Latest Posts (16 found)
Manuel Moreale 5 days ago

Linda Ma

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Linda Ma, whose blog can be found at midnightpond.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Aleem Ali and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hey, I’m Linda. I grew up in Budapest in a Chinese family of four, heavily influenced by the 2000s internet. I was very interested in leaving home and ended up in the United Kingdom—all over, but with the most time spent in Edinburgh, Scotland. I got into design, sociology, and working in tech and startups. Then, I had enough of being a designer, working in startups, and living in the UK, so I left. I moved to Berlin and started building a life that fits me more authentically. My interests change a lot, but the persistent ones have been: journaling with a fountain pen, being horizontal in nature, breathwork, and ambient music. I was struck by a sudden need to write in public last year. I’d been writing in private but never felt the need to put anything online because I have this thing about wanting to remain mysterious. At least, that’s the story I was telling myself. In hindsight, the 'sudden need' was more of a 'wanting to feel safe to be seen.' I also wanted to find more people who were like-minded. Not necessarily interested in the same things as me, but thinking in similar ways. Through writing, I discovered that articulating your internal world with clarity takes time and that I was contributing to my own problems because I wasn't good at expressing myself. I write about these kinds of realizations in my blog. It’s like turning blurriness and stories into clarity and facts. I also do the opposite sometimes, where I reframe experiences and feelings into semi-fictional stories as a way to release them. I enjoy playing in this space between self-understanding through reality and self-soothing through fantasy. I also just enjoy the process of writing and the feeling of hammering on the keyboard. I wanted the blog to be formless and open-ended, so it didn’t have a name to begin with, and it was hanging out on my personal website. The name just kinda happened. I like the sound of the word “pond” and the feeling I get when I think of a pond. Then I thought: if I were a pond, what kind of pond would I be? A midnight pond. It reflects me, my writing, and the kind of impression I’d like to leave. It’s taken on a life of its own now, and I’m curious to see how it evolves. Nowadays, it seems I’m interested in writing shorter pieces and poems. I get a lot of inspiration from introspection, often catalyzed by conversations with people, paragraphs from books, music, or moments from everyday life. In terms of the writing process, the longer blogposts grow into being like this: I'll have fleeting thoughts and ideas that come to me pretty randomly. I try to put them all in one place (a folder in Obsidian or a board in Muse ). I organically return to certain thoughts and notes over time, and I observe which ones make me feel excited. Typically, I'll switch to iA Writer to do the actual writing — something about switching into another environment helps me get into the right mindset. Sometimes the posts are finished easily and quickly, sometimes I get stuck. When I get stuck, I take the entire piece and make it into a pile of mess in Muse. Sometimes the mess transforms into a coherent piece, sometimes it gets abandoned. When I finish something and feel really good about it, I let it sit for a couple days and look at it again once the post-completion high has faded. This is advice from the editors of the Modern Love column , and it’s very good advice. I occasionally ask a friend to read something to gauge clarity and meaning. I like the idea of having more thinking buddies. Please feel free to reach out if you think we could be good thinking buddies. Yes, I do believe the physical space influences my creativity. And it’s not just the immediate environment (the room or desk I'm writing at) but also the thing or tool I'm writing with (apps and notebook) as well as the broader environment (where I am geographically). There’s a brilliant book by Vivian Gornick called The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative and a quote in it: “If you don’t leave home you suffocate, if you go too far you lose oxygen.” It’s her comment on one of the example pieces she discusses. This writer was talking about how he couldn’t write when he was too close or too far from home. It’s an interesting perspective to consider, and I find it very relatable. Though I wouldn’t have arrived at this conclusion had I not experienced both extremes. My ideal creative environment is a relatively quiet space where I can see some trees or a body of water when I look up. The tools I mentioned before and my physical journal are also essential to me. My site is built with Astro , the code is on GitHub, and all deploys through Netlify. The site/blog is really just a bunch of .md and .mdx files with some HTML and CSS. I code in VS Code. I wouldn’t change anything about the content or the name. Maybe I would give the tech stack or platform more thought if I started it now? In moments of frustration with Astro or code, I’ve often wondered if I should just accept that I’m not a techie and use something simpler. It’s been an interesting journey figuring things out though. Too deep into it, can’t back out now. The only running cost I have at the moment is the domain which is around $10 a year. iA Writer was a one-time purchase of $49.99. My blog doesn’t generate revenue. I don’t like the idea of turning personal blogs into moneymaking machines because it will most likely influence what and how you write. But — I am supportive of creatives wanting to be valued for what they create and share from an authentic place. I like voluntary support based systems like buymeacoffee.com or ko-fi.com . I also like the spirit behind platforms like Kickstarter or Metalabel . I started a Substack earlier this year where I share the longer posts from my blog. I’m not sure how I feel about this subscription thing, but I now use the paywall to protect posts that are more personal than others. I’ve come across a lot of writing I enjoy though and connected with others through writing. Here are a few I’ve been introduced to or stumbled upon: Interesting, no-longer-active blogs: I like coming across sites that surprise me. Here’s one that boggles my mind, and here’s writer Catherine Lacey’s website . There’s also this online documentary and experience of The Garden of Earthly Delights by Jheronimous Bosch that I share all the time, and Spencer Chang’s website is pretty cool. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 110 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Ben Werdmuller and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible. Lu’s Wikiblogardenite — Very real and entertaining blog of a "slightly-surreal videos maker and coder". Romina’s Journal — Journal of a graphic designer and visual artist. Maggie Appleton’s Garden — Big fan of Maggie’s visual essays on programming, design, and anthropology. Elliott’s memory site — This memory site gives me a cozy feeling. Where are Kay and Phil? — Friends documenting their bike tours and recipes. brr — Blog of an IT professional who was deployed to Antarctica during 2022-2023. The late Ursula K. Le Guin’s blog — She started this at the age of 81 in 2010.

css CSS writing Writing culture Culture html HTML
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Manuel Moreale 5 days ago

