GreatReads - Blog Aggregator · Phoenix Framework

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Manuel Moreale 6 days ago

Interviews, interviews, interviews

For some weird combination of factors, I ended up answering questions to three different people for three entirely unrelated projects, and all three interviews went live around the same time. I answered a few questions for the Over/Under series run by Hyle . Love the concept, this was a lot of fun. I also answered a few questions from Kai since he’s running a great series where he asks previous IndieWeb Carnival hosts to share some thoughts about the theme they chose. And lastly, Kristoffer asked me to talk a bit more about my most recent project/newsletter, Dealgorithmed , for his Naive Weekly , another newsletter you definitely want to check out because it’s fantastic. Click those links and check these projects; they’re all wonderful. And especially go check all the other interviews, so many wonderful people are listed on all three sites. 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

Open Source

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Step aside, phone: week 2

Halfway through this enjoyable life experiment, and overall, I’m very pleased with the results. As I mentioned last week, I was expecting week two usage to be a bit higher compared to week one, where I went full phone-rejection mode, but I’m still pleased with how low my usage was, even though it felt like I was using the phone a lot. No huge spikes this week, didn’t need to use Google Maps a lot, so the time distribution is a lot more even, as you can see. The first three days of the week were pretty similar to the previous week. I moved my chats back on the phone, and that’s most of the time spent on screen since “social” is just the combination of Telegram, WhatsApp, and iMessage. Usage went up a bit in the second part of the week, but I consider that a “healthy” use of the phone. On Thursday, I spent 20 or so minutes setting up an app, one that I’d categorise as a life utility app, like banking or insurance apps. They do have a site, but you’re required to use the phone anyway to take pictures and other crap, so it was faster to do it on the phone. Then on Saturday, I had to use Maps as well as AllTrails to find a place out in the wild. I was trying to find a bunker that’s hidden somewhere in a forest not too far from where I live (this is a story for another time), and that’s why screen time was a bit higher than normal on that particular day. Overall, I’m very happy with how the week went. A thing I’m particularly pleased with is the fact that I have yet to consume a single piece of media on my phone since we started this experiment. So far, I have only opened the browser a couple of times, and it was always to look up something very specific, and never to mindlessly scroll through news, videos or anything like that. My content consumption on the phone is down to essentially zero. One fun side effect of this experiment is how infrequently I now charge my phone. I took this screenshot this morning before plugging it in, and apparently, the last time it was fully charged was Wednesday afternoon. I’m now charging it once every 3 or 4 days, which is pretty neat. 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

Data Analysis

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Updated thoughts on People and Blogs

This is a follow-up on my previous post . After talking to a few friends and getting feedback from the kind people who decided to email me and share their thoughts, I decided that I will stop once interview number 150 is out, on July 10th. 150 is a neat number because it means I can match each interview to a first gen Pokemon. I am a 90s kid after all. That said, my stopping on the 10th of July doesn’t mean the series also has to stop. If anyone out there is interested in picking it up and carrying it forward, I’ll be more than happy to give the series away. If that's you, send me an email. I’m also happy to part ways with the domain name if it can be of any help. Whether someone picks up the torch or not, the first 150 interviews will be archived here on my blog for as long as I have a presence on the web. 20 interviews left, 6 drafts are ready to go, a few more people have the questions, and I’m waiting to get their answers (that may or may not arrive before July 10th). It’s going to be fun to see who ends up being the final guest. 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

