2026-03-01 20:00:00
Three-quarters of the way through this “challenge”, and the findings are mostly the same. Phone usage is very easy to keep in check if you decide to put your mind to it. The past seven days have been very similar to the previous seven, and that’s good, since this type of phone usage needs to become the new normal.
Contrary to the previous week, this time it was the first half of the week that saw higher usage, and that was mostly due to a few long Telegram sessions late in the day on Monday and Tuesday. 44 or the 54 minutes logged on Monday, and 32 of the 45 logged on Tuesday, were spent on Telegram. Only 26 minutes out of 46 on Wednesday, the rest of the usage was work-related since I had to do a few phone calls and test a couple of things on mobile Safari.
The second half of the week saw a lot less phone time, but I did have to spend a lot more time at my computer, taking care of client stuff, and that’s why I barely picked up the phone. Which is fine. I still have not consumed content on the phone, three weeks in. That’s awesome, and I want that to stay that way.
Again, very pleased with how this month-long experiment is going, and I do have some takeaways, but I’ll wait until next Sunday to share them.
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2026-02-27 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Dominik Schwind, whose blog can be found at lostfocus.de.
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My name is Dominik Schwind and I'm from Lörrach, a small town on the German side of the tri-border area with Switzerland and France. I've been a web developer for a really long time now, mostly server-side and just occasionally dabbling in what is showing up in the browser. Annoyingly that's a hobby that I turned into work, so I guess that's ruined now. (Which doesn't stop me, though: I have too many half-finished side-project websites and apps to count.)
Besides that I also really like to take photos and after a few years of being frozen in place I started to travel again, which is always nice. I do like watching motorsports of almost all types, I can easily get sucked into computer games like Factorio and I like to listen to podcasts, top of them being the Omnibus Project, Do Go On and Roderick on the Line.
I've had a website since before I had internet access - some computer game I had in the mid-90s had the manual included as HTML and I used it to learn how to make basic websites. The very first day my father came home with a modem, I signed up for GeoCities and when I found a webhost that would allow me to run CGI scripts, I installed NewsPro, an early proto-blog system before blogging was even a thing. And while these early iterations of my website(s) are long gone, I haven't stopped since.
The name came from an unease I started to feel in my final year of high school: once I finished school, I didn't know where to direct my energy and attention. That feeling hasn't really left since then.
Mostly there is none - when I think of something that I want to communicate to someone, anyone, I try to put it online. Quite often it ends up on Mastodon but I do try to put things on my blog, especially when I know it is something future me would appreciate.
A few years ago I noticed that I had neglecting my blog in favour of other ways of communicating and I started a pact with a couple of friends to write weeknotes. We're in our fourth year now, which feels like an accomplishment. I try to write those posts first thing on a Sunday morning, if possible.
I write most of my posts in Markdown in iA Writer, which is probably the most arrogant Markdown editing app in the world. But I paid for it at some point, so I better use it, too.
I basically only need a computer and a place to sit and I'm fine. I've tried to find ways to blog from my phone but in the end, I prefer a proper keyboard and a bigger screen.
While I never observed any difference in blogging creativity depending on the physical space, I actually quite enjoy writing in places other than my desk.
This one is actually pretty simple: I run WordPress, currently on a DigitalOcean VM. One of the points on my long to-do list for my web stuff is to move it to Hetzner, which probably would only take an evening. And yet, I procrastinate.
I've (more or less) jokingly said I'd replace WordPress with a CMS of my own making for years now, but at some point I've resigned, even though my database is a mess.
Probably not.
Ever since the beginning I wrote for two audiences: my friends and future me. I'm really happy when someone else finds my blog and might turn into an internet friend, but I wouldn't know how else to achieve that other than what I've been doing for all these years now.
.de domains are pretty affordable, so it is that plus the server, which is around €100 per year.
The blog doesn't generate any revenue, in many ways it's "only" a journal.
When it comes to other bloggers, I'd say: go for it if you think your writing (or your photography or whatever it might be you're sharing on your website) is something that can be turned into revenue, one way or another. In many ways I'm a bit bummed that Flattr (or something similar) never really took of, I would happily use a service like that.
Of course I need to mention my friends and fellow weeknoters: Martin (blogs in German) and Teymur. (NSFW)
Three of the people whose blogs I read have been interviewed here already: Ahn (Interview), Jeremy Keith (Interview) and Winnie Lim .(Interview)
Some other people whose blogs I read and who might be interesting people to answer your questions would be Jennifer Mills, (who has the best take on weekly blog posts I have ever seen) Nikkin, (he calls it a newsletter, but there is an RSS feed) Roy Tang and Ruben Schade.
If you don't have one yet, go start a personal website! Don't take it too seriously, try things and it can be a nice, meditative hobby and helps against the urge to doomscroll. Also you might never know, your kind of people might find it and connect with you.
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2026-02-23 18:35:00
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 Hyde. 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.
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2026-02-22 15:50:00
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.
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2026-02-22 01:50:00
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.
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2026-02-20 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stefano Verna, whose blog can be found at squeaki.sh.
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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 130 interviews.
People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.