Latest Posts (20 found)
Manuel Moreale Today

Double opt-in PSA

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

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Manuel Moreale 2 days ago

On eating shit

You’re sitting at a table. In front of you, a series of plates. They’re full of shit (like some people). Not the same shit, mind you. It’s different types, produced by different animals, in different quantities. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that you have to eat the contents of one of those plates. Yeah, it sucks, I’m sorry. But you just have to. So you understandably start going through the thought process of figuring out which one is the “best” one. You start examining the shape, the texture, the animal that produced it. You start finding reasons to pick one over another. You start rationalising, trying to justify your decision to the other people who, like you, also need to pick which one to eat. It’s a process. A shitty one, I might say. But in going through this ordeal, you start losing track of the only thing that really matters: this situation fucking sucks, and there’s no good answer. The only reasonable thing to do is to pick the plate with the least steamy, smelly, nasty pile of shit and then figure out a way not to find yourself in that situation ever again. Sometimes eating shit is unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make it as painless as possible. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 2 days ago

Karen

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

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Manuel Moreale 3 days ago

Dealgorithmed

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

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Manuel Moreale 6 days ago

A moment in yet another memorial

There’s something unique about visiting WW memorials. I don’t even know how to explain it. It’s a strange mix of awe, sorrow, gratefulness, and many other feelings all bunched together. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 weeks ago

Alexandra Wolfe

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra Wolfe, whose blog can be found at wrywriter.ca . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Piet Terheyden and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m a viviparous, mammalian, carbon-based biped — a veritable fossil from a bygone age sometimes referred to as the Good Old Days. Though, to be honest, that’s debatable to the nth degree. I was born in Germany to British parents and moved across the planet every 2-3 years, all of which seemed very natural to me at the time. Apart from studying for 3 degrees (I never finished any of them) I did several years in the military ostensibly as an air traffic controller. I then somehow stumbled from there into the print & publishing trade and made a comfortable living working on books and magazines. I even rubbed shoulders with a few names over the years, which in and of itself, was pleasantly entertaining. Being in the publishing trade allowed me to indulge in a number of my fav hobbies, including publishing a couple of scifi ezines over the years, run a Star Trek club, hang out at several scifi and comic cons, and meet the stars and writers of many of my fav scifi shows. I still have the photographic evidence to prove it. I didn’t so much as decide to blog as stumble into it, like many back in the days of LiveJournal and MySpace, we all just followed the crowd. It then seemed logical (at the time) to upgrade from a MySpace account to bumbling around with HTML creating a static website that was then quickly superseded by me creating an official ‘Blog’. At that point I was using the then new Wordpress software. It was, for me at least, revolutionary. Suddenly, everyone was blogging about everything. It’s at that point I think I bought my first domain name: wrywriter and used the dot com version till right up till a few years ago when I added the dot ca version and, sadly, let the dot com version lapse. Though now, I wish I had kept it. Now, I still have the name, but have moved away from Wordpress and blog ‘lightly’ using Bear Blog and Micro Blog to scribble and share my thoughts on. Clean, small, simple and more focused on the actual writing and less on the tweaking and tinkering. Both platforms suit my current needs. I’m not sure I have a process per se. I don’t plan posts, and don’t jot down ideas. I’m more of a pantster, I stare at the blinking cursor only when I feel like I have something to say. Whether that be some random thought I had over breakfast, a news item I want to respond to, or a response to someone else’s post. I don’t do research, or make drafts, or have endless notebooks full of ideas. Unless we’re talking about short stories or ideas for novels. Blogging, for me, is more about spontaneity. I would have to say that physical space can and probably does influence how anyone writes. And that we all have our own particular quirks and eccentricities when it comes to our writing environment. I like mine to be quiet, clean, and minimal. There are a few toys I have at hand I play with, but other than that, it’s me and the keyboard, and a large screen. You’re asking a dinosaur who somehow lived long enough to stumble into a Jetson’s future what my Tech Stack is? Excuse me while I consult someone smarter than I am about what a tech stake might look like. Oh, you mean where did I buy my domain name and that sort of thing? I want to say Porkbun because I just love saying Porkbun. But no such luck, I sourced my domains here, in Canada, with WHC.ca and, at one time I had hosting with them, that is, till they kept putting their prices up. I also got very disillusioned by Wordpress so moved full time to Bear Blog and Micro Blog. I use Bear for more long form rambling posts and post my daily thoughts over on m.b. which is more suited to sharing said drivel on social media. I find this a bit of an odd question, my experience is based on what I went through, that ‘living’ experience of places and spaces that no longer exist, so of course, in the here and now, it would all be different. I would probably start off with a simple blog on Bear or the Pika platform and skip the likes of Blogger and Wordpress altogether. The web might be obsessed with money, but I’d say most bloggers are not. I’m not interested in monetising my blog, nor am I interested in reading blogs that are focused on making money. I avoid them like the plague. If someone quietly, and respectfully asks me to support their writing, however, with a discrete ‘Buy Me A Coffee’ button, then I’m almost always happy to make a donation. There are so many great blogs about at the moment, but some of my current fav reads are: I would humbly suggest you ask David Johnson of Crossing The Threshold for an interview. David lives in Hawaii and always has some thoughtful posts to read on his blog. There are many things I’m always working on when it comes to writing projects. I do love to scribble. You can find more over on Alexandra Wolfe (alexandrawolfe.ca) and read my daily posts over on the Wry Writer (wrywriter.ca). For those of you out there who love reading fantasy, I stumbled upon a great series by Robert Jackson Bennet starting with, The Tainted Cup and followed by A Drop Of Corruption. I sincerely hope there’s more in the series. Some fun websites people might like to check out: And finally, I would like to extend a big thank you to Robert Birming for suggesting me to join in this amazing series, People & Blogs, and an even bigger thank you to you, Manu, for asking me to take part. I feel honoured to be among such an esteemed alumni. Much love, Alex Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 116 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Chuck Grimmett and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible. David at www.crossingthethreshold.net Sylvia at sylvia.buzz David at forkingmad.blog Kimberly at kimberlykg.com Robert at robertbirming.com Annie at anniemueller.com My life in Weeks weeks.ginatrapani.org Notebook of Ghosts notebookofghosts.com Shady Characters shadycharacters.co.uk