Stefano Verna

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stefano Verna, whose blog can be found at squeaki.sh . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by x-way and the other 116 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 Stefano, I’m 40 years old, I live in Italy. I have three sons (the oldest turned 18 last week — happy birthday Ale!). I try to be a present and attentive father, and I believe I am, despite the compromises that come with divorce. I discovered programming at 12 with a little book I found at the library featuring games in QuickBASIC… and I never stopped from there. Creating digital things has always been my greatest passion. In my first year of university, I released one of the very first Firefox extensions , which was an immediate huge success: in no time, 2M daily users… and thousands were donating on PayPal! A huge thing for a 19-year-old. From that experience on, I kept recreating that recipe: building my own software on the web. After many years in the web agency world, one of the many ideas I threw together in my spare time for fun, DatoCMS , was once again very successful. 10 years after the first line of code I wrote, the product continues to exist, grow, and be used all over the world. Today we’re about 15 people working on it. For me, it’s a true dream come true. Apart from programming, which continues to be a fundamental part of my life in terms of fulfillment and satisfaction (perhaps too much so), I’m an idealist, a man of the left, and a great enthusiast of meditation, psychology, and personal growth work in general. I’ve had various blogs in my life. The first one was as a teenager, in the full Blogger era (2004), to communicate and find friends. I even found my future wife and mother of my children there. The second was to find work and make myself known professionally (the articles are still on Github ). My current blog, squeakish , was born after a month-long vacation I took a couple of years ago in Brazil: disconnecting (for the first time in my life, actually!) from responsibilities for an extended period gave me the chance to think about many things differently. It inspired me and made me want to study and write again. It’s called squeakish because I’m (proudly?) the exact opposite of a solid and confident person. I’m full of internal creaks, and my blog contains posts that represent “yieldings,” vulnerabilities that I feel like exploring and sharing. Inspiration always comes from personal reflections that I feel the need to communicate. Often these are difficult things that I struggle to put out into the world. Of these reflections, only a small portion ends up on the blog. Most of them I feel are too personal in their details to be of value to someone else. This is perhaps the biggest block at the moment: understanding the threshold for when something should move from my personal journal to being shared on the blog. I should probably worry less about it? My posts are always written in a single session — I want them to remain as authentic as possible to the moment they were conceived. I wait a few hours before publishing them, to be able to reread them and see if something can be improved, and then they’re online. My creative process needs to be facilitated, first of all by taking dedicated time. This is the fundamental thing. Normally I’ve always written from home, in my usual “nest,” but lately (and even right now) I’m trying to change locations (bars, cafés). Surrounding yourself with different things helps you see things differently. I also try to avoid any kind of “aesthetic” distraction — I write in a notepad without any formatting ( Paper ), and only at the very end I copy on the CMS and format. The site is in Astro and the code is available on Github : there’s a README that explains the details. I had fun learning and implementing webmentions, microformats, backfeeding from Mastodon, and I wrote a brief guide about it. The content is on, well, DatoCMS. I didn’t want to invent anything new — it’s what I know like the back of my hand, and I know it already gives me everything I need and like, including easy image and video management. The site is deployed on Cloudflare Pages, the domain is on Spaceship . I tried to keep the layout as simple as possible, and even copied the Hey World layout. No distractions! The first version of the site was in Svelte: working in the headless CMS world, in ten years I’ve really worked with all the available platforms, static site generators, and frameworks, and I’ve come to the conclusion that today Astro is the most suitable and versatile tool for producing content-driven websites. YMMV. The name “Squeakish” still appeals to me — it has something playful about it and doesn’t take itself too seriously — but I’ve never been a fanatic about finding perfect names. So yeah, right now I’m good with what I have! The only cost… is for the domain ($30/year)? Cloudflare Pages is free, the DatoCMS project is on a free plan. Personally, I have no need to monetize my blog. With monetization automatically comes a sense of responsibility, and this is exactly the opposite of what I’m looking for. I have no negative opinion about those who do it. The important thing is to avoid the enshittification that money normally brings. Personal blogs, as you well know, are the soul of the Internet, and we must try to preserve them free and sincere. God, there are so many! My feed reader is actually publicly visible at /news and at the bottom there’s the list of people I follow. Personally, I’d go with David Celis and/or Chris ! Having your own simple feed reader publicly available inside your own website is something I haven’t seen anywhere else, but it’s simple to build and I feel gives a nice high-level view into what one person is currently feeding himself with. I've actually wrote a bit about this . I just watched a wonderful film, so I feel the need to share it: O Filho de mil Homens . Finally, I’d like to use this space to offer my experience (personal? professional?) to anyone who might need it: if you’d like to have a chat, and you think I might be able to help you with something, reach out via PM on Mastodon and I’ll try to do my best! 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 129 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Brennan Kenneth Brown and the other 116 supporters for making this series possible.

Programming

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

An incomplete list of things I don’t have

Hair. A nice beard. Savings. Debt. A house. Subscriptions to video streaming services. A piece of forest. Kids. A wife. A husband. Hands without scars. Arms without scars. Legs without scars. A face without scars. A monthly salary. Paid vacations. Happiness. Things I’m proud of. A normal dog. Social media profiles. Investments. Plans for the future. Plans for the present. Plans for the past. A camera. Concrete goals. Wisdom. Ai bots. Ai companions. Ai slaves. Fancy clothes. Colognes. Fame (although I am quite hungry). Faith. Horses in the back. 99 problems. Enlightenment. A daily routine. Willingness to write long posts. 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

Step aside, phone: week 1

First weekly recap for this fun life experiment. To remind you what this is all about : in order to help Kevin get back to a more sane use of his time in front of his phone, we decided to publicly share 4 weeks of screen time statistics from our phones and write roundups every Sunday. Yes, we’re essentially trying to shame ourselves into being more mindful about our phone usage. Let me tell you, it definitely works. Every time I do one of these experiments, I use the first week to prove to myself that this whole phone usage situation is mostly a matter of being mindful about it, and that if I decide that I don’t want to use the phone, well, I will not use it. And it’s not very hard. Monday to Wednesday, I basically almost never picked up my phone from my desk. It was fully charged on Sunday afternoon, and I didn’t plug it in again till Thursday. I did use it when I was outside for a couple of minor things, but as you can see from the image below, screen time is reporting 9 minutes of total usage for the first 3 days of the week. Thursday and Friday, I logged a bit more screen time (had to do a few things that required the use of apps), but also because I started listening to a few podcasts while I was driving. I said I started because one thing I did this week was delete any app that’s related to content consumption from the phone. I think my personal goal for this month-long experiment is going to be to get back to a use of my phone that’s utility-driven and not consumption-focused. The phone should be a tool to do things and not a passive consumption device. Friday usage spiked, and that’s because I was out on a date, so most of the time spent with the screen on was Google Maps being open while I was in the car. I still tried to be mindful of that, though. I drove about 5 hours back and forth, but I only used Google Maps for a bit more than 1 hour. I also used the browser for the first time this week to purchase a couple of tickets for a museum, and I took a few pictures. So this is how the first week went. Not included here is last Sunday—I told Kevin we were going to start this experiment on Monday—but I clocked 11 minutes on that day. Not bad. Now, one consideration about this first week: in order to push my phone usage this low, I had to move some of my normal phone usage over to my Mac, which is how I managed to basically never touch chat apps on my phone. I know this is pretty much cheating, but it was intentional and something I was planning to do only in this first week, and I will move that screen time back on my phone starting next week. The goal is to find the right balance after all, and I like the process of pushing it all the way down to the extreme and then bringing it back up to some more sane levels. If you have decided to take part in this experiment, email me a link to your post, and I’ll include it below. 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 Read Kevin's week one recap Read Thomas' week one recap Read Steve's week one recap Read John's week one and two recaps

