’s amazing how much life can improve with the help of 20 milligrams of chemicals a day. 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

17 down, 27 more to go

Here we go again. Afternoon walk this time around. It’s almost 2pm, and I’m standing in the same parking spot where I got picked up last week. No breakfast in me, but I did have lunch before heading out. Compared to last week’s hike, this one’s gonna be way easier. We have a bit more than 20kms to walk, with roughly 650 meters of ascent and 1300 of descent. Gonna be fun. Before we begin, I’ll have to apologise for the terrible photos I took, especially of the churches. Been a weird walk, and there was also non-ideal lighting most of the day and, I don’t know, I guess I was not very inspired today? I’ll hopefully do better next time around. Ok, down the mountain we go. Compared to last week, today’s a lot cooler, and there’s a gentle breeze. Perfect conditions to walk down a mountain and into the forest. The first part is a lot steeper than I thought. I did consider walking the whole loop in reverse, and this part would not be fun. I’m having a hard time going down, I can’t imagine going up from here, especially after a long walk. Thankfully, the trail becomes a lot easier to walk after that initial steep part, and I’m now enjoying my time in the woods. There’s gonna be a lot of going in and out of the woods on this hike. Down a few steps and I’m about to emerge next to Montemaggiore , the last town you encounter on your way up to Mount Matajur. I saw these concrete stairs many times before, while driving up this road. Always wanted to walk this trail, and I’m glad I’m finally doing it. The trail goes through the buildings, neat! So many old and abandoned buildings. Makes me kinda sad. But I get it, life up here ain’t exactly easy, or practical. And on the other side? A big, and frankly quite ugly, Jesus. This is relatively modern, and I’ll be honest, I’m not a fan. The trail continues in and around the town, down a few sets of stairs, and through some overgrown grass. So far, this one’s the worst-maintained trail I have walked. But I can imagine that doing maintenance is not exactly easy over here. So kudos to everyone who does it. I’m now back on one of those service roads, and it’s a very enjoyable walk. We’re slowly going down, the weather is lovely, and I’m very much enjoying my time outside. It’s not an incredibly varied walk so far, the scenery is mostly the same, but still, this is not a bad way to spend a Saturday afternoon. This small football field made me smile. I have no idea who comes up here to use it, but it’s fun to see it’s still there. I’d have loved to have something like this available to me as a kid. But now there’s nobody around, these valleys are slowly getting abandoned, which is sad but also understandable. Time to take a left turn, leave the service road behind me and go up into the woods again. I’m not too distant from the first of the three churches I’ll visit today. Was not expecting to find myself in this open area with a view of the valley underneath. This is a lovely spot, and there’s also a cabin nearby. Probably used by the hunters, like most of the cabins scattered around the valleys. Into the woods again, and I now need to leave the trail behind me because the first church is some 100 or so meters off the path. So down I go and to reach the church of Sant’Ulderico in Monte (15/44). The area around the church is quite neglected, and the overall scenery is really not the best. The only good thing about this one is that one of the windows was open, and I finally managed to take a decent picture of the inside of one of the churches. It’s very barebones, but the altar is nice. I still think it’s sad that these are all locked; they could become awesome shelters for the night. I should probably learn lock picking… Time to hike back up to where I left the trail earlier and keep moving on through the woods. Next stop is gonna be where the trail splits and the variant starts. I hate these variants. They make no sense, and this one in particular is almost as long as the main path, only to touch one more church, one that is not even all that nice or unique. But I guess there’s no point in complaining; nobody is forcing me to walk these trails after all. After another hour of uneventful walking into the woods, we have finally reached the location of the church of Santi Primo e Feliciano (16/44), which I didn’t even bother visit closely and only took this photo of it. The only nice thing about this church is the location, since it has a great view, but the building itself is incredibly uninspiring, especially because it has probably been restructured in modern times. There are a couple of pictures on the link above if you want to see more of it. That said, though, there are a couple of way more interesting things to see around here. Starting from this throwback sign. What a blast from the past. Do you even remember the time when not everyone had a phone, and you could use phones in public places to make phone calls? What a time! The other unusual sight is a Thai temple?!? That was very unexpected. I was aware that there’s a Buddhist one in the area (that I might actually see during a future walk), but knew nothing about this one. Neat! And right in front of it? A small chapel to remember the people who have died during the two World Wars. I told you these things are everywhere and that it’s impossible to forget what happened during those times if you live here. I’m about to start going back up, and my watch vibrates to alert me that there’s a “severe weather storm alert” which is always great to see when you’re half way through a long walk, and you’re in the middle of nowhere, a couple of hours from your car. I was contemplating stopping for a quick break, but the opposite happened: I started going! As a result, I took very few pictures of the next chunk of the walk but was mostly the same, going in and out of the woods. An hour later, I connected back with the main path and was close to the third and final church of this walk, the church of San Michele Arcangelo (17/44), which is by far the best one of the three I visited today. Very small and in an elevated position with a nice view of the valley. Like many others, it was reconstructed after the quakes of the sixteenth century, and you can clearly see that there are parts missing in the front. Still, I much prefer to see churches in this condition; at least they feel like they have a history behind them. Almost 4 hours in, still 7 kms left to walk, which means there’s no time to waste. I leave the church behind me, go through the small village, into the woods, and some 20 or so minutes later, I’m back on a paved road. My legs would love to go right and downhill, but I need to go left and uphill, the direction our grandparents used to take to go to school back in the day. But I’m quite happy for this because I get the chance to see a church I've always wanted to visit. That’s the church of Sant'Andrea Apostolo and every time I drive up to Mount Matajur, I can see it from my car. Has this very characteristic twisty road going up to it from the small village underneath and I always wanted to drive there. And I have to say, the location is very nice. Living up here must be a nightmare because there’s only one way down, and the road is very narrow. Plus, the closest anything must be 30 to 40 minutes away by car. But if you’re looking for peace and quiet, this is the place for you. Another point scored by team Mary on my way out of the town. There’s less than 5kms left now, I’m starting to feel a bit tired, my feet hurt, I need better shoes, I want to take a quick break, but I also don’t want to stop because I know I’m only an hour or so from my car. And stopping at this point makes no sense. So into the forest I go again for the final stretch of this walk. Found a bunch of sheep chilling in the forest right at the end of the walk. These animals are so fun. If I had the space, I’d totally get a few, just to see them play with the crazy dog I have. I wonder what he would do. Maybe one day I’ll find out. Final descent into the forest, couple of turns, and here we are, back at the parking spot where I left my car some 5 hours ago. Thankfully, it’s still there because walking home from here would not be fun. Doable, sure. But not fun. So far, my least favourite walk and the churches were mostly uninspiring, but hey, that’s part of the fun. Next up, we have another long descent, but I very much look forward to doing the walk after that, number 6, since that has the potential to be the most tiring yet fun and interesting walk of the entire series. I’ll definitely need to buy a better pair of shoes by then. There's a new folder on the shared Drive folder with all the pictures I took on the walk. And yes, I have moved from iCloud to Drive because apparently iCloud doesn't like huge albums. And there's also the link to the data recorded by my watch , if you want to get more info on the hike itself. You love the outdoors and RSS. You're one of the special ones.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