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Y’all are great

I keep hearing and reading people bitching and moaning about the web being dead, lamenting the good old days of the web, when real people were out there, and sites weren’t all about promoting some shit nobody cares about or attempting to amass an audience only to then flip it in exchange for money. And I’m sitting here, screaming at my screen «That web you’re missing is still here, you dumbdumb, you just have to leave your stupid corporate, algodriven, social media jail to find it» . This past Friday the interview with the lovely Nic Chan went live on People and Blogs. Her site has something mine does not: analytics. And they're public! That offered the rare opportunity for me to see the effect the series has on a featured blog. This series lives on my blog but has nothing to do with me. It exists to connect you, the human who’s reading this, with all the other wonderful humans that are still out there, spending their time making sure the old school web, the one made by the people, for the people, is not dying. And see that bump on Nic’s analytics made me so happy. Because it means the series is working and doing its job. And it’s all because people like you are taking the time to read these interviews and click on those links to visit those blogs. And maybe you’re also taking time to reach out to those people and connect with them. This is the web many people are missing, a web that is, in fact, still here, very much alive. Y’all are great. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Nic Chan

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Numeric Citizen and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. Hi, my name is Nic Chan! I'm a web developer and hobbyist artist who lives in Hong Kong. It's pretty funny, depending on who you ask, the audience is shocked to hear about my secret other life, since I typically keep these identities very separate. If I'm not tinkering with websites or frantically mixing paint, you might find me shitposting on Mastodon, sweating through the Hong Kong summers or volunteering at the cat shelter. Despite growing up on the internet, I had never intended to be a web developer. I studied Fine Arts at a small liberal arts college in California, where I solidified a vaguely Californian accent that haunts me till this day. I entered the working world hoping to start a career that would somehow be arts related, but quickly decided that it wasn't for me. The art world, especially at higher levels, feels very inauthentic and performative in a way that left me constantly tired. During that time, I managed to convince my employer that it would save them money if I also managed their website for them, and used that opportunity as a spring board to teach myself web development. Upon reflection, I have no idea how I managed to convince them that this was a good idea. Though some engagements were longer than others, I've been a freelance web developer for around 10 years now! I'm a web generalist, but the thing I want to do more of is building sustainable and accessible websites with core web technologies. This really is the reason I continue to do what I do! I love the web as a medium, and I want to see it thrive. The reason why I started posting on my blog was basically to prove to clients that I was a real, trustworthy person. Unfortunately, to have any sort of success as a freelancer, unless you are a literal savant, I think you need to do -some- kind of marketing, and blogging is the only method that I found acceptable to me personally. (LinkedIn was still a cesspit in 2015!) In recent years, the blog has very much drifted away from that original purpose. I now mostly post very long-form thoughts on tech industry topics, whenever I feel the need to. For some odd reason, my instructional/informative writing is not as popular as my ranting, so I will leave tech education to other folks! As far as my blog goes now, I probably spend an equal amount of time tinkering on random code parts of the site as writing blog posts. I want to explore more topics outside of web development and the tech industry in the future. My absolute favorite bloggers are the ones who 'bring their whole selves' to their blog, and post updates on their creative hobbies or whatever is on their mind at the moment. The thing I love about the IndieWeb is mostly the people behind it, so getting to bond over the little things like shared hobbies is one of the main draws for me. Fuck the technology, I'm here for the people. My blogging process is pretty simple. I might have an idea for a topic, and I'll create a file in Obsidian with as much information as I care to note down, and when I get a moment I will come back and write out the post, usually in a very linear way, in as many sittings as it takes to finish the draft. I switched to Obsidian sometime in 2025 and it really did help me get a lot more writing done than I did in years past — cloud-based SaaS solutions are fine, but apparently, if I have to log in to a website to start writing, that does pose a significant barrier to me actually getting any writing done. Having Obsidian just be there on my desktop removes that tiny bit of friction, and I had really underestimated how important that is to the creative process. Once a draft is done, I like to let things sit and marinate for a while, until I can read it again with 'fresh eyes.' You'll never find a super timely take on current events on my blog, I take far too long for that! I don't typically write additional drafts — call it a character flaw, but I'm far more likely to scrap an idea completely than to rework it in a substantial way. Shamefully, I have posts from over a year ago that are still about 90% complete. They will sit until I finally manage to push through whatever reservations I might have about posting and just hit the publish button. If I'm writing something more technical or industry-related, I will try badger some folks to do a quick read-through. Special shoutout to my buddy EJ Mason for being the person who usually suffers through this task. I have a pretty particular desk setup for ergonomic/health reasons. I am physically incapable of being a laptop in a coffee shop kind of person, my fingers will start to turn numb as I use the trackpad, and I've used a custom keyboard layout for so long I can't really get work done on a traditional keyboard layout! If I'm writing at my computer, I need to be in my home office, at my PC, with my Ergodox EZ (a split ortholinear keyboard that has served me very well over the past few years), and a drawing tablet as a pointer device. I like it to be nice and quiet when I'm writing, if there's background noise, I can't hear my internal voice over the sound of other people speaking! Even with this particular setup, sitting at my desk does tire me out more than most people, so on very rare occasions I will draft a post with pen and paper. Unlike with computer writing, I'm completely agnostic as to what materials I actually write with, I've occasionally written post outlines on stray receipts or napkins. I built my personal site with Astro and Svelte! I have a whole series on the topic of building my website if you want a peek behind the hood at how I did it. There's so much I want to do to extend the site, but I find the biggest obstacle remains creating the graphics. The funny thing is, I definitely feel a sense of dread when looking at a blank canvas, even when I know what the final product is going to look like. Maybe putting this out there in the world will be the kick in the butt I need to make progress! Everything is managed in code and Markdown, without a CMS. Though it does have flaws and limitations when it comes to certain components, Markdown remains my favorite format for drafting pretty much anything. My site is currently hosted on Cloudflare. I fully admit that it's not very IndieWeb of me, I do feel strongly about potentially moving off big tech infrastructure, but I'm not very good at managing servers on my own and I'm a bit scared to do so with the prevalence of bad-faith crawlers. Yeah, I wouldn't write the components in Svelte. If you look back at my posts, I acknowledge that I would probably regret this decision and want to use web components later, but at the time I lacked the web components knowledge to execute the vision properly. No shade against Svelte, it's just that for something like my blog, I prefer to have to deal with less of a maintenance burden than I might willingly take on for a work project, since I'm only in the codebase for a couple of times a year. There are some features/syntax that I'm using that will likely be deprecated in future versions of Svelte, so that's a pain I will have to deal with eventually. In my youth, I definitely had a bit of 'shiny new thing syndrome' when it came to web technologies. Nowadays, I prefer things that are more stable and slow. I've been burned just a few too many times for me to feel excited about proprietary technology! I pay for $24 USD for a domain name. I swear it used to be cheaper in the past! I also pay Plausible and Tinylytics as I believe in paying for privacy-respecting services. I started with Plausible, and at some point I became preoccupied with having a heart button for my posts, so I added Tinylytics. It's on my long list of todos to sort this out, I definitely don't need both. I mainly keep analytics to know where my posts are being linked from — doing this has helped me find some really awesome people and blogs (badum-tsh). Other than that, keeping the site running is free. This might change in the future, I do want to do more fun things that might require more financial resources, but I don't have any intent to monetize it, it's just a little home on the internet that I'm happy throw cash at to keep the (metaphorical) lights on. In no particularly order, here's a list of blogs I've been really enjoying. I think there will be some level of overlap with the People and Blogs folks, as I've been a long-time reader and found many folks worth following through this series, so thank you Manu! After rambling on for far too long for most of this, I'm finally at a loss for words. I'd be much obliged if you visited my site but you can also follow me on Mastodon if you have a hankering for some shelter cat pics. I have a submission coming out for the 'Free To Play' gaming-themed zine under Difference Engine , a Singaporean indie comics publisher. It's a collaboration with the narrative designer & writer Sarah Mak , I hope you'll check it out when the time comes! Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 115 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Luke Dorny and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible. Like Keenan , who I found from this series and is rapidly becoming one of my all-time favorite bloggers. Keenan is a true wordsmith, and an incredibly kind human. They're so good at what they do, that they managed to completely break some assumptions I had about myself, like I thought I hated the podcast format of 'two friends chatting' until they started one with Halsted ! Ethan Marcotte has been absolutely killing it lately. His work is quiet and thoughtful, but in a wonderfully understated way that sticks in your brain for a long, long time. I've never seen anyone write as much as Jim Nielsen does and still have as many awesome posts. Come on, what's your secret Jim? Melanie Richards is one of the main reasons I want to start blogging about my other creative hobbies a bit more. She also has one of the prettiest blog designs I have ever seen! Everything I know about web sustainability, I have probably learned directly from Fershad Irani's blog . Eric Bailey writes the kind of posts that I send to every single person I know in the industry as soon as I see them hit my feed. Robert Kingett 's website tagline is 'A fabulously blind romance author', what's not to love? Robert has written numerous pieces that have completely reshaped how I feel about certain topics. His writing style is persuasive with a heaped tablespoon of humor for good measure. The final two folks don't post that regularly, but they are my friends so I am allowed to nudge them in the hope it will make them post more often. Jan Maarten and Katherine Yang have blogs that are so unapologetically them. More posts, please!