My issue with the two sides

One fairly common concept you’ll inevitably stumble upon if you spend any modicum of time reading discussions on the web is the idea of “two sides”. Some will tell you that the two sides are not the same and one is clearly better than the other, others will argue that not taking one side means that you’re tacitly supporting the other, while someone else will tell you that trying to argue that maybe more nuanced positions exist, in addition to the two sides, is wrong and you’re a bad person for doing that. All this is fair, and I’m more than happy to concede that, in some circumstances, one side is indeed clearly better than the other. I’m also happy to concede that again, in some circumstances, not expressing a preference for one of the two camps, when one is clearly better than the other, can be seen as tacit support for the worse one. I’m also more than happy to agree that sometimes dragging a discussion into the mud that is the infinite fractal world of the fine details is not really all that helpful. Having said all that, I still think way too often conversations on the web have the tendency to completely obliterate any level of nuance. Which is understandable, considering most conversations are taking place on social media platforms that aren’t designed to have nuanced conversations in the first place. There are ideas and concepts that demand more than 300 characters to be expressed fully, but unfortunately, sometimes even saying that can be seen as problematic in some circles. And that is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because progress can only be had if people have enough space and time to express themselves fully and then have their ideas challenged constructively. And yes, I’m already hearing you screaming that some racist bigots out there don’t deserve to have their views treated respectfully and be given time and space. I get it, and I understand it. The problem I see with this, though, is that the internet is a weird place. A lot of people aren’t vocal. Most of them are just lurking around, absorbing content and forming ideas in their head and maybe discussing things in person with close friends and family. And amongst them, there probably are a lot of people who would be more than happy to support and join the good one of the two sides, but are probably kept at a distance because of the insanity they see unfolding. I’m gonna pick a stupid example to make this point a bit clearer. Let’s imagine the topic of the day is “kicking puppies”. One camp is happily going around supporting the kicking of puppies because it’s a fun thing to do, and puppies are worthless and annoying, while the other camp thinks puppies are adorable—they are—and they are living creatures and deserve to not be kicked and instead loved and adored. It’s fairly easy to see that one camp, clearly, is better than the other, and if you are a sane and decent person, you should not have a hard time figuring out which camp is worth siding with. And sure, you might be one of those people who might argue that in some cases, puppies can be problematic because maybe they are puppies of a terrible invasive species that will destroy the solar system in 3 years if we don’t kick them all now. But, generally speaking you should find it easy to side with one of the two sides, even if only with some asterisk attached. But what if the pro-puppies camp you hear from online doesn’t stop at "puppies should be loved" but also argues that people who kick puppies should all die now and be dissolved in acid and their families be shot into the sun? You clearly are supporting the puppies' cause, but you are definitely not on board with all the rest of the nonsense. What do you do then, when someone screams at you, asking which side you are siding with? You clearly love puppies, but you also don’t want to support drowning people in acid. So you’re fucked. You could try to explain your position, but nobody got time for that. Chances are, you say nothing, and you silently move away from the public discourse space, never to be seen or heard again. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s bad. It’s bad when a lot of people are scared to express what they think because they are scared of the repercussions. Because you can’t have a healthy society without open dialogue. And I don’t even know how we fix this at the internet level. I don’t think there even is a way to fix this to be perfectly honest with you. It’s up to the individuals to go through the effort of giving other people time and space to express themselves and engage in dialogue. And if that's the only way out, well, shit. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Safari and iOS 26: PSA and a rant

The new iOS is bad in so many ways that writing a post highlighting them all is quite pointless. By the time I’d be done typing, they’d have likely released iOS 27 (and hopefully fixed most of this nonsense). So I’m not gonna waste time doing that and simply focus on one single thing that was so bad when I first upgraded that I was genuinely considering changing career: the new iOS UI. Look, I don’t really care about new UIs; I’m not one of those people who complain simply because things are different. I know software changes over time, that’s fine. But this UI is bad for one simple reason: you can’t access all tabs when using the phone one-handed in a convenient way. And before you start typing «Hey idiot, have you tried tapping that button with the three dots?» I can tell you that yes, I did. I know the missing options are there. But this means that literally every operation now takes two taps instead of one, and I also have to sit through an excruciatingly slow animation every time that stupid menu opens up. If, like me, you hate this, I just wanted to let you know that there is a solution. Go into settings -> apps -> Safari, scroll down a bit till you find the Tabs section and in there, there’s an option to change the UI with something that’s so much better. This is the end of the PSA. Now, let me rant. Look, I don’t think I’m an amazing designer. Or a designer at all these days. But I think I do possess at least one redeeming quality: some design-related common sense, thanks to a professor who, for 5 years, bashed me in the head constantly while I was studying design. The main purpose of a browser is to provide access to the web. You do that through a paradigm called tabs. It’s been like that for decades. Creating a tab, closing a tab, and moving through tabs are the minimum functionalities needed to have a proper browser UI. Ok, I guess you also need to have an address bar where to type something, but I consider that part of the tab. You cannot hide the controls for those interactions inside a menu. You just cannot. Imagine if the shutter button in your camera app was hidden behind a pop-up menu. You’d chuck that piece of shit of an app in the digital hell it belongs to. And for good reasons. If I’m using a browser, I need to be able to create a new tab with just one click. I need to be able to access all the open tabs in one click. That’s a non-negotiable imo. And this alternative Safari UI is not perfect, mind you. The new tab button is still hidden behind an extra tap, while the middle spot in that UI is taken up by a completely useless share button, because Apple is apparently run by people with infinite wisdom. And this is not fucking rocket science. Basically, every other browser out there is managing to do this just fine. New tab in the middle, arrows to navigate on one side, all tabs button on the right. The point of a UI in something like a browser is not to wow or to provide joy. The point is to fucking work. How about you first do that, and then you figure out how to pour all your stupid molten glass on top of it? Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

design Design
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

On public online behaviour

I’m currently in “digital fasting” mode, trying to consume as little content as possible here on the internet. But I do have to be here for work, and so I still end up reading a few things here and there. Some of that content is sent to me via email by random people (always appreciate that) while other is just because I have to open links to blogs that are submitted to blogroll.org. And even though I am not on any social media platform, some of the nonsense that’s going on there still manages to reach me, albeit indirectly. Which is quite impressive, I have to say. It’s incredibly hard to both have an online presence and also completely seal yourself away from social media nonsense. And this is something that’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because the idea of a fediverse is blurring the line that separates these worlds. One thing that’s fun to observe, though, as a very passive and disinterested spectator, is how some patterns of behaviour seem to be platform agnostic. Which is just a very polite way for me to say that dickheads are omnipresent. It doesn’t matter what tech stack they have behind them: if you give them a public way to express themselves, they’ll inevitably shit on everything and everyone and just be despicable human beings, no matter what. And I really do believe that this is a byproduct of the public nature of social media. I sincerely doubt that they do this in private, because I don’t think it’s as rewarding. By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone. Then pat yourself on the back and get ready to join the next mob. This is something that’s entirely absent when interactions are moved to private channels of communication. I think it’s incredibly rare for a mob to try to pile on you via email. You can just keep marking everyone as spam, not even bothering to open their messages. And they get no kick out of it. There’s no personal reward to be found in sending a shitty email to someone. And that is why, even though I had nothing but enjoyable exchanges with everyone I crossed paths with online, I’ll still stick with email and DMs as the way to interact with the rest of you out there. And if you think you have a good argument to make to prove I’m wrong, I wanna hear it. My inbox is open . Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

programming Programming media Media culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Blake Watson