Statistics Analytics

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

David Cain

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with David Cain, whose blog can be found at raptitude.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Markus Heurung and the other 116 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m a Canadian blogger and entrepreneur. I started doing this back when I was in a totally different line of work. I was a surveyor for an engineering company, and where I live the industry slows down in the winter because of the harsh cold, so I began poking around on the internet a little more than usual. That led to discovering blogs, and the possibility of doing that for a living. I had always been into writing, so having a way to publish my thoughts and for interested parties to read them and care was a revelation. That was 2008 or so, when the internet was a very different place. Social media was a niche and nerdy thing, big companies had no idea how to use the internet, and we were not all algorithmized. I miss that time. Aside from what I write about (see below), I’m into indoor climbing, reading, religion, history, and lifting weights. I’m also into the idea of the “Oldschool Internet.” As you know if you’re over 30, the internet used to feel different than it does now. It was freer, more creative and weird, and less dominated by big platforms and algorithms. I have a deep, deep nostalgia for it and I wish I could recreate that feeling. When I was goofing around on the internet at work I found a blog about blogging for a living, and one day decided I would do that. I had always been interested in the inner world of the human being. I was always thinking about this conundrum of having mind and a body. You have no instruction manual, and you have to go and live a life and try to be happy. I sat down and listed like a hundred obscure ideas I’d been wanting to tell the world. What I didn’t realize is that my obsession with the inner human world and managing the human condition was due to having undiagnosed ADHD, which made ordinary life stuff very complicated and difficult. My challenges led me to reading piles of self-help and spiritual-flavored stuff. A lot of it was crap but I did learn quite a bit about making the most of the mess that is human life, and shared what I found. The blog I started was called Raptitude . It was just a made-up word, combining “rapt” and “aptitude.” The idea is that you can get better at appreciating life, at being rapt by the day-to-day experience of being alive. Many of my posts were little tricks I’d figured out for getting yourself to do things, not realizing it was coming from a rather crippling psychiatric condition. I finally got diagnosed at age 40, after twelve years of blogging. I always tried to stay away from writing in the kind of mushy, therapeutic tone that dominates the self-help and spiritual space. I wrote about weird and hypothetical things instead, and I found an audience pretty quickly. This year I launched a second site to help other “productivity-challenged” people. It’s called How to Do Things , and it’s more practical and less philosophical than Raptitude, and is aimed at adults with ADHD. Today my writing is more focused, less wild. But Raptitude is the same blog it was 17 years ago when I first launched it. I have ideas all the time and take voice notes when I’m out and about. If I’m home I just mind-dump into a text document. Later I go through my ideas and find one I think I could actually write about. I play around with it, find an angle, and start typing. I do a lot of moving things around, cutting and pasting. Sometimes I’ll write 3 or 4 thousand words and end up with a 1200-word post. Sometimes I even delete the original idea and just riff on a tangential idea. It is not an efficient or structured process, it’s just habit. I take forever to write posts, even now. I don’t do drafts exactly, I just barf out the idea, try to find a bottom-line point, then revise what I’ve written to point to that bottom-line idea. I do a couple of passes to try to shorten it, which just as often ends up lengthening it. Then I add pictures with funny captions so people don’t get bored and publish it. I don’t involve anyone else in the writing and there are typos sometimes. I have a home office and that’s pretty much exclusively where I work. Everything I need is there, my desk has a lot of space, I have multiple monitors. I play instrumental music. Classical or ambient electronic. I’ve worked in coffee shops, and I do get inspired by being out in the world. But I always feel guilty about taking up their seats for too long, and the travel time seems like a waste so I don’t do that much. I have always used WordPress, and self-host on BigScoots. I love the host and am so glad I switched from a large, well-known terrible company I will not name. WordPress is good and a lot less clunky than it used to be. Today I would just do a Substack. I still might switch to Substack one day. It seems like a well-contained environment that takes eliminates a lot of technical and design considerations that can suck up writing time. You’re also built into a network of other writers and readers. What I would do differently is learn to make a kind of content that doesn’t take long to make. I take forever to do one piece and it is still hard. Another thing I’d do differently is define my topic more narrowly. I write about anything pertaining to human life, which makes it difficult to know what to write about, and difficult to do any marketing or intentional growth, because there is no identifiable crowd or demographic that I know would be into my “topic.” It costs a fortune, all told, because it’s a business and not just a blog. Hosting isn’t bad – a few hundred dollars a year. I pay someone on a monthly basis to update and maintain the site and deal with downtime and crashes and other stuff that used to blow up my life once a year or so. I’m not a super savvy technical person so this is necessary. The highest cost is the email management system, which is essential for the layers and layers of emails I send. With 40,000 people in the system it costs over $400 a month. There may be cheaper options but switching would be too big a pain. I also have tons of little subscription costs that have become necessary for product delivery (Dropbox for example). Altogether my monthly business expenses are more than my rent. I make a full-time living from my blog by offering products to my readers. I also have a Patreon. The whole operation would be way cheaper to run if I didn’t sell anything. I am all for monetizing personal blogs. Good content is hard to make and takes time, and if you want to offer something bigger than blog posts, you have to charge for it or it doesn’t get made. I am a fan of David Pinsof’s Everything is Bullshit and Scott Alexander’s Astral Codex Ten , both of which are Substacks now. Mostly I read books these days. I just want to say this was a lot of fun. Not to be the old man in the room but the internet has changed immensely since I started in 2008. Part of what has dropped away (at least for me) has been being in the “world” of blogs. Answering these questions and reading other people’s answers on your site has reminded me that some semblance of that community spirit still exists. Thanks for keeping it alive. 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 128 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Brennan Kenneth Brown and the other 116 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