career Career java Java web-development Web Development
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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Following up on input diet

Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic . It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting for me next to the bed. In my post, I wrote that «the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume.» and that is exactly what I did yesterday morning. The total number of feeds on my RSS reader went down from hundreds to exactly seventeen. I stopped at nineteen initially, but later in the day, I decided to remove two more after realising I should follow two simple rules: Time will tell if this setup works or not, but I think it’s a good starting point to reshape my digital diet. And speaking of ingesting digital content, I will not pass on this opportunity to mention that Jatan — also featured on P&B —has published a poetry book to celebrate his Moon Monday newsletter passing both 5 years of digital existence as well as 10000 subscribers . The book is available pretty much everywhere a book can exist, and in I think all possible formats, which is very impressive, I have to say. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs My RSS consumption should have a hard cap at 25 total feeds. All the content in there should come from people I either know in person or have interacted with directly at some point.

books Books writing Writing programming Programming
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Manuel Moreale 2 weeks ago

Input diet

Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361 —thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them there by never looking away. (...) Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins. The topic of who is getting my attention these days is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. Because time and attention are a precious resource, one we probably take for granted way too often. A resource that’s been abused by the modern economy to the point where people seem unable to focus anymore, with the sole goal of selling us crap we likely don’t need. The other piece I’ve been thinking about is Ridgeline #217 , where Craig wrote: The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms. The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically. I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal. How to get there, that I don’t know, but I feel like it’s a worthy goal to pursue. And I think this goal is gonna be part of a broader push towards really curating the inputs in my life. By inputs, I mean everything I consume. Because I realised my mental health is deeply affected by what I consume, day after day. The books I read, the posts and blogs I scroll through, the news I ingest, the music I listen to. Everything contributes to how I feel, and I think I’m only now realising how much more strict and diligent I should be with my input diet. The other day, I reopened my RSS reader after my small break from media consumption, and I was both over- and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed because I follow quite a lot of blogs, and so there were thousands of posts waiting to be read in there. Underwhelmed because after a quick scroll through all those entries, I realised there wasn’t much I was genuinely excited to read. Which isn’t to say the content in there wasn’t interesting, quite the opposite. I follow a lot of people who write a lot of interesting content. But I realised it was not content that really resonates with me, at this point in my life. And I came to the realisation that the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume. And in doing that, this time around, I should be a lot more deliberate, a lot more careful in what I add. Because now more than ever, in this age of infinite digital abundance, quality really is more important than quantity. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