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Blake Watson, whose blog can be found at blakewatson.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Jaga Santagostino and the other 121 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Sure! I’m Blake. I live in a small city near Jackson, Mississippi, USA. I work for MRI Technologies as a frontend engineer, building bespoke web apps for NASA. Previously I worked at an ad agency as an interactive designer. I have a neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It's a progressive condition that causes my muscles to become weaker over time. Because of that, I use a power wheelchair and a whole host of assistive technologies big and small. I rely on caregivers for most daily activities like taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating—just to name a few. I am able to use a computer on my own. I knew from almost the first time I used one that it was going to be important in my life. I studied Business Information Systems in college as a way to take computer-related courses without all the math of computer science (which scared me at the time). When I graduated, I had a tough time finding a job making websites. I did a bit of freelance work and volunteer work to build up a portfolio, but was otherwise unemployed for several years. I finally got my foot in the door and I recently celebrated a milestone of being employed for a decade . When I'm not working, I'm probably tinkering on side projects . I'm somewhat of a side project and home-cooked app enthusiast. I just really enjoy making and using my own tools. Over the last 10 years, I've gotten into playing Dungeons and Dragons and a lot of my side projects have been related to D&D. I enjoy design, typography, strategy games, storytelling, writing, programming, gamedev, and music. I got hooked on making websites in high school and college in the early 2000s. A friend of mine in high school had a sports news website. I want to say it was made with the Homestead site builder or something similar. I started writing for it and helping with it. I couldn’t get enough so I started making my own websites using WYSIWYG page builders. But I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of page builders. Designing sites felt clunky and I couldn’t get elements to do exactly what I wanted them to do. I had a few blogs on other services over the years. Xanga was maybe the first one. Then I had one on Blogger for a while. In 2005, I took a course called Advanced Languages 1. It turned out to be JavaScript. Learning JavaScript necessitated learning HTML. Throughout the course I became obsessed with learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually, in August of 2005— twenty years ago —I purchased the domain blakewatson.com . I iterated on it multiple times a year at first. It morphed from quirky design to quirkier design as I learned more CSS. It was a personal homepage, but I blogged at other services. Thanks to RSS, I could list my recent blog posts on my website. When I graduated from college, my personal website became more of a web designer's portfolio, a professional site that I would use to attract clients and describe my services. But around that time I was learning how to use WordPress and I started a self-hosted WordPress blog called I hate stairs . It was an extremely personal disability-related and life journaling type of blog that I ran for several years. When I got my first full-time position and didn't need to freelance any longer, I converted blakewatson.com back into a personal website. But this time, primarily a blog. I discontinued I hate stairs (though I maintain an archive and all the original URLs work ). I had always looked up to various web designers in the 2000s who had web development related blogs. People like Jeffery Zeldman , Andy Clarke , Jason Santa Maria , and Tina Roth Eisenberg . For the past decade, I've blogged about web design, disability, and assistive tech—with the odd random topic here or there. I used to blog only when inspiration struck me hard enough to jolt my lazy ass out of whatever else I was doing. That strategy left me writing three or four articles a year (I don’t know why, but I think of my blog posts as articles in a minor publication, and this hasn’t helped me do anything but self-edit—I need to snap out of it and just post ). In March 2023, however, I noticed that I had written an article every month so far that year. I decided to keep up the streak. And ever since then, I've posted at least one article a month on my blog. I realize that isn't very frequent for some people, but I enjoy that pacing, although I wouldn't mind producing a handful more per year. Since I'm purposefully posting more, I've started keeping a list of ideas in my notes just so I have something to look through when it's time to write. I use Obsidian mostly for that kind of thing. The writing itself almost always happens in iA Writer . This app is critical to my process because I am someone who likes to tinker with settings and fonts and pretty much anything I can configure. If I want to get actual writing done, I need constraints. iA Writer is perfect because it looks and works great by default and has very few formatting options. I think I paid $10 for this app one time ten or more years ago. That has to be the best deal I've ever gotten on anything. I usually draft in Writer and then preview it on my site locally to proofread. I have to proofread on the website, in the design where it will live. If I proofread in the editor I will miss all kinds of typos. So I pop back and forth between the browser and the editor fixing things as I go. I can no longer type on a physical keyboard. I use a mix of onscreen keyboard and dictation when writing prose. Typing is a chore and part of the reason I don’t blog more often. It usually takes me several hours to draft, proofread, and publish a post. I mostly need to be at my desk because I have my necessary assistive tech equipment set up there. I romanticize the idea of writing in a comfy nook or at a cozy coffee shop. I've tried packing up my setup and taking it to a coffee shop, but in practice I get precious little writing done that way. What I usually do to get into a good flow state is put on my AirPods Pro, turn on noise cancellation, maybe have some ambient background noise or music , and just write. Preferably while sipping coffee or soda. But if I could have any environment I wanted, I would be sitting in a small room by a window a few stories up in a quaint little building from the game Townscaper , clacking away on an old typewriter or scribbling in a journal with a Parker Jotter . I've bounced around a bit in terms of tech stack, but in 2024, I migrated from a self-hosted WordPress site to a generated static site with Eleventy . My site is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN)—a shared hosting service I love for its simplistic homemade admin system, and powerful VPS-like capabilities. My domain is registered with them as well, although I’m letting Cloudflare handle my DNS for now. I used Eleventy for the first time in 2020 and became a huge fan. I was stoked to migrate blakewatson.com . The source code is in a private repo on GitHub. Whenever I push to the main branch, DeployHQ picks it up and deploys it to my server. I also have a somewhat convoluted setup that checks for social media posts and displays them on my website by rebuilding and deploying automatically whenever I post. It's more just a way for me to have an archive of my posts on Mastodon than anything. Because my website is so old, I have some files not in my repo that live on my server. It is somewhat of a sprawling living organism at this point, with various small apps and tools (and even games !) deployed to sub-directories. I have a weekly scheduled task that runs and saves the entire site to Backblaze B2 . You know, I'm happy to say that I'd mostly do the same thing. I think everyone should have their own website. I would still choose to blog at my own domain name. Probably still a static website. I might structure things a bit differently. If I were designing it now, I might make more allowances for title-less, short posts (technically I can do this now, but they get lumped into my social feed, which I'm calling my Microblog, and kind of get lost). I might design it to be a little weirder rather than buttoned up as it is now. And hey, it's my website. I still might do that. Tinkering with your personal website is one of life's great joys. If you can't think of anything to do with your website, here are a hundred ideas for you . I don't make money from my website directly, but having a website was critical in getting my first job and getting clients before that. So, in a way, all the money I've made working could be attributed to having a personal website. I have a lot of websites and a lot of domains, so it's a little hard to figure out exactly what blakewatson.com itself costs. NFSN is a pay-as-you-go service. I'm currently hosting 13 websites of varying sizes and complexity, and my monthly cost aside from domains is about $23.49. $5 of that is an optional support membership. I could probably get the cost down further by putting the smaller sites together on a single shared server. I pay about $14 per year for the domain these days. I pay $10.50 per month for DeployHQ , but I use it for multiple sites including a for-profit side project, so it doesn’t really cost anything to use it for my blog (this is the type of mental gymnastics I like to do). I pay $15 per month for Fathom Analytics . In my mind, this is also subsidized by my for-profit side project. I mentioned that I backup my website to Backblaze B2. It's extremely affordable, and I think I'm paying below 50 cents per month currently for the amount of storage I'm using (and that also includes several websites). If you also throw in the cost of tools like Tower and Sketch , then there's another $200 worth of costs per year. But I use those programs for many things other than my blog. When you get down to it, blogs are fairly inexpensive to run when they are small and personal like mine. I could probably get the price down to free, save for the domain name, if I wanted to use something like Cloudflare Pages to host it—or maybe a free blogging service. I don't mind people monetizing their blogs at all. I mean if it's obnoxious then I'm probably not going to stay on your website very long. But if it's done tastefully with respect to the readers then good for you. I also don't mind paying to support bloggers in some cases. I have a number of subscriptions for various people to support their writing or other creative output. Here are some blogs I'm impressed with in no particular order. Many of these people have been featured in this series before. I'd like to take this opportunity to mention Anne Sturdivant . She was interviewed here on People & Blogs. When I first discovered this series, I put her blog in the suggestion box. I was impressed with her personal website empire and the amount of content she produced. Sadly, Anne passed away earlier this year. We were internet buddies and I miss her. 💜 I'd like to share a handful of my side projects for anyone who might be interested. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 109 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Bomburache and the other 121 supporters for making this series possible. Chris Coyier . " Mediocre ideas, showing up, and persistence. " <3 Jim Nielsen . Continually produces smart content. Don't know how he does it. Nicole Kinzel . She has posted nearly daily for over two years capturing human struggles and life with SMA through free verse poetry. Dave Rupert . I enjoy the balance of tech and personal stuff and the honesty of the writing. Tyler Sticka . His blog is so clean you could eat off of it. A good mix of tech and personal topics. Delightful animations. Maciej Cegłowski . Infrequent and longform. Usually interesting regardless of whether I agree or disagree. Brianna Albers . I’m cheating because this is a column and not a blog per se. But her writing reads like a blog—it's personal, contemplative, and compelling. There are so very few representations of life with SMA online that I'd be remiss not to mention her. Daring Fireball . A classic blog I’ve read for years. Good for Apple news but also interesting finds in typography and design. Robb Knight . To me, Robb’s website is the epitome of the modern indieweb homepage. It’s quirky, fun, and full of content of all kinds. And that font. :chefskiss: Katherine Yang . A relatively new blog. Beautiful site design. Katherine's site feels fresh and experimental and exudes humanity. HTML for People . I wrote this web book for anyone who is interested in learning HTML to make websites. I wrote this to be radically beginner-friendly. The focus is on what you can accomplish with HTML rather than dwelling on a lot of technical information. A Fine Start . This is the for-profit side project I mentioned. It is a new tab page replacement for your web browser. I originally made it for myself because I wanted all of my favorite links to be easily clickable from every new tab. I decided to turn it into a product. The vast majority of the features are free. You only pay if you want to automatically sync your links with other browsers and devices. Minimal Character Sheet . I mentioned enjoying Dungeons and Dragons. This is a web app for managing a D&D 5th edition character. I made it to be a freeform digital character sheet. It's similar to using a form fillable PDF, except that you have a lot more room to write. It doesn't force many particular limitations on your character since you can write whatever you want. Totally free.