A random list of silly things I hate

«Not sure if this can turn into a blogger's challenge» , he said. Well, we can certainly try: 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 Blogs that don’t have a contact email. The smell of cauliflowers when they’re cooking. Drivers who do not respect safety distances. Loud people in public places. Loud people in general. All the bros: crypto-bros, ai-bros, gym-bros. When you go buy something online, and only your size is sold out. People with no spatial awareness at the supermarket. Green shield bugs .

Entertainment

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Step aside, phone

I was chatting with Kevin earlier today, and since he’s unhappy with his mindless phone usage , I proposed a challenge to him: for the next 4 weeks, each Sunday, we’re gonna publish screenshots of our screen time usage as well as some reflections and notes on how the week went. If you also want to cut down on some of your phone usage, feel free to join in; I’ll be happy to include links to your posts. I experimented with phone usage in the past and I know that I can push screen time usage very low , but it’s always nice to do these types of challenges, especially when done to help someone else. Like Kevin, I’m also trying to read more. I read 35 books last year , the goal for 2026 is to read 36 (currently more than halfway through book number 5), and so I’m gonna attempt to spend more time reading on paper and less on screen. It’s gonna be fun, curious to see how low I can push my daily averages this time around. 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

Mobile

Books

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Frances

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frances, whose blog can be found at francescrossley.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Minsuk Kang and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hello! I’m Frances, I live in the East Midlands in the UK with my wife, back in my hometown to be near my family. I like stories, spending lots of time outside, history, and being an aunt. Right now I’m into zines, playing more ttrpgs, reading lots of biographies, and am going to take some letterpress printing classes. This year I am looking forward to camping, more reading projects, outdoor swimming, and feeding all the neighbourhood slugs with my garden veg. Just generally I’m interested in creativity, learning, fun projects, and trying new things, then blogging about it. I work in the voluntary sector and adult education, and am training to be a mental health counsellor. In February 2025 I got into an enthusiasm about the indie web. I’ve been messing around on the internet since 2000 when I started making geocities sites. There have been many different blogs and sites since then but nothing for the past few years. I really wanted to get among it and I went from looking at some Neocities sites to having my blog up and running within hours. Since then I've had fun adding more stuff to my site, and tweaking things, but no major changes. It took a while to settle into a rhythm - which is upbeat, chatty, 250-ish words, three to five times a week. Now I'm really happy with how it's going and it feels like I’ve only just gotten started. I love emailing with people, taking part in blog carnivals, and so on. Mostly ideas come from or are about books I'm reading, little projects I'm doing, tv and films, other people's posts, conversations with my niblings, rabbit holes I'm going down, and stuff I enjoy. Writing helps me think, possibly writing is how I think. I try to stay positive and to write posts that are hopefully fun for other people to read. It’s very off-the-cuff when ideas come up and I put them in a draft, even just a sentence of an idea. There's always a few posts on the go at any one time and they usually get posted within a week. I like a choice of things to be working on - which is true of most stuff, not just blog posts. Some posts like my link roundups or lists of things I've been enjoying are added to over time, then posted when they get to a good length. I've been experimenting with ‘theme’ weeks or series, which has been great fun so far. I do think the physical space influences creativity. To keep my battery charged I need to be exposed to new ideas: reading, going to a museum, looking at art, doing things. I’ve spent years training myself out of the idea I have to be in the ideal creative environment or state in order to write. I'll write queueing at the shops or on the bus, perfectly happily. It’s more about being able to write whenever I have time or ideas. Ideally, I’d be in a field. I am almost always listening to music though. There is deliberately very little in the way of a tech stack. I use Bear Blog, which I love very much. My domains are with Namecheap. That’s it. I didn’t want anything to complicate getting started when I was in that enthusiasm. I’m mostly on my phone or tablet so it was essential I could write, post, and fiddle, really do everything, without needing my laptop. I don’t even draft elsewhere - I write directly into the Bear Blog editor because I believe in living dangerously. No backups, we die like men. Honestly, no. I made decisions - the platform, to use my name - and I could have made them differently but I stand by them. Those are just details - writing, thinking, sharing, contributing, and connecting with people are the real focus. I’ve got an annual paid plan for Bear Blog which is about £40 a year plus my domain name is about £12 a year. It does not generate revenue and I don’t want or need it to. People can do whatever they like with their personal blogs and I will contribute to a tip jar, buy people’s books or zines, and so on, whenever I can. This is the toughest question! So many great blogs. Just a few, and I’d love to see any of them interviewed: mɛ̈rmɛ̈r , Sylvia at A parenthetical departure , Ruth at An Archaeopteryx , Ním's memex , Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board , Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad at The White Pube , and Paul Watson at The Lazarus Corporation . I’m just a big fan of everyone out here rewilding the web with fun blogs, sites, and projects. Including everything you do, Manu, with your blog, People and Blogs, and Dealgorithmed. Thank you for them, and for having me here. Another cool project: Elmcat made an interactive map of the TTRPG blogosphere . Not only is this an amazing technically but it's so inspiring to see the community and all the connections. 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 127 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Sixian Lim and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Adblocking ≠ Piracy