media Media culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

Robb Knight

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Hans and the other 124 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I'm a developer and dad to two girls living in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK. By day I work for a SaaS company and in my own time I work on my many side projects . In a previous life I worked at a certain clown's restaurant which is where I met my wife some 15 years ago. Although developer is what I get paid to do I'm trying to move towards more making ; websites, stickers , shirts, art, whatever. I have no idea what that looks like yet or how it's going to pay my bills. I have a whole host of side projects I've worked on over the years; they're not all winners but they all serve, or served, a purpose. If I get lucky, they resonate with other people which is always nice. I've had a lot of blogs over the years, most of which would get a handful of posts before being abandoned. There was a version that ran on Tumblr which I did do for at least a year or two — any interesting posts from that have been saved. The current iteration is by far the longest serving and will be the final version. There's no chance of me wiping it all and starting again. This current version is part of my main website which is where I put everything . My toots on Mastodon start life as a note post , I post interesting links I find , and I log all the media I watch/play/whatever (I don't want to say consume, that's gross) in Almanac , which itself is on the third or fourth iteration. As I said above, I had done a few posts on the Tumblr-powered blog but if I look at my stats for posts, it was around 2022 when Twitter started to fall apart that I started to blog more. I was moving away from posting things directly onto social media sites and getting it onto my own site. I started writing more posts that just had a short idea or helpful tip because I realised not every post has to be some incredible think piece. My analytics show that these posts also tend to be the most popular which probably says more about the state of large, ad-riddled websites than it does about my writing. For example this post about disconnecting Facebook from Spotify is consistently in the top five posts on my site but you're never going to read that post unless you specifically need it. It's not a "good" post, it just exists. To call what I have a process would be a very liberal use of the word "process". If I have nothing to write about I just won't write anything, I have no desire to keep to a schedule and write just for the sake of it. Usually, I'll get prompted by something someone asks like "How did you do X on your website?" or I feel like I have something to say that would be interesting other people. I write my posts in Obsidian, then when they're ready to go I'll add them to my site. If I'm on my proper computer laptop I use my CLI tool to add a new post. If I'm on mobile, I use the very haphazard CMS I built. I'll proof read most things myself before posting and I rarely ask for anyone else's input but if I do want a second opinion it's going to be previous P&B interviewee , Keenan . Usually I'm able to get out what I want to say fairly succinctly without too much editing. A proper keyboard and ideally a desk to sit at is what I prefer when I'm writing (or coding) but I can live with just the keyboard. My desk setup makes some people's skin crawl because there's so much going on but I like having all the trinkets and knick knacks around me. I deeply dislike using my phone for most things outside of scrolling lists, like social media so I rarely write long posts on it. The small form factor just doesn't work for me at all but I also kind of need it to exist in the world. All my domains are registered with Porkbun and I manage the DNS with DNSControl - my main domain, rknight.me, has nearly 50 records for subdomains so managing those without DNSControl would not be a fun activity. Speaking of DNS I use Bunny for my DNS management and also use their CDN for images and other files I need to host. The website itself is, as are many of my side projects, built with Eleventy . Eleventy gives me the flexibility to do some interesting things with the posts and other content on my site which would be much harder with some other systems. The site gets built on Forge to a Hetzner server whenever I push an update to GitHub either via command line, or through the aforementioned CMS, and is also triggered at various points in the day to pull in my Mastodon posts. Assuming I actually had to the time to do it, I think I would start with the CMS first, before building anything of the actual site. It is a pain to update things when I'm not at my laptop but jamming features into my CMS is equally frustrating. If I wanted something off the shelf and easier to maintain I suspect I would choose Ghost or Pika . Many of these costs are part of my freelancing so are bundled with other sites I run and somewhat hidden but I'll do my best to outline what I do use. I have a single server on Hetzner that serves my main site as well as another 30 or so side projects so the cost is negligible per-site but it costs about $5 a month. Forge costs $12 a month to deploy my site along with other sites. The domain is $20 a year I think but that's it. I have a One a Month Club here and I have a handful of people supporting that way. I also use affiliate links for services I use and like which occasionally pays me a little bit. I think monetising blogs is fine, if it's done in a tasteful way. Dumping Google ads all over your site is terrible for everyone but hand-picked sponsors or referrals is a good way to find new services. Just keep it classy. I want to read sites that are about the person writing them. Photos of things people have done, blog posts about notebooks, wallpaper, food, everything. Things people enjoy. This is the second time I'm going to mention Keenan here because they write so wonderfully. They also have a podcast with Halsted called Friendship Material which is all kinds of lovely and joyful and everyone should listen. Alex writes some really interesting computing-related posts, like this one about using static websites as tiny archives . Annie is so smart and honest in her writing it brings me joy every time I see a new post from her. This post is a masterpiece . I'd be a terrible business boy if I didn't at least mention EchoFeed , an RSS cross posting service I run. I also have a podcast that used to be about tech but is now about snacks. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 114 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to James Reeves and the other 124 supporters for making this series possible.

web-development Web Development
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Manuel Moreale 3 weeks ago

A moment with a decidedly less gloomy church

If you’re subscribed to my From the Summit newsletter , you might recognise this church. It’s the same one I wrote about in the most recent missive , only this time there was a lovely sunny day and the whole place was not engulfed in the fog. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

writing Writing journalism Journalism culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Frank Chimero

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Sal and the other 123 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m Frank Chimero, I design and write from my little apartment in New York City. I’ve been doing this for a long time, mostly for technology and media companies. Other than work, I’m interested in the same things many other people are: my partner, my dog, visiting museums, movies, paintings, reading, cooking, stimulating conversation, and long walks. A lot of those have a tendency to go together, especially here in New York, which is nice. I started teaching design shortly after finishing undergrad and had a great time with it. My students and I had so many stimulating conversations in the classroom, and their questions really forced me to think about my presumptions and beliefs about design in a way I wouldn't have without the prompting. So, after class, I'd type them up and was eager to share, and thus my blog was born. Writing is generally a way to scratch an itch in my brain. Sometimes it is an annoyance or disagreement with something else I read, or responding to an idea I came across in my reading that captivated me in some way, and trying to figure out why it grabbed me. Most first drafts are brain dumps in front of the keyboard or going for a walk and using speech to text on my phone. These things are incredibly rough, and take a bit of polishing until they end up on the site, but I enjoy that process too. It’s nice to nudge, tweak, and expand on parts and feel things get stronger or more clear. I try to have some interesting reference or idea at the heart of each post I make, because it’s what I want to read. The web I am interested in is the insights and ideas of individuals. Some people will think I’m a barbarian, but I don’t think tools matter that much. I write in TextEdit. If it’s by hand, it is typically on loose copier paper and a pen I stole from a hotel. I’m sensitive to spaces and love a beautiful room and good lighting, but I think it is more worthwhile to learn how to write well in spite of the environment rather than because of it. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The trick, for me, is to seek out those beautiful places and experiences and try to hold on to the internal environment they create in me, then find ways to get it down onto the page later. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t. A few years ago I wrote a book called The Shape of Design . I’d book trains from New York City up to Albany to enjoy the views of the Hudson Valley from the train window. The trip was about 8 hours there and back home. I got so many words down, something about the momentum of the view creating a velocity in the writing. But you know what? Once I stacked that writing up next to all the other writing I did in libraries, at the kitchen table, or coffee shops, I never could pinpoint where what was written. This is going to be underwhelming. I have an off-the-rack Macbook Pro M4. There is pretty much nothing installed on it except Figma, my fonts, and just enough of a local dev environment to make my rickety Jekyll deployments. If you were to close your eyes and imagine the first five sites you’d need for work, I have those, too. I have last year’s iPhone with YouTube and NTS Radio on it. I’ve stripped most everything out. It makes no difference. I just type and typeset. I’m not certain. I have no clue how one would grow an audience in 2025 without betraying some of my values about respecting people’s attention. My current mindset is to enjoy my audience, respect them, and make no presumptions about it growing. The site either costs $60 or $0, depending on how you look at it. It’s served via Github Pages, which requires a subscription, but it also pays for other things like private repos, etc. I’ve never tried to make money with the writing on my site. Even the book I wrote is available in full online for free. This isn’t necessarily a moral stance, it is simply that the economics of it wouldn’t pay enough to justify the headspace it’d occupy. If others want to do something different, I say go for it. I focus most of my reading time on books, and most of my digital reading is happening through newsletters these days. On the blog side of things, I mostly check up on friends’ writing by manually going to their site. “I wonder what Naz is up to?” and that kind of thing. I know there is RSS, but seeing the site is half the point. You’ve already interviewed a lot of them, but I think you would get a kick going through Rob Weychert ’s obsessively maximalist life-documentation-as-blog. It is exactly the opposite of my own tendencies (“anything you don’t remember must not be that important”), and I have a lot of admiration, confusion, and respect for what he’s done. I want to take a moment to give a shout out to libraries. Librarians are god’s people. I think there is a strong ideological kinship between digital personal publishing (blogs) and libraries (self-expression, availability of information, capitalistic counterpoint, community and connection, and the overall “this is for everyone” vibe the web was born from). So, go check out your local library. Get a card, check out a book, enjoy the space, and maybe ask about what other services they have to offer besides media. Good communities come from good people and good spaces. Supporting your local library may be a way to nudge the world toward your vision of how it should be. Or it could just be a nice way to spend an afternoon. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 113 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Henrik Wist and the other 123 supporters for making this series possible.