css CSS c# C# design Design html HTML career Career
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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Making things obvious

Back in February 2024, I published a blog post about my new—at the time—site. One of the things I mentioned in that post was that this site had a guestbook . Quick aside: a guestbook, for those of you who might not know, is something that used to be fairly common on the web of the late 90s, early 2000s, but slowly fell out of fashion as more and more people moved to social media and people stopped caring about personal sites for the most part. This site doesn’t have comments, and the only way to interact with me is to either send me an email (I love those) or to ping me on iMessage if you’re on the Apple ecosystem. But I wanted to give people a way to leave a mark of their passage, which is why I implemented a guestbook. I think guestbooks in general are awesome, and some are so much fun to browse. I mean, just look how fun Eva’s guestbook is. Anyway, I mentioned I had a guestbook, and a link to it has been sitting at the bottom of every post ever since. It’s also linked at the bottom of every post if you read this site using RSS. And I mentioned it in passing every once in a while inside my posts. And yet, I still often get messages from people telling me they didn’t know this site has a guestbook. Which is totally fine, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to spend their days on my site, but it makes me wonder how many other things I assume are obvious to everyone who visits this site but actually aren’t. For example, do you know I have a weekly series called People and Blogs and every Friday for the past 2+ years, I have published an interview featuring an amazing person and their personal site? It’s mentioned everywhere on this site, all the 100+ interviews are in the archive down below, but maybe some people don’t actually know that? Do I have to mention that in addition to this site, I also maintain blogroll.org ? And that if you have a personal site, you can submit it to it? And do I also have to mention that everything I do is very generously supported by some super kind and awesome people who have signed up for my One a month Club ? An idea that has its own dedicated website , thanks to Jarrod. Every time I mentioned these things, a part of me cringes and feels bad because it sounds so self-promoty, but then I get those emails and I’m reminded that the only way for people to know the things you do exist is if you remind them that they do, in fact, exist. And if you already knew about all these things, I’m sorry. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

web-development Web Development
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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