I told Kevin I was going to write this post since we were discussing this topic the other day. This is my half of the argument; maybe he’ll write an “Adblocking = Piracy” post on his site if he finds the time between one meeting and the other. I am not the first person to write this post; I am sure I won’t be the last. Plenty of people have expressed their opinion on this subject, and so far, no consensus has been reached (and I suspect never will). For me, the reason why the two are not the same is very simple. When I pirate something (a game, a TV show, a movie, music, you name it), the original, legal, implied agreement was pretty straightforward: someone created something and put it up for sale, and if you want that something, you have to exchange money in order to get access to said something. There are no ambiguities here, and it’s a fairly simple transaction. That’s how most of society works. There’s a more complex discussion we can have to figure out if piracy = stealing, but that’s a separate discussion, and it’s not relevant here. With adblocking, on the other hand, the implied agreement is more complex. To start, while browsing the web, I don’t know upfront if the link I’m about to click on has ads or not. So the argument that you shouldn’t use adblockers because you have accepted to be served ads while consuming a specific piece of content is shaky at best in my view. I could see that argument being more valid if ads weren’t displayed straight away, and I was given the option to leave the site before ads were displayed to me, but this is not what’s happening on the web. Then there’s the issue of what being served an ad means. Do I have to watch the ad? Does it have to be displayed on my screen? If ads are displayed on the sidebar of your website, and I keep that portion of the browser outside my screen on purpose, is that adblocking? I’m literally not allowing the ads on my screen after all. If the ads load and I have a script that, after 100ms, replaces them with pictures of cats, is that ok? If I design an adblocker that grabs all the ads on your page and moves them all to the bottom of the page, and I never reach that portion of the site, is that ok? The moment your data has reached my computer, I should be free to interact with it however I see fit. And if I decide to strip away most of the junk you sent my way, it’s my right to do so, the same way it was my right to stand up and walk away or change channel when TV ads were running. Adblocking is not piracy. And actually, I think more people should run adblockers. Actually, all people should run adblockers and force businesses to reconsider how they monetise their content. But I’ll be curious to hear from the people who are in the “adblocking is piracy” camp. Kevin, go write that blog post. 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