writing Writing design Design
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

IndieWeb Carnival: On Ego

Ego is one of those words that’s difficult to parse. I find language to be an imperfect tool in the quest to describe the inner workings of the mind, because in there, things tend to be fuzzy, while words are often sharp, pointing to distinct concepts that are seldom found in someone’s brain. «I don’t have an ego» , some claim. How that is even possible remains a mystery. I suspect it all comes down to how one defines the word ego, and what concepts are associated to it. Personally, I find the whole concept of trying to “give up” one’s ego to be quite futile. Take this definition as a starting point: In philosophy, the self, or the ego, is an individual's own being, knowledge, and values, and the relationship between these attributes. If we use this definition of ego, I don’t see how you can ever get to giving it up. Unless by giving it up one means killing themselves, which personally I don’t find to be a compelling answer to this question. Because to give up something, someone has to be there to be the subject of the giving up. But if nobody’s there anymore, nothing is given up, because there’s nothing that can be given up. Do I make any sense? Ego gives us many other words: from egoism, to egotism, to egocentrism. Those are all words that carry a bad reputation; nobody likes to be called an egoist. As social creatures, as part of the larger group of billions of human beings currently living on this earth, we find these constant inward-looking traits to be undesirable. That said, though, I find the idea of always living experiences in the service of others, in an attempt to suppress one’s ego, to be an unhealthy way to go about spending the time we have available on this planet. Attempting to completely annihilate the things that make you you, in order to better fit with the rest of society, is not worth it. It’s not healthy to spend time on this planet thinking you’re the absolute best at everything and nobody can teach you anything ever. That’s obvious. But the opposite is also not healthy: living your life thinking you’re worth nothing, that you know nothing, that everyone knows more and is worth than you and that they should be the ones to talk, to teach, to do, to earn. If there’s one lesson I try to carry with me, it's that extremes are bad. And the goal should be to keep the pendulum swings to a minimum, and spend as much time as possible at the centre, where things are balanced. And you might think I’m saying this to you, but I’m actually talking to myself. Because the ego is still there, the inner dialogue continues, and the personal struggles will persist. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

culture Culture
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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Romina Malta

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Romina Malta, whose blog can be found at romi.link . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Piet Terheyden and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I’m Romina Malta, a graphic artist and designer from Buenos Aires. Design found me out of necessity: I started with small commissions and learned everything by doing. What began as a practical skill became a way of thinking and a way to connect the things I enjoy: image, sound, and structure. Over time, I developed a practice with a very specific and recognizable imprint, working across music, art, and technology. I take on creative direction and design projects for artists, record labels, and cultural spaces, often focusing on visual identity, books, and printed matter. I also run door.link , a personal platform where I publish mixtapes. It grew naturally from my habit of spending time digging for music… searching, buying, and finding sounds that stay with me. The site became a way to archive that process and to share what I discover. Outside of my profession, I like traveling, writing, and spending long stretches of time alone at home. That’s usually when I can think clearly and start new ideas. The journal began as a way to write freely, to give shape to thoughts that didn’t belong to my design work or to social media. I wanted a slower space where things could stay in progress, where I could think through writing. I learned to read and write unusually early, with a strange speed, in a family that was almost illiterate, which still makes it more striking to me. I didn’t like going to school, but I loved going to the library. I used to borrow poetry books, the Bible, short novels, anything I could find. Every reading was a reason to write, because reading meant getting to know the world through words. That was me then, always somewhere between reading and writing. Over the years that habit never left. A long time ago I wrote on Blogger, then on Tumblr, and later through my previous websites. Each version reflected a different moment in my life, different interests, tones, and ways of sharing. The format kept changing, but the reason stayed the same: I’ve always needed to write things down, to keep a trace of what’s happening inside and around me. For me, every design process involves a writing process. Designing leads me to write, and writing often leads me back to design. The journal became the space where those two practices overlap, where I can translate visual ideas into words and words into form. Sometimes the texts carry emotion; other times they lean toward a kind of necessary dramatism. I like words, alone, together, read backwards. I like letters too; I think of them as visual units. The world inside my mind is a constant conversation, and the journal is where a part of that dialogue finds form. There’s no plan behind it. It grows slowly, almost unnoticed, changing with whatever I’m living or thinking about. Some months I write often, other times I don’t open it for weeks. But it’s always there, a reminder that part of my work happens quietly, and that sometimes the most meaningful things appear when nothing seems to be happening. Writing usually begins with something small, a sentence I hear, a word that stays, or an image I can’t stop thinking about. I write when something insists on being written. There is no plan or schedule; it happens when I have enough silence to listen. I don’t do research, but I read constantly. Reading moves the language inside me. It changes how I think, how I describe, how I look at things. Sometimes reading becomes a direct path to writing, as if one text opened the door to another. I love writing on the computer. The rhythm of typing helps me find the right tempo for my thoughts. I like watching the words appear on the screen, one after another, almost mechanically. It makes me feel that something is taking shape outside of me. When I travel, I often write at night in hotels. The neutral space, the different air, the sound of another city outside the window, all create a certain kind of attention that I can’t find at home. The distance, in some way, sharpens how I think. Sometimes I stop in the middle of a sentence and return to it days later. Other times I finish in one sitting and never touch it again. It depends on how it feels. Writing is less about the result and more about the moment when the thought becomes clear. You know, writing and design are part of the same process. Both are ways of organizing what’s invisible, of trying to give form to something I can barely define. Designing teaches me how to see, and writing teaches me how to listen. Yes, space definitely influences how I work. I notice it every time I travel. Writing in hotels, for example, changes how I think. There’s something about being in a neutral room, surrounded by objects that aren’t mine, that makes me more observant. I pay attention differently. At home I’m more methodical. I like having a desk, a comfortable chair, and a bit of quiet. I usually work at night or very early in the morning, when everything feels suspended. I don’t need much: my laptop, a notebook, paper, pencils around. Light is important to me. I prefer dim light, sometimes just a lamp, enough to see but not enough to distract. Music helps too, especially repetitive sounds that make time stretch. I think physical space shapes how attention flows. Sometimes I need stillness, sometimes I need movement. A familiar room can hold me steady, while an unfamiliar one can open something unexpected. Both are necessary. The site is built on Cargo, which I’ve been using for a few years. I like how direct it feels… It allows me to design by instinct, adjusting elements visually instead of through code. For the first time, I’m writing directly on a page, one text over another, almost like layering words in a notebook. It’s a quiet process. Eventually I might return to using a service that helps readers follow and archive new posts more easily, but for now I enjoy this way. I don’t think I would change much. The formats have changed, the platforms too, but the impulse behind it is the same. Writing online has always been a way to think in public. Maybe I’d make it even simpler. I like when a website feels close to a personal notebook… imperfect, direct, and a bit confusing at times. The older I get, the more I value that kind of simplicity. If anything, I’d try to document more consistently. Over the years I’ve lost entire archives of texts and images because of platform changes or broken links. Now I pay more attention to preserving what I make, both online and offline. Other than that, I’d still keep it small and independent. It costs very little. Just the domain, hosting, and the time it takes to keep it alive. I don’t see it as a cost but as part of the work, like having a studio, or paper, or ink. It’s where things begin before they become something else. I’ve never tried to monetise the blog. It doesn’t feel like the right space for that. romi.link/journal exists outside of that logic; it’s not meant to sell or promote anything. It’s more like an open notebook, a record of thought. That said, I understand why people monetise their blogs. Writing takes time and energy, and it’s fair to want to sustain it. I’ve supported other writers through subscriptions or by buying their publications, and I think that’s the best way to do it, directly, without the noise of algorithms or ads. I’ve been reading Fair Companies for a while now. Not necessarily because I agree with everything, of course, but because it’s refreshing to find other points of view. I like when a site feels personal, when you can sense that someone is genuinely curious. Probably Nicolas Boullosa Hm… No mucho. Lately I’ve been thinking about how fragile the internet feels. Everything moves too quickly, and yet most of what we publish disappears almost instantly. Keeping a personal site today feels like keeping a diary in public: it’s small, quiet, and mostly unseen, but it resists the speed of everything else. I find comfort in that slowness. Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 112 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Jim Mitchell and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