New site, kinda

If you’re reading this blog using RSS or via email (when I remember to send the content via email), you likely didn’t notice it. And if you’re reading my blog in the browser but are not a sharp observer, chances are, you also didn’t notice it. A new version of my site is live. At first glance, not much has changed. The typeface is still the same—love you, Iowan—the layout is still the same, the colours are still the same. For the most part, the site should still feel pretty much the same. So what has changed? A lot, especially under the hood. For example: I have rewritten the entire CSS, and I’m no longer using SASS since it’s no longer needed; interviews are now separate from regular content at the backend level and have their own dedicate URL structure (old URLs should still work, though); the site is now better structured to be expanded into something more akin to a digital garden than “just” a blog. Since I had to rewrite all the frontend code, I took this opportunity to tweak a few things here and there: quotes have a new style, the guestbook has been redesigned (go sign it if you haven’t already) , typography has been slightly tweaked in a couple of places, and the site should now scale much better on very big screens. More importantly, though, P&B interviews now have a more unique design—and a new colour scheme—something that makes me very happy. There are so many things I want to do for this series, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to this, so I’m happy to have at least managed to give them a more unique identity here on the site. This space is still a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress, so expect things to change over time as I fine-tune minor details here and there. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Scoring books

Over the past couple of years, I've used Literal to keep track of the books I've read and that I’m reading. When you mark a book as completed, Literal, like probably every other site and app of this type, asks for a review, which includes a 1-to-5 star rating. I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5. I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know. Anyway, I find myself reflecting on this because as I’m—painfully slowly—working on an updated version of my site, I’m considering adding a books section to it and was debating what to do when it comes to ratings. I’ll likely end up doing something similar to what Netflix does (or did; I have no idea if it’s still like that, since I don’t watch Netflix). Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Kris Howard

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Kris Howard, whose blog can be found at web-goddess.org . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Ilja Panić and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Heya! I'm Kris Howard, and as of September 2025, I've been blogging continuously for 25 years. 😳 I grew up in rural Indiana, had a couple of brief working stints in London and Munich, and have lived nearly all of my adult life in Sydney, Australia with my husband Rodd (aka The Snook). I started my career as a web developer in the dotcom boom and eventually went on to manage projects and lead teams. I ended up in Developer Relations for AWS, where I travelled all over telling folks why they should use the cloud. It was a lot of fun until everything became all about AI. In 2024 I joined the Snook in early retirement (at age 47), and for the past year I've been reading books (remember books?!), hanging out with friends, indulging in my craft hobbies (knitting, sewing, and now weaving), volunteering, travelling around Australia, and generally trying to spend a lot less time in front of a computer. I was on work-study in university, and they assigned me to work in the dining hall. That sucked , so I scrambled to find something better. I ended up working in the Computer Department just as my university was connecting everyone to the Internet. I learned HTML and built websites for myself and my dorm, and in 1996 I launched a fan site for my favourite author that's been running ever since. Fun trivia: I hosted that on roalddahl.org until the Dahl estate reached out about acquiring the domain name. I happily transferred it to them, and in return I got to meet Felicity Dahl and visit his writing hut in Buckinghamshire! By that time I had left uni and was working as a web developer in London. I started testing out Blogger (which back then would actually FTP static files to your own webhosting!) in September 2000 and launched my blog properly a couple months later at web-goddess.co.uk. The name was a bit of a joke, a nickname that a Scottish friend gave me because of how much time I spent online. Originally my goal was just to document my life overseas for friends and family, and to share silly things I found on the Internet. When the dotcom crash hit at the end of 2001, I ended up moving to Sydney with my Australian boyfriend and changed the domain to web-goddess.org instead. For a long time I ran off my own custom PHP CMS (which I even distributed ) before moving to Wordpress ten years ago. My blogging energy has waxed and waned over the years. There were long stretches when I just syndicated content from places like Instagram and Google Reader to the blog rather than write. Since retiring from full-time work I've really renewed my focus on it as the home for all my content online. I've migrated all my posts from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to the blog, and I now syndicate out from the blog to Mastodon and Bluesky. Every day I go back through my archives and clean up broken links. (So much linkrot.) I miss the Web of the early 2000s and I'm trying to keep my little corner of it thriving. My process is fairly casual, and I don't usually write extensive drafts before publishing. Back in the olden days, I used it basically like Twitter - just dashing off a thought or sharing a link multiple times a day. Nowadays I tend to be a bit more deliberate with what I share. Occasionally I'll get Rodd to review something, especially if it touches on our personal life (like my posts about our retirement finances ). I've occasionally dabbled with creating a series of posts on a theme, like when we tried cooking our way through the Jamie's 30 Minute Meals cookbook (still by far my most popular posts ever!). When we were living in Munich, I made a point of documenting all of our travels around Europe, knowing I'd want to look back on those trips later. I tend to write my posts in the Wordpress classic editor in a web browser. I'm comfortable with that workflow, but I've also used the Gutenberg block editor on occasion. I also occasionally post from the Wordpress app on my phone. Last year I figured out that I could post via Apple Shortcuts using the Wordpress API , which has made it really easy for me to share photos when I'm away from the computer. Definitely. We renovated our house last year and I took the opportunity to design the office-slash-craft-room of my dreams. I've got a ridiculously wide curved monitor, a super clicky Keychron mechanical keyboard , and a very silly NES mouse . I've got a comfy chair and a desk I can adjust up and down with the press of a button. I've got everything I need within arm's reach whether I'm blogging, knitting, or sewing. Having a pegboard with lots of tools on it fills a part of my soul I didn't realise was empty! I also tend to listen to music when I'm at the computer (Apple Music via Echo Dot speaker). I started out with my own hand-coded PHP-based CMS, which I used for fifteen years on various shared hosting providers. Eventually I realised that my rudimentary coding skills weren't meeting the security bar anymore, and I reluctantly let a friend persuade me try out Wordpress . To my surprise, I loved it and ended up migrating roalddahlfans.com over to it as well. It's not without its occasional headaches, but I haven't had any major problems in the last decade. During the initial months of the pandemic, I decided to migrate both sites from their shared webhosting over to Amazon Lightsail (since I was working for AWS at the time and wanted to learn more about the service). Both sites are hosted in the US and use the Wordpress blueprint on Linux (2GB memory, 2 vCPUs, 60GB SSD) with CloudFront as a CDN. The domain names were registered with Google Domains, which have since been migrated to Squarespace. For a couple years now I've been toying with the idea of converting one or both the sites to be static, served off S3 or similar. It would be a lot cheaper, faster, and more secure. The challenge is that I'm not starting from scratch; I have thousands of posts and pages that I've written over the years. I also really like being able to post from anywhere, including my phone. My husband Rodd was an SRE at Google and is a much better coder than me, so he's been working on a script that would allow us to run Wordpress from our home server and generate static HTML. We'll try it out with roalddahlfans.com and then decide where to go from there. Haha, I'd definitely choose a different name! I realised pretty early on that if you typed my domain incorrectly, nearly every other permutation was adult content. Whoops. I'd probably go with a static site today, just to keep things as simple as possible. I love the old school tiny websites that folks are building these days, and I'd go full IndieWeb - write on my site and syndicate everywhere else. I would be a bit more... considerate with how I write. I realised this year as I've been tidying up the broken links in my archives that I wasn't always kind in how I wrote about some people or topics. The early 2000s were a much snarkier time, I guess. I've chosen to leave those posts up, but I've added a disclaimer that they don't necessarily reflect who I am today. (Similarly, I've been adding a disclaimer on all my posts about Harry Potter. Rowling sucks, and it makes me sad.) I held off on monetising for many years, especially on roalddahlfans.com since most of the audience are kids. Eventually I added some hand-picked Google Ads to the site and to my blog archives, restricting the placement and ad categories. I also added Amazon affiliate links to the Dahl site, since I figured a lot of parents would be likely to buy the books. These more than covered the hosting costs over the years. (In fact, Rodd had to declare my websites when he joined Google in case there was a conflict of interest!) When we were living in Munich a few years back, I discovered that Germany has stringent tax laws about website monetisation and would require me to register as a side business. It was all too complicated, so the easiest thing was to just remove the ads. I didn't bother putting them back when we got to Australia, so for several years now there's been no income. Hosting is generally $40-50 AUD a month (for both sites), with an additional $125 AUD per site annually for Jetpack (which gives me automated backups, comment spam protection, and some other security features). This is honestly way overkill, and I reckon I can reduce that a lot in the future (especially if I move to a static site). I don't like the idea that everything on the web needs to be monetised or that everybody needs to have a side hustle. I love it when people share things online just because they want to. That's how both my sites started, and that's why I keep them going. That said, I financially support a couple bloggers and my Mastodon instance admin via Patreon, because I want them to continue. So many sites disappear, and it's just sad. One of the people I think of when I think of blogging is Matt Haughey from A Whole Lotta Nothing: a.wholelottanothing.org . He was the founder of Metafilter.com , and I think I've been reading his site for literally decades now. He was there when blogging was invented. Definitely someone worth talking to! Does a newsletter count as a blog these days? The person whose words have given me the most hope for humanity in 2025 is Mike Monteiro . Every time he writes it's just so, so good and I end up blogging it or sending it around to all my friends. (Archives are here .) I've also been really enjoying the blog of Robb Knight: rknight.me . He built Echofeed , the service I use to syndicate my blog posts out to Mastodon and Bluesky. He's always building something nerdy, or geeking out over pens and stationery. This is so absolutely dorky, but I am currently reading the Aubrey-Maturin "Master and Commander" books . I always figured they were quintessential "Dad books" (given they are historical fiction about naval voyages in the Napoleonic Wars) and therefore Not For Me, but this amazing essay convinced me to give them a shot. I've discovered that the books themselves are fantastic, and there's this whole fandom subculture I never knew about! They refer to reading the series as a "circumnavigation," and there are charming map websites and podcasts and subreddits with fans all talking (in character!) about the books. I'm loving it. It's been a welcome escape from the news over the past few months, and I can highly recommend the series. 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 108 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Markus Heurung and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Digital fatigue