Ad Blockers didn’t help kill the open web

In the spirit of the open web, I’m writing this post to disagree with something someone else has posted on their own site. Specifically, a post titled “ Ad Blockers helped kill the open web ” by Christian Heilmann . I 100% agree with Christian when he writes that: The experience for users who don’t employ [ad blockers] is different, though, to the extend that the web is becoming unusable. What I disagree with is what follows: Here’s the thing: I am 100% sure these things are connected. The more people block ads, the more aggressive advertising became. To the extend that a newspaper site of today reminds you of illegal download or porn sites of the early 2000s. This is a generalization that’s maybe true in some cases. Maybe. Maybe if we’re only talking newspapers and other news sites, maybe that’s true. Again, maybe. I suspect there are other factors at play in the newspaper landscape, and it’s not just a matter of people blocking ads therefore, we need more ads. But the title of the post isn’t “Ad Blockers helped kill newspapers” but rather “Ad Blockers helped kill the open web”. That’s a much different claim, one that I strongly disagree with. The argument about not wanting to be tracked, I agree, is debatable. Some people don’t want to be tracked but are happy to do the tracking on their own sites. Still, I do think it should be my right not to be tracked around, and if the only way to do that is run tracker blockers, then so be it. But there is a difference between tracking prevention and blocking ads. Not every ad is predatory and designed to record your actions There probably is a difference, but honestly, the burden shouldn’t be on the user to figure it out. And so blocking everything seems to be the best course of action. Also, you can totally still run ads even when people have adblockers. They can’t be programmatic ads, sure. And they might be less effective (debatable), but that’s not a problem for the users to deal with. It’s a business issue. I agree that the web platform failed at figuring out a way to deal with monetisation. Everything ultimately falls back on Ads because it’s the only idea that “works”. But to me, the issue is that we have an overabundance of content, and most content is not worth paying for. Most content is not worth anything. This post is worth nothing. Before the web, nobody was going to pay anything to read something like this. At best, I could write it and send it to a newspaper as an opinion piece, and maybe they’d be interested in publishing it. But for some reason, the web has morphed our perception of content to the point where everything needs to generate money because everything is considered valuable. Well, it isn’t. The vast majority of sites on the web don’t need to make money. The vast majority of sites on the web cost very little to keep going. Adblockers have not killed those sites because there are no ads to be blocked there. To circle back to the topic of payments, Flattr was a good idea. Funnily enough, I even had the same idea years ago before discovering that someone had already built it (obviously). But that’s also not really a solution. Because the reality of the web is that if you provide something for free, most people are not going to pay for it. A physical paper I also skim at the store before purchasing it to see if it is worth it. This is also an already solved problem. Sites can have paywalls or limited free content previews. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach. The problem with the web is that for years, corporations and individuals, who were running big and small sites, were happy to slap Google ads on their sites and cash in on the money while simultaneously helping make Google the dominant force it is today. And then enshittification kicked in, and Google started fucking those people over. This is the classic case of a shortsighted move from a previous generation that is screwing the subsequent ones. All that said, the open web is not dead. Maybe a small subset of sites whose business depended on publishing content for free is dying. And maybe it's a good thing. But I’m not gonna feel sorry for running dual adblockers both at the browser and the network level. Surveillance capitalism fucking sucks, and we should maybe start fixing that before we worry about adblockers. 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

A moment with a message from the past

Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square. 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

Nikita Prokopov

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikita Prokopov, whose blog can be found at tonsky.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Eleonora and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I am from Siberia. I studied CS there, got my first job in IT, and moved to Germany in 2018. Apart from programming, I am passionate about movies and filmmaking, UI design, experimented with standup, play badminton. I started writing in LiveJournal when I was still in uni, found a very nice Russian-speaking FP community there. Had a lot of eye-opening and often very heated discussions. Experimented with publishing in collaborative blogs (Habr, approximately Russian dev.to) but felt that author’s identity gets lost there. Personal blog was my attempt at reaching a wider English-speaking community. Livejournal was already dying by then, and I was smart (lucky?) enough to not choose Medium (TBH, it looked very promising in 2014). I am pretty happy with that decision. The older you get, the less you believe any startup has your best interests at heart. This leads to the only possible conclusion: self-hosting. It is hard to start but once you get your core audience there’s no limit to your growth. I usually collect ideas for a while (pictures, phrases, links, thoughts). This happens in the background and can take years. Once it reaches critical mass, I sit down to organize it all in a coherent whole. I don’t do separate drafts; it’s more like a pile of ideas — first pass — reflection — reorganization/cleanup — review — publish. A mandatory part of the reflection phase is questioning myself: why am I writing this, nobody is going to read it, this is stupid/silly/trivial/too complicated. That’s how you know you are writing something truly great. I usually ask a friend or two for feedback, Grammarly/ChatGPT/built-in Apple AI to do proofreading. I can only write in Sublime Text because it’s a tool I use daily for coding and it has become second nature to me. I feel very uncomfortable in any other tool when some minor detail behaves slightly different from what I am used to. iA Writer is fantastic and I tried to reproduce it as close as possible, its only downside being not being Sublime Text. I recently bought a NuPhy keyboard (Air60 v2 Cowberry) for my PC because of its compact size and cute looks, but was surprised that it sounds amazing and now I am addicted to typing on it. Apart from that, no: any place, any time, any device. No sounds, no music, as I find both distracting. I used to use Github pages but got tired of Ruby/Jekyll local installation breaking on macOS every year or so. I don’t blog often, so it’s the worst: you come back to your blog once every few months, completely without context, and you need to spend hours just restoring it to the status quo. Wrote my own engine in Clojure and has been happy ever since. For some reason I didn’t go with the static generator route. I do a good old CGI style approach, with an actual server rendering your pages. It’s more fun that way, and allows for more interactivity, although I didn’t explore it much yet. No, I am totally happy with where I am. Server costs €35/mo, but I co-host a lot of other projects there. Domain is €25/year. I used to have Patreon, but it was not just for blog, also for my open-source projects. I never tried monetizing writing, not sure how well that would go, but I have nothing against it. Off the top of my RSS feed: Fira Code is a nice programming font you might like. 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 126 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Ken Zinser and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible. Jamie Brandon https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/log/ Rakhim Davletkaliyev https://rakhim.exotext.com/ Marcin Wichary https://aresluna.org/ Ilya Birman https://ilyabirman.net/meanwhile/