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

Look, another AI browser

Yesterday, OpenAI announced Atlas, its AI browser. To the surprise of literally nobody, it’s Chromium with AI slapped on top. Perplexity also has a browser: it’s called Comet, and it also is Chromium with AI slapped on top. Then we have DIA, which is, you guessed it, Chromium with AI slapped on top. I think Opera also has one of those Chromium browsers with AI slapped on top. I code sites for a living (allegedly), and I honestly cannot overstate how uninterested I am in all these new browsers. Because these are not new browsers: these are Chromium frames with AI slapped on top. The thing I found more interesting about the whole OpenAI announcement was Sam Altman tweeting: «10 am livestream today to launch a new product I'm quite excited about!» . This is coming from someone who’s allegedly running a company that’s building a tool that should usher in a new era where computers will replace most of human work, where we’ll all have a super intelligence always available in our pockets, ready to dispense infinite wisdom. And yet he’s quite excited about a fucking Chromium installation with AI slapped on top of it. I guess building an actual browser, from scratch, is still a task so monumentally difficult that even a company that is aiming for super-intelligence can’t tackle it. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

10 pointless facts about me

Found on Kev’s blog and originally started by Dave , here are my answers to this fun blog challenge: Sometimes. I’d say maybe a few times a week? I’m terrible at being consistent, and that includes flossing regularly. Coffee in the morning, tea (sometimes) later in the day, not enough water the rest of the time. Did I mention I’m terrible at being consistent? That includes drinking enough water. Right now, I’d say flip flops, even though they are a terrible choice when you have to walk around the woods. Probably Crema catalana . It’s the one dessert I’m resisting the temptation to buy what’s needed to make it myself at home because I know I’d end up eating it every day, three times a day. I say hi to the dog that’s for sure sleeping somewhere near. From a purely physical perspective, I’d say 22. If I have to consider all factors, I’d say 36. And I’m 36. Do beanies and toques count as hats? Because if they do, then I own 7 hats. If they don’t, then I’m down to 3. It’s from a walk with the dog the other day: clear sky and some tree branches and leaves illuminated by a lovely light. Most of my gallery looks like that. I don’t watch TV, and the last time I watched a TV series, I think it was in the dark days of the COVID shutdown, which happened what, 32 years ago? I don’t even know what’s on TV these days. The oldest memory I have of a job I wanted to do was car designer. I remember loving seeing yellow FIAT Coupé around. Funny because now I couldn’t care less about cars. Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

A newsletter-related PSA

Quick PSA for those of you out there who are interested in subscribing to either my From the Summit 2.0 , the newsletter version of People and Blogs , or simply prefer to get these blog posts delivered via email : all those newsletters require double opt-in. What that means is that once you have signed up, you should get a second email asking you to click a link to confirm your email address. Sometimes those emails land in the spam folder for reasons unknown to me. Maybe I don’t pray the SMTP gods with enough conviction, who knows. What I do know is that I see a lot of people signing up and then not confirming their addresses. So, if you did sign up but did not receive the confirmation email, ping me either via email or Apple Messages, using [email protected], and I’ll look into that. 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