AI blog question challenge

Rishabh emailed me the other day, asking me to answer the 7 questions of his new blog challenge, and who am I to say no to such a request? So here we go. I assume by AI models we mean the current crop of LLMs, and not AI models in general, because I’m old enough to remember when “Machine Learning” was a thing. What even is AI anyway at this point, since everything is lumped together into one useless definition? Anyway, I believe my first experience was trying out chagpt back when it first came out. I don’t think I spent more than 10 or 15 minutes using it at the time. It was impressive tech, but was also completely useless for me at the time, and that’s why I didn’t bother spending more time using it. This is an interesting question. Do I use AI? Well, I guess the answer is yes since it’s almost impossible to avoid using it if you use the web at this point. Pretty much all tools and services are integrating some sort of AI-powered functionalities, and it’s become harder and harder not to use them. If, instead, the question is do I use one of the various LLMs directly to do stuff, then the answer is still yes, but the amount of usage is so low that some people might consider that to be the same as not using them at all. I don’t directly pay for any of the models, but my work email has been powered by Google for more than a decade, and so I do get access to Gemini Pro. Workspace has usage data for everything, and I just looked it up: In the last 90 days, the only AI-related feature I used was the Gemini App (that’s not surprising considering I turned off everything else), and I have apparently used it 62 times. I’m now looking at the history of those chats, and pretty much all of them are single-question queries related to something web dev I was doing. Things like how to do a specific thing inside Kirby, or how to achieve something using a particular JS library. This is stuff one should be able to find inside documentation websites, but the search there is often awful and so after a google search, I try my luck with AI. And as I wrote somewhere else, I never copy-paste. I ask very narrow questions so that I can be pointed towards the correct answer. And once I have that, I do the coding and I re-implement everything myself. Am I against using AI? As a generative tool, yes. I refuse to ask AI to do something for me or to generate content from scratch. As a tech in general? I think it has some potentially useful applications in narrow contexts. As always, the answer is not cut-and-dry, and it can be yes or no depending on the framing and the scope. The only aspect I appreciate is the ability to ask questions in natural language. Because sometimes you have a problem or an answer you’re looking for that can’t be described in a more structured way. As for what I don’t like, how anthropomorphised these stupid tools are is definitely high on my list. I don’t want my computer to talk back or to make jokes or to say «I’m sorry». If I input a question, I want an answer back, and that’s it. I don’t want follow up questions, I don’t want some pointless preamble. I get why this happens, but I fucking hate it. This is software. I don't want my software to have a personality. I want it to perform a task and get out of my way. I also don’t like the lying, the gaslighting, and all the other crap, and I also don’t like what the AI industry is doing as a whole, but that’s a separate issue. Again, another question that has different answers depending on the scope. The idea of being able to generate images, in general, is neutral to me. It all comes down to what you use it for. There are some potential use cases that are totally fine, others are completely insane. As a whole, I think the ability to generate slop is bad, but that’s because humanity can’t be trusted to do anything the right way. As for their use in blog posts, I think stock images were useless, and I don’t see images generated with AI to be any different. Unless you have generated an image as part of the content to explain or visualise something. That’s fine, label it as a generated image and move on. That’s no different than including a render, or a sketch on paper, from a content perspective. My consumption of online content these days is so limited that I don’t have this issue. I read very few blogs, and I know they are not AI generated because I emailed the people behind them more than once, and I know what their stance is. I watch almost no YouTube, and I only read a few news sites. My strategy is to simply stay away from the digital world as much as possible, and I’m at the point where I’m considering dropping my digital consumption down to zero and quit the internet as a place for content. I have zero hope. And that is because I have zero hope in anything that’s in the hands of mega corporations. The incentives are totally skewed, and they’d do everything they can in order to keep the line go up. I don’t see people with strong morals in positions of power and so unless we decide to go full French Revolution, I see no reason for things to improve. 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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