C# Clojure

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Digital resistance

One of the blogs I’ve been paying closer attention to over the past few weeks is patrickrhone.net since he’s doing a great job in commenting and sharing both the awful things that are happening in Minnesota, where he’s based, but also some of the positives that are coming out from a moment this tragic. Reading through his posts made me appreciate how important it is, in moments like these, that we still have the ability to share snippets of reality directly with each other. Most people will likely remember when mainstream social media could be used as a force for change at a societal level. The Arab Spring is an obvious example. But that was more than a decade ago, and the social media landscape is very different right now, different to the point where I suspect something like that would not be allowed to happen again. But the existence of personal sites, run by people who are willing to live and share their experience of what’s happening around them, remains an incredibly valuable tool in the context of digital resistance. Judging by the reports I saw, there are attempts to crack down on Signal groups and the other ways people use to communicate and organize, so I think the more spread out, the more distributed, the more decentralized these movements are, the harder it becomes to keep them under control. And maybe this is probably the best use case for something like Mastodon, where a multitude of instances can go online easily and make it very hard to censor them all. It might not have the same reach as the mainstream platforms, but I think it’s a lot more resilient and harder to silence. Countries always have the option to go nuclear and block the entire Internet; we’ve all seen that happening before, but I suspect that’s harder to do in places where most of society needs the Internet to function properly. And related to this, the other day Seth shared on his blog a link to macrowave and the first thought I had was that this—or similar ones—could become another incredibly useful tools in the context of organized resistance. All this to say that if you have enough knowledge to set up a personal site, a forum, a Mastodon instance, or any other way to help people share what's happening and connect with each other, that’s probably something worth doing at this point in time. 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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Java

Open Source

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Sharing is caring

Even though he again misrepresented the point I made in a previous post and he also attributed me things I never said, I'm still going to share this post by Baldur Bjarnason , because he touches on many important topics worth thinking and talking about, especially at this specific moment in time, considering all the shit that's happening in the world. I'm not gonna attempt to correct him, because I don't think it matters at this point. He's free to think I'm a nazi apologist, or sympathizer, or whatever else he thinks I am (and since I'm Italian, you should also assume I'm a Fascist while you're there). I’m not gonna lose sleep over that, but I will point out something that is important to me: Not assuming ≠ tolerating. Not assuming ≠ excusing. Not assuming ≠ allowing something. And one more note: Because you absolutely should judge people based on the books they like. That’s what talking about books is for. Why they like a book is as important, if not more important, than what book they like. That was the whole point of my post. And by knowing what book one likes you don’t also know why they like it, unless you engage in a conversation. As you said, that’s why we talk about books and why we talk about things in general. Because if we don’t talk, then we just assume. 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

Books

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

A follow-up on a follow-up

I already wrote a follow up to my previous post but while that was happening Bix wrote something on their site and in there there’s a perfect passage which illustrates way better the point I was attempting to make (not hard to do, considering I am not a great writer) and I’ll quote it down below: The real example to use here more naturally would be people still liking the Harry Potter franchise despite J.K. Rowling being a fetid, rancid TERF. In that actual situation, there are nuances. For example, if the books (or movies) meant a lot to you and you still own them and you still revisit them, you aren’t actually giving Rowling any more money or visible support as a human being. If you’re continuing to buy, rent, or attend any of her work, you actively are supporting a fetid, rancid TERF. It’s valid for people to judge you on that. For the sake of this discussion, (and this is a hypothetical, Baldur) , let’s pretend I tell you that my favorite book is Harry Potter. Now, you tell me, based on that information you have just received, how do you determine in which one of the two camps proposed by Bix do I fit in? Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