I think I’m starting to feel what I can only describe as digital fatigue. I believe this is the result of a combination of two main factors: The solution is going to be a fairly easy one: I think I’m going to stop consuming digital content for the rest of the year and focus more on reading books and creating content myself. I know I’m going to miss reading content from a bunch of people I really like, but right now, this seems to be the only reasonable solution to save myself and my mental sanity. 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

Robert Birming

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robert Birming, whose blog can be found at birming.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Nikkin and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m from Stockholm, Sweden, and these days I make a living doing home inspections. It’s a job I really enjoy, mostly because it takes me to places I’d never otherwise see and lets me meet all kinds of people along the way. Before this, I’ve tried quite a few different things: bricklayer (that’s what I actually went to school for), musician (yes, that’s me behind the drums ), full-time blogger, digital marketing consultant, and janitor – just to name a few. I ended up in my current line of work after realizing I wasn’t too keen on spending my life in front of a computer screen. So I took a year off and moved to Thailand. When I came back, it felt like the right time for a change. Now I feel lucky to have a job that’s both satisfying and flexible enough to leave time for one of my greatest interests: blogging. I started blogging around 2002 using Movable Type, which was pretty much the only tool available at the time. After about a year, I switched to WordPress. My first blog was called Smidigt (Swedish for “easy/handy”). It didn’t have a particular focus at first, but over time it evolved into a blog about geeky tech stuff: cool USB sticks (yes, that was a thing back then), Star Wars-inspired computer accessories, toys, and other fun finds. Eventually, major tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo started linking to the blog, even though it was in Swedish, whenever I posted something interesting that hadn’t been picked up elsewhere yet. That exposure led me to start an English version of the blog called GeekAlerts . After a few years as a full-time blogger, I hit the (in)famous wall and quit. But the interest never really left. A couple of years ago, I felt it was time to return, so I started fresh with a new English blog. This time hosted on Bear , one of the cool indie platforms that had appeared during my absence. Since then, I’ve tried a few other platforms. There are so many wonderful options available today, and I love experimenting. But I’ve also realized that I can’t hop around forever, so for now I’m sticking with what I currently use: Micro.blog Most of my writing comes from personal experiences: people I meet, places I visit, or situations that made me stop and reflect. That’s usually where the inspiration begins. Since I write about recent events, I rarely keep drafts. I just sit down and pour it all out. After that, I run the text through ChatGPT with a strict prompt to only “fix any grammar and spelling mistakes” and still leave room for my Swenglish style (I recently blogged about how I use AI and added a dedicated /ai page). Once I’ve double-checked that no sneaky AI rewrites slipped in, I hit publish. On days when I have the freedom to choose, I prefer sitting in a café with my laptop. I like the atmosphere and the change of scenery. Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I prefer silence, other times it feels inspiring to be surrounded by the everyday noise and commotion. At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter where I blog. I just adapt to the situation I’m in. With my long blogging experience, I’ve even mastered the skill of blogging while taking a... what’s the word again... bath. All my posts are written in iA Writer and published straight from the editor to Micro.blog. And that’s all there is to it. No Shoobaboo or Snarfus involved. I prefer to keep things simple. Honestly, I still have no idea what the hell I’m doing. And maybe that’s the point. Blogging has always felt more like an ongoing, joyful experiment than a plan. And I like it that way. I pay $5/month for Micro.blog. I started on the very affordable $1/month Micro.one plan, which would still cover my needs, but I like the idea of contributing a little extra to support the ongoing development of this great platform Manton is building. My domain name is registered with a Swedish company for about $15/year. I don’t make any money from blogging and I don’t have any “buy me a coffee” buttons, but if you’re ever in Sweden and feel like treating me to a real cup of coffee, I’ll gladly accept your “Swedish fika” invitation any day of the week. That said, I don’t mind at all when other creators encourage support. They bring personality and beauty into the world, so why not let people show their appreciation? For some makers, it can even be a way to motivate themselves to keep showing up and creating. I also like supporting other creators when our paths cross. A fresh example is Jim Mitchell , the creator of the theme I’m using. When he puts out a new version, I usually buy him a coffee or two. Sometimes those updates even include requests from me, so it almost feels like I’m paying myself. A true win-win. I love where personal blogging is today. There’s such a wide variety of voices, and I keep discovering fantastic writers every week. Here are a few I’d love to see in a future People & Blogs edition: I always have a lot of ideas, but these days (given my past experience) I try to let them sit a bit before acting on them. There’s no rush, and I already feel my creative urge is fulfilled with what I have. Instead, I’d like to share someone else’s fresh project: Crucial Tracks . It’s a place to ”share the important songs in your life”, and I’ve been hooked ever since I found it. I even got the T-shirt. For real. Thank you so much for inviting me as a guest for People & Blogs . I’ve been a reader for a long time and have discovered plenty of marvelous makers through it. “Tack och hej, leverpastej!” That’s the Swedish equivalent of “See you later, alligator!” The problem is that ours translates to “Thanks and bye, liver paste.” Not quite as cool. And I don’t even like liver paste. PS. Some might find my Blogging Tips & Tools page useful. 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 108 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Jan and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 4 weeks ago