Five least favourite tech topics

The other day Kevin sent me a preview link of an upcoming post for his Overkill site, and I jokingly replied to him that «Home servers are probably the second least appealing tech topic for me» . I then started thinking about what my least favourite tech topics are, and I thought it would make for a fun blog post, and so here we are, my five least favourite tech topics. From infotainment screens to car OS, I’m bored to death by everything that has to do with screens in a car. Some car-related tech is cool, don’t get me wrong, but it usually has nothing to do with screens. Headphones, earbuds, hi-fi systems, you name it. The only thing I find amusing about that entire world is how bizarre some of the products are. I dive into this topic maybe once every 5 years when I have to change headphones, and that’s about it. I own a watch that’s just barely smart enough to be considered a smartwatch. I use it to track my hikes and to have offline maps. That’s the extent to which I’m interested in the world of wearables. Everything else I find boring as hell. Don’t care about smart glasses, don’t care about AI pins, don’t care about smart rings, don’t care about internet-connected intelligent butt-plugs. I already have a hard time dealing with a smartphone; that’s more than enough. I not only have very little interest in home servers, but I also don’t have a use for them, which is probably why I find the whole topic so unappealing. Every time I read something about this topic, my only thought is that it seems like a lot of work and a lot of unnecessary headaches. And it also seems to become a second job, which is definitely something I don’t need in my life. The reason this is at the top of the list is because not only do I find smart appliances to be terribly boring, but also because it’s probably the only tech “innovation” I’m actively fighting against. I want my home dumb. I don’t want to charge my doorbell, I don’t want to flash a firmware on my lightbulbs, I don’t want to set up a home server to deploy some open source software to make sure my new light switch shows up on my phone. That sounds like a nightmare to me. There you have it, my least favourite tech topics. Wait, no AI? Yes, no AI. AI tech is kinda cool, it’s the whole circus around it that I find insufferable. How about you, though? Do you have a least favourite tech topic? Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs

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Manuel Moreale 1 months ago

Alice

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alice, whose blog can be found at thewallflowerdigest.co.uk . Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter . The People and Blogs series is supported by Winnie Lim and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month. I'm Alice, I'm currently 37, I'm from the East Midlands in the UK, and have lived in the region all my life. I live with my husband (whom I married in June) and our two cats. They are the best cats. At university, I studied English Literature because I never had any idea what I wanted to do for a career! I really enjoyed my time at university. Looking back, it was such a luxury to have all the time dedicated to reading books and thinking deeply about them (even if I was always too shy to contribute much in seminars!). I can't say an English Lit. degree has ever been beneficial in a practical sense, but I'm happy that I've started to dust off some of the cobwebs on it with my book blog! My work and my blog are separate, but I think the fact that it exists at all is a result of the way my career went, or rather didn't go! I got a Master's degree in Information and Library Management, but failed to ever get a proper professional job. Plan A was University Librarian, but I didn't get the graduate trainee placement I needed, and, with that, I was forever locked out of university libraries. I never saw a job posting that didn't require "at least 5 years of experience in an equivalent role", and social anxiety hampered the development of networking skills. I was a library assistant at a university for a while, where a good portion of my colleagues were in the same boat as me! Plan B was a School Librarian, purely because it was the only job I got offered. I was ill-suited to it, never really enjoyed and the school I was in had little interest in supporting the Library or developing a reading culture. I did that for about 4 years, the whole time trying to come up with an alternative plan. Eventually, Plan C presented itself, and I ended up in a little niche of library management systems, where I worked on data migrations for special libraries, and eventually moved into archives and museums. This is a job that really suits me. It turns out my true love all along was actually databases, information retrieval and the challenge of solving all the puzzles that involved! If I could go back in time to 18-21 years old, knowing myself as I do now, I would make different decisions! But, for now, I am happy where I ended up, and I'm still making a little contribution to the cultural sector! The Wallflower Digest was born in 2022 because my previous job had stopped offering me stimulating challenges, and I was feeling overlooked, bored and trapped by a lack of opportunities! My self-esteem was taking a real hit, and I just needed something to give me a goal and focus. I have had blogs in the past when bored at work! My library assistant job in my twenties was in a tiny, quiet campus library that involved some lone working evening shifts where there would be nothing to do but sit on the enquiries desk for hours! That was how my first blog started; it was mostly a TV blog called Between Screens. That was hosted by WordPress.com (I did have custom domains, though!) and is now long deleted. I used to write recaps and reviews of my favourite TV shows, movies and video games. This was mostly Made in Chelsea, Game of Thrones, Veronica Mars and Mass Effect ! I also played around briefly with a fiction blog and a sewing blog, but those were short-lived. This time around, I wanted my blog to be somewhere to exercise my writing skills and have a chance to play around with CSS and maybe other website bits if I wanted. When I picked the name, I wasn't sure what the blog was going to be, but I think I managed to nail it. I wanted something that felt like me. I've always been very shy, but I was painfully so as a child, and someone (probably a teacher) referred to me as a 'wallflower', and that term got stuck in my young brain. I don't know if the meaning will translate for those who aren't native English speakers, so as a definition, a "wallflower" can mean someone with an introverted personality type (or social anxiety) who will usually distance themselves from the crowd and actively avoid being in the limelight. Plus, I like flowers! I recently planted some wallflowers (Erysimum) in my garden! And then a ‘digest’ is a compilation or summary of information, and my blog is a mess of different topics. I share as I digest the things I read, learn and experience in my life. When I got started, I spun my wheels for a bit in the mud of terrible advice for new bloggers. You know, this strange idea that a blog has to make money, and therefore has to solve problems for an audience! This is why some of my oldest posts have a recognisable Content formatting of SEO friendly headings and keywords! But I eventually realised the fun and mental stimulation I needed came from just doing whatever I wanted, and that an Audience wasn't important to me (actually, I fear that!)! And, more importantly, the blogs I was finding that I enjoyed the most were messy little personal blogs where people shared snippets of their lives. These days, I remind myself that I can do what I want. I see it now as a loosely defined project to help me distil the things that resonate, and help me to understand myself a little better. I share whatever I want to, which currently is book reviews, updates on my life, occasionally progress with my garden (though I've been too busy this year!), and my embroidery or other craft projects. Lately - trying to be less of a wallflower - I've been taking part in more blogging community linkups and tag memes, which have been a lot of fun to answer prompts, but also for "blog hopping" and seeing who else is out there! I'm hoping to branch out from the book-based ones to other topics and blog hop beyond the borders of the book community, or the more tech-focused folks I found on Mastodon. I am toying with the idea of creating my own if I can't find an existing one that feels right! Life has been very busy recently, so the blog has really been ticking over on book reviews and joining in with the book blogger community's Top Ten Tuesday weekly link-up (currently hosted by ArtsyReaderGirl ). It's hard to find the time for more "creative" posts at the moment, but I do try to put really effort into my TTT and try to find something to say about the books I choose to list. Sometimes I get struck by inspiration - usually a topic that keeps recurring in my life somehow - and I'll start a draft, or just jot some thoughts into a note and eventually find the time to work it into something that makes sense! That is the biggest challenge when I work 40 hours a week and have to do all the other responsibilities of life, relationships and health things that come with being an adult. I mean, I've been trying to find the time and mental bandwidth to write a full review with my analysis of the book Rouge by Mona Awad since January (I loved it, and I'm still thinking about it)! But it's still in drafts, and I think I need to read it a third time now. It's like a running joke that I'll forever talk about it and never get it posted! I also post life updates semi-regularly. Those posts are just a catch-up on whatever is going on - how my walking/move more challenges are going, TV or movies, anything else I feel like! I love to read that kind of 'slice of life' content from other people. Now and again, I'll share something about my social anxiety struggles. I'm always battling this, and I find writing out my experiences and feelings helps to work it out of my system. As for the process, my drafts usually get entered straight into the Jetpack app on my phone. I used Obsidian as my digital notes app for general thoughts and inspiration, and all my book reviews and ebook highlights get synced into there, too. What I've got going on with Obsidian is its own little project (essentially as my own personal database!). Most of the time, I post whenever I've finished writing because time is too short to proofread, and that's why my blog is full of typos and errors! I do re-read things later on and correct mistakes I spot, but that's as far as it goes! I also love to use Canva to create graphics. Every book review gets a little graphic with a summary; those originated in my short-lived attempt to get involved with Bookstagram, and I enjoyed making them so much that I've kept them for the blog. I am also a visual person, so it is important to me that I like the look of my website! I think my creativity relies more on my mental state than my physical space! Definitely, my menstrual cycle comes with days where I'm buzzing with ideas and writing is easier, and I wake up with ideas first thing in the morning before the responsibilities of the day have taken over. I do need quite though. I can't think with background chatter, I have no idea how people manage to work in noisy cafes! They make me instantly tired, and my brain shuts down. Writing is easiest when I am on my PC with a full keyboard and dual monitors, but because I work from home full-time at the same desk, I don't like to be pinned in the same spot in my evenings, shut away from my husband, so PC time only really happens on the weekend. More often, I write on my phone; I also have an iPad, but if I'm typing on mobile, I'm faster on my phone. I am hosted by Hostingr, which has been fine and easy to use for a non-techie like me. My CMS is WordPress, it came installed and I find it familiar and easy to use with a big community. I find there is usually a plugin to solve most problems! I have no problem with the block editor, and I love that I can hook my blog up to the wider WordPress.com world to more easily connect with other bloggers. I use the Jetpack app for quick editing and posting, as well as my RSS feed, and to explore and discover new blogs through tags. I honestly think Jetpack gets underrated as a discovery tool! I don't think I would change anything about my blog. With hindsight, I do wish I'd wasted less time down the SEO rabbit hole and removed the pre-installed AISEO plugin earlier! I could also have figured out how I connect my blog to WordPress/Jetpack sooner to find other bloggers. I would not have made my thoughts on Atomic Habits so SEO friendly... it got caught in Google's net and now I regret how well it does search results. There is a crowd of James Clear fans who get upset when you don't praise it as the life-changing work of a genius they hold it up to be. Every few months, I get something that makes me consider turning off the comments. I got a New Year deal with Hostingr for 4 years of hosting at a ridiculous discount, so I paid that all upfront, and I think it worked out about £3 a month. I'm going to have to work out what to do when that's up for renewal! I think my domain is £8.99 a year. That is all the cost; I don't make any money from my blog, nor do I plan to. This is just a hobby, and hobbies (just like my embroidery and gardening) often cost money! Monetising would immediately make it stressful for me and take the fun out of it. I don't mind if other people want to monestise as long as it's not obnoxious. I don't like newsletters where they put some things behind a paywall but not everything, or they put half of it behind the paywall. Those are annoying when they come through my RSS feed, and usually I end up unsubscribing. I've occasionally done a "buy me a coffee" kind of one-off donation to bloggers, or the pay-what-you-like subscription model, where I can just do a couple of quid a month to show support. Or if they're an artist and they have a shop, I buy something small if the postage to the UK is reasonable. My favourite blogs are the ones where I can feel the person writing it, and their personality and passions come through. I want to read human thoughts, not Content! I like details about people's lives with the things they love (books, TV shows, comics, flowers, whatever!), or might share that they're having a hard time with something and how they're coping. Michael at My Comic Relief writes wonderful, passionate and compassionate posts about his favourite TV shows, movies and comic books. When Doctor Who and The Acolyte were on, I was watching my RSS feed for these thoughts every week! I always find his perspective interesting and his enthusiasm infectious. Dragon Rambles is a mix of personal posts and book reviews written by Nic in New Zealand. I think she's been blogging for many years. I really love it when she shares new books she finds for her collection of retro science fiction and fantasy! I have no interest in ever reading any of them myself, but I love to read about them and her collection! I also enjoy reading Elizabeth Tai . She is based in Malaysia and was one of the first bloggers I found on Mastodon in my super early days, and it was through her that I learned popular Indie Web concepts like digital gardens and POSSE. I enjoy the fact that she writes about all kinds of things! I am actually surprised she's not been featured yet! I think Michael, Nic or Liz would be great to interview. Michael and Nic, I found in the land of WordPress, and may not even be aware of this project! My other 3 favourites you've already featured, but I'll mention them because I think they're great! Veronique has been a favourite for a long time! Her writing always feels intimate, and I love the little snippet she shares from her life, her artwork and her passion for zines. She also mentioned my blog in her interview, and I can't tell you how thrilled I was! I had to try to explain the whole thing to my husband, who does not read blogs! Winnie Lim is another long-time favourite of mine. Her blog is also very intimate and thoughtful, and I am always eager to read about her life and little adventures. And also Tracy Durnell's Mind Garden is like what I think I'd like my blog to be, if I had the time and inclination to properly organise myself! I know she's also had a P&B feature because that's how I found her. I love her weekly notes. I don't know why I enjoy reading what music she listened to and what meals she had that week, but I do! This one is a silly one, and maybe a bit of a blast from the past because I used to follow Cake Wrecks way back in the day (like 15 years ago!), and when I was collecting RSS feeds of blogs again a couple of years ago, I was so happy it was still around! Unlike Regresty, RIP (and RIP to what Esty used to be!). Anyway, there is something about badly decorated cakes that I find deeply hilarious (and bad art in general), and these collections of wonky cakes made by so-called professional bakers are a regular source of joy. I don't have anything in particular to share. I am just so excited to have been asked to take part! I hope everyone keeps on doing what they love and blogging about it in the way that they want! I am thankful to have found that the 'blogosphere' is still alive and well, and for me, it's such a peaceful refuge away from the overwhelming noise of social media. I am also hugely appreciative of projects like this that make it easier for bloggers to find each other, so thank you, Manu! Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed . If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 111 interviews . Make sure to also say thank you to Annie Mueller and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.

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