AI

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Ryan

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Ryan, whose blog can be found at laze.net . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Jeremy Bassetti and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hey there, I'm Ryan. I'm originally from South Jersey (as in southern New Jersey) but live now in Northern Virginia with my wife, two kids, dog, and rabbit. I'm well out of school by this point, but I was a computer science major over half a lifetime ago. I've been a web developer for many years, though my current professional role is less well-defined for various reasons. I've built fun little projects on the web since 1994, most of which were pretty low-key or niche. A couple got some nice acknowledgement in large media outlets or went mildly viral for a bit, but my favorites have always flown under the radar and garner just the rare "thank you!" email. I'm passionate about genealogy/family history, the personal web (duh!), music/movies/books, radio archiving, personal preservation, running, animal rights, and trying to be less of a jerk each day. I launched my first personal web site on my college's server in December of 1994 (only the second student to have done so), but my first blog post, of sorts, was on April 20, 1998 shortly after I'd moved to a proper web host and my own domain. I had a changelog for a while with updates about the site, but then I started a page with a changelog for my life--a blog, though the word wasn't widely used at that point. The blog grew more important and eventually got its own name, "twist of fait accomplis." It ran through 2020, though slowed down quite a bit in the mid-2010s. Over that time, I did a lot of personal blogging (the type of stuff that would later be appropriate for social media), linkblogging, commentary, and longer essays. I had a few posts gain traction over the years, somewhat unexpectedly. Like the one where I wrote about seeing The Maury Povich Show in person and watching Maury embarrassingly misgender an audience member. It blew up when people got to the post through Google and thought that I was Maury and started telling me their life stories in the comments (often with PII). That post got over 700 comments before I had to turn them off. Sadly, Maury himself never reached out to do a collab. laze x Povich could have been great. In 2020, I was using a Wordpress security plugin that was (ironically) compromised and ended up injecting sites I ran with malware. I got fed up with Wordpress and had already been growing weary of the state of the personal web, so I pulled my site down and replaced it with a single, unindexed web page that I would quietly update every few months. By 2024, I started re-engaging with the IndieWeb (or whatever you want to call it) and felt a hankering to bring my site back in some way, so I did. Since then, I've fallen back in love with blogging and tinkering with my site. The current incarnation features selected posts going back to 1998 from assorted sites I've run over the years as well as a nice dose of new posts. I've decided that in the current iteration of my site, I'm simply letting my interests guide me. Sometimes, that means I'm writing a post about an album I've been listening to, other times responding to someone else's post or writing about a project I've been working on or a topic that's been interesting me. Sometimes I just write about my experience getting older . Some of the posts (like one I wrote about heart disease and lipoprotein(a) ) I put some time into researching, which can make the process a bit slow. I've got one post about a pretty esoteric piece of train history that I've been working on-and-off for months on because I feel like there's more good info out there I need to find before I can hit publish (even though only ten people will end up reading it). I have a Writing folder in Joplin where I keep all my drafts. It's a nice way to write, as I can switch between a rich text editor and straight markdown, and then copy the markdown directly into a micro.blog post when I'm done. I do any proofing and corrections myself before posting and inevitably even more after posting. I try not to be too precious about it, though. It's my site and though I don't want it to feel sloppy, I'm human and make mistakes. I'm at peace with the occasional typo or awkward sentence. Like most people, I like to have a quiet space to think and write, perhaps accompanied by some non-vocal music. I do most of my writing in my home office/guest bedroom looking out the window on my small backyard. It's quite pleasant during the summer to see all the greenery, but even during the winter months, I appreciate the light that comes through. Writing on the front porch in nice weather or by the fireplace in the winter are nice alternatives when I need to mix things up. I don't have as many "I'm going to sit down and write for 30 minutes"-type moments as I'd like. More often, it's "I can probably snag ten minutes now for a paragraph or two." I take what I can get, which can result in fragmented prose that requires a good deal of massaging before it's ready for public consumption. I've gone through so many blogging platforms and web hosts over the years, but laze.net is currently hosted at micro.blog, which I use more as a traditional CMS than as a microblogging or POSSE service as it was intended. It's Hugo on the backend and deploys as a static site, which I like. I'm at the point where I don't want to worry about managing deployments, updating software, configuring servers... none of that interests me at this stage. I find more joy in thinking and writing than I do in tinkering with what's running the site. (I run other sites where I'm more involved technically, but we're talking about laze.net here.) I've started and restarted too many blogs and where I've settled is this: I aim to keep things as simple as possible (while also appreciating a degree of flexibility) with a well-designed CMS on the back end that pushes out a static site on the other. I'm happy with the way things are now. I love that there are so many options out there now, whether it's micro.blog, Bear, Pika, or any of the other services Manuel outlines on his blog platforms page. There's a service out there for whatever level of involvement one might want to have with their site's appearance or functionality. I'm on the micro.blog premium plan, which is $10/month. My email is hosted at mxroute, which I subscribed to a while ago for some deal, so let's call that a buck or two a month since I host other domains' email there as well. The domain registration costs about $13/year. So, I'm able to run the site for around $15/month. I don't monetize the site. Nothing against anyone who does with theirs, though. Some of these folks may have been featured here before (and indeed this may be where I found them). I have a proper blogroll , too, that I'm always adding to. I've always got a few side projects going on. I've got one dedicated to a pet cemetery in the Nevada desert . I do a good bit of radio archiving (and wholeheartedly support unimportant archiving ). I've also got a digital garden dedicated to genealogy , but it needs some tending. And a pal and I have a very slow joint blog where we post once a year, alternating years between us. Anything new (or old) that I may be up to, I try to add to my "projects" page . 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 125 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Matt Rutherford and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible. Paul - I've known Paul online since the early-90s (GEnie!!) and we still keep in almost daily contact. His blog is always a good read. He's the writer I wish I was. Interview him! Chris - Chris is a blogger I met back in the early 2000s only to find out he lived a block away (I knew he was local but not that local). He's been in the game forever and has always been a great example of what the indie/personal web is about. Interview him, too! ( Already did! ) Alex - Alex's series on Tiny Archives and recent three-parter on personal social media archiving are some of my favorite things of the last couple of years. Katherine - I feel like everyone probably knows about Katherine's site at this point, but I tell you... what a delightful web presence. Grizzly Gazette - This group blog on Bear has been a good read since it launched this year.

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