RIP my minimal phone setup

As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And you know why? Because I was hating the previous one as well. «Why are you still using it then?» I hear you say. Because I have no good alternatives. Most of the tools I use are developed exclusively for this ecosystem, and those are tools I love to use. Plus, Windows is not any better, and I don’t have time to deal with anything Linux. So yeah, it is what it is. I’ll get used to all this nonsense on MacOS, from the insanely big rounded corners to the awful design choices. Something I won’t get used to, though, is the home screen on my phone. For the past couple of years, I was running with a setup that looked like this: This empty screen was achieved with a workaround, using a combination of a purposely designed wallpaper and a few accessibility settings. And I loved it. The fact that my home screen was empty was making me so happy. The only way I was interacting with my phone was by swiping down and using Spotlight. But now, in their infinite wisdom, the fine folks at Apple have decided that everything on this stupid device needs to show fake reflections, which means the empty dock is now back because fuck me for using the phone in a weird way, I guess. Thank you, Tim Apple. 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

Two quick news items

Sometimes I post not because I have something to get out of my system, but because I have something I want to share. This is one of those occasions. First, Cody has a new pop-up newsletter going called “Trespassing Through Montana” . I’m a big fan of what he does, and I also enjoy helping people connect with each other online, so I’m not gonna pass on this opportunity to suggest you to sign up for his newsletter. The second is that the Internet Phone Book is back in stock . I mentioned this lovely object in an old post of mine , and I’m so glad I managed to grab my copy when it came out. I’m also happy to be in it and very pleased to have Luke as my neighbour. That’s it, that’s all I have to say. Buy the book , sign up for the newsletter , and enjoy the weekend. 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

Jack Baty

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Jack Baty, whose blog can be found at baty.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Andrea Contino and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hello, I'm Jack. I was born, raised, and live in west Michigan, US. I live in a quiet (aka "boring") suburb with my lovely wife, our dog, a few tropical fish, and a sea urchin named Lurch. I was a paperboy, fast food worker, and ditch digger long before I started creating software for a living. My first programming project was a Laboratory Information Management System (L.I.M.S.) for a local environmental testing lab. This was in 1992. I was learning as I went, using a Macintosh RDBMS environment called 4th Dimension. I continued as a solo software developer for a couple of years. In 1995, I cofounded the web design firm "Fusionary Media" with my two partners. Fusionary grew to a team of around 15 people. We built some very nice websites, software, and mobile apps for companies like MLB, GM, Steelcase, etc. This went on for 25 years, until we sold the company in 2020. I've been "retired" since then, but I miss working on things with people, so we'll see. These days I spend most of my time with photography, blogging, and reading. I enjoy tinkering with tech of all kinds and exploring what different software tools can do. This often means completely upending my workflow in order to shoehorn some cool new toy into it. I call this a "hobby". Which one? 😂 In the late 1990s, when the internet was still new and exciting, I wanted to tell everyone about everything. I was learning to create websites, so starting a blog was a great opportunity to do both. I created a couple of proto-blogs in 1998 and 1999, but those have been lost to time. My current blog at baty.net began in August 2000, 25 years ago this month. Everything before 2021 is archived at archive.baty.net . I don't delete old posts, although I probably should. My early posts were mostly Gruber-style link posts. It's sad that so many of those original links are dead now. Eventually I started sharing more details about what I was doing and thinking about, rather than just linking to other things. This continues today. I sporadically maintain several other sites/blogs. Other than Baty.net , there's also a "Daily Notes" blog at daily.baty.net , but lately I've just been rolling that into baty.net. I recently started a photo blog using Ghost at baty.photo . Ghost makes posting images easy, but I haven't decided if I'll continue. I keep a wiki using TiddlyWiki (since 2018) ( rudimentarylathe.org ). I don't even know what it's for, honestly, but I keep putting stuff there when I don't know where else it should go. My dream is to have only One True Blog, but that's been elusive. Honestly, I don't really have a creative process. Nothing deliberate, anyway. My posts are mostly journal entries about whatever's on my mind. What usually happens is that I'll read someone's blog post or I'll try some new tool, and share my thoughts on it. I used to write (bad) poetry and would love to compose longer, thoughtful essays, but that never happens. More often than not I publish things long before they're ready. It's as if I'd never heard of proofreading. I just fix things later. If I had to make everything perfect first, I'd never post anything. I write my posts in whatever text editor I'm infatuated with at the moment. 90% of the time, that means Emacs, the nerdiest possible option. I prefer a tidy, pleasant environment. Usually, though, I sit at my desktop computer (an M4 MacBook Air and Studio Display) in my messy basement office. I just start writing whenever I have something to say. My wife thinks I have some form of auditory processing disorder, so I rarely listen to music while writing. It only muddles my thoughts (even more than they already are). I do find that things come easier for me when I'm surrounded by books. They inspire me. Once in a while, I'll draft posts longhand with a nice fountain pen or on a manual typewriter, but I'm lazy, so that's pretty rare. If I had my way, there'd be a giant window in my home office, maybe overlooking water. Currently I stare at a bare wall, which is probably not ideal for creative inspiration. I change platforms so often that it'll probably be different by the time anyone reads this, but I'm currently using Hugo to render a static website. My static sites are hosted on a small VPS running FreeBSD with Caddy as the web server. I use Porkbun for domain registration and management. For creating new posts in Hugo, I have Emacs configured to create properly formatted Markdown files in the correct location. I write the posts in Emacs. When finished, I run a little shell script that builds the site and uploads it to the server. I don't use any fancy Github deployment actions or anything. I just render the site locally and use rsync to push changes. I've used nearly every blogging platform ever created. I've even written several of my own. Each platform has something I love about it, and when I start to miss whatever that thing is, I'll switch back to it. And so on. Sometimes moving to a new blogging platform gets the writing juices flowing. Sometimes it's just something to do when I'm bored and don't have anything to say. I would love to be the type of person who started a WordPress (or whatever) blog in the noughts and never changed anything. So many of my posts have bad links or missing images due to moving from platform to platform. It's frustrating for both me and my readers. I suppose what I'd do differently is pick a process and stick with it. Maybe focus on writing instead of tinkering with themes and platforms and such. Blogs are simple things, really, and overthinking everything has caused me nothing but trouble. I'm running my static sites on a small, $5/month (plus $1 for backups) VPS at Vultr, so it costs very little. I pay another $5/month for Tinylytics to watch traffic/views. So I'm in for around $11/month. The Ghost blog costs $15/month at MagicPages . One other cost is domain registrations, which adds up to maybe $50/year. I have no interested in trying to make money from blogging, even if it were feasible. I hesitate to recommend specific blogs, since that means leaving out so many others. I'll just pick a few at random from my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow are by people writing about their lives and interests. I'm less inclined to follow Capital-B Bloggers or industry-specific blogs these days. I'm interested in people, not companies. May I just suggest to anyone reading this, if you're even remotely interested in starting a blog, do it! 😁 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 108 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Nicolas Magand and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

On em dashes

Stumbled on this post a moment ago—on a lovely colourful blog, I might add—and I have thoughts on the subject: I'm low-key mad about this! So we just can't use em dashes anymore? We let the machines take them from us?? And we didn't even put up a fight or anything??? Although I'm frustrated, I promise from now on to no longer use em dashes and keep my heavy italics usage to a minimum as well. I don't want anyone to think I use AI. (I mean, I do use AI to research stuff, but not to write.) It just sucks because I feel like from now on there will always be this bubbling paranoia over writing that no writer will ever be able to avoid. I'm genuinely a pro-technology, "embrace the future but let's make it better"-type of person, but I'm wary of the "new normal" this precedent sends. But whatever. You win, AI. You can have your stupid em dashes. No you can't have them. Yes, we can still use em dashes. And no, I’m not going to stop using them because fucking chatgpt is abusing them. What if they tweak the instructions next week and tell it to use more full stops or commas? What are we gonna do then? Stop using those as well? Hell no. I’ll keep writing however I want, and if someone decides to stop reading what I write because they suspect it’s AI-generated because I use too many em dashes, or parentheses, or any other punctuation or word or whatever, well, good riddance. I’m not gonna miss you. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way. 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

Blogs don’t need to be so lonely

While clicking through my RSS feeds, I found my way to Jay’s post titled “ Do blogs need to be so lonely? ”. It’s an interesting post, especially interesting for me since I love blogs. Betteridge's law of headlines tells us that the answer to the question Jay is posing is “no”, but I think it’s worth expanding on why I think that’s not the case. Do blogs, like this one I’m writing in now, need to be so lonely? Not always, but sometimes, I feel like I’m shouting into the void. I’m picturing something relatively simple. Something like a group blog, or a blog co-op. A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them. So, I don’t have anything against the idea of group blogging or a blog co-op, but I don’t think that will address the initial problem Jay’s flagging, that sensation of shouting into a void. I guess shouting into a void with a few friends is better than doing it by yourself, but the end result is still the same. And unless by group blog he means writing posts together and not just posting them on the same site, then I don’t think the situation would change much. The second part of that quote is the one I find the most interesting and the one I can’t stop smiling at every time I think about it. A group of internet friends posting together, without too much oversight or coordination between them. I can’t stop smiling because we already have this. It’s what people used to call the blogosphere . There are already potentially millions of people out there, posting together, without much oversight or coordination between them. I have interviewed one hundred and six of them for People and Blogs (which, btw, is a collaborative blogging project) and there are almost a thousand collected on the blogroll . A lot of them I consider internet friends. I follow what they’re up to thanks to their blogs, and I occasionally send them emails, precisely to address the “shouting into the void” nature of blogging. And it’s working wonderfully. I think we have all the tools we need to address the issue Jay’s flagging in his post. Now we just need to actually do it. I think it comes down to linking more to what other people are writing, posting more replies to other people’s posts, and putting some effort into connecting directly with the author when we stumble on a piece of writing that resonates with us. So why not collaborative blogging? Why not groups of people coming together to create personal blogs? Something less formal than a journalist collective, but more communal than a personal blog. Blogging collectively opens us up to a new kind of content, one in which members of the blog are in conversation with one another in a way that’s comfortable and unique. This is already happening; it doesn’t need to be invented. In his piece, Jay quoted Leon’s post . I have now mentioned and linked to both of them in mine. They’ll be free to respond on their blogs if they want to keep the conversation going, and anybody else is welcome to join. Your blog doesn’t have to be lonely. But at the same time, you can’t expect it not to be that way without effort. So if you care, then put some effort into this. Trust me, it’s worth 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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