2025-12-16 16:35:00
With the growing trend of countries proposing laws to restrict access to the web based on users’ age, I feel compelled to say two things:
A) No, age-gating social media is not going to kill what’s left of the internet. If you think “the internet” = “social media sites,” then that’s your fault, and you should be ashamed. But don't get it twisted: this doesn't mean that these laws aren't bad, because they are.
B) How about, instead of preventing “the kids” from accessing social media, we go in the opposite direction and keep all the adults out? Wouldn’t that be wonderful? You also get the added benefit of kicking probably billions of people off social media, and that would for sure screw with the finances of Meta and Co.
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2025-12-14 17:10:00
This is my entry for December’s IWC hosted by V.H. Belvadi. If you have thoughts on the subject, make sure to write a blog post before the end of the month, and join the carnival.
I’m not good at making predictions, so I don’t really know what the IndieWeb is gonna look like in 5 years. If I had to guess, I’d say it will probably look very much like it looks now, only with more AI-generated nonsense sprinkled throughout. But rather than making predictions, let me write about hopes and wishes. My feelings when it comes to the web can be described as a pendulum or a standing wave. I alternate between naïve optimism and endless pessimism. I’m writing this in my downward swinging phase, which means this post is gonna be kinda bleak.
There’s a post I keep thinking about. More specifically, this question:
In trying to escape the torment nexus, have we just built a nicer version of the torment nexus?
Here’s my hope for the IW in 2030: I hope that in 5 years, we have stopped pretending. Pretending that replacing corporate platforms with bad copies of the same platforms is a good and desirable thing to do. Pretending that what we really need to solve the issues that are plaguing the web is more tools and more protocols. Pretending that all the people out there who use the web on a daily basis care about the same things we do. Pretending that the fault for all this digital mess lies entirely on the shoulders of a few mega corporations, while the billions of people out there are just bystanders, caught in the crossfire.
But also stop pretending that everything is doomed, that the web is about to die, that AI will sloppify everything, that writing on a blog is pointless, that tending to a digital garden is wasted time.
Yes, a vast chunk of the 2025 web fucking sucks. It’s an unusable mess, and going in without adblockers, VPNs, and network-level filters is an atrocious experience. And that won’t change in 2030. If there’s one prediction I can confidently make, it's this one: in 5 years, the web is still gonna be a mess.
At the same time, though, the web is a marvelous place if you know how to navigate it. There’s still delight to be found out there, and it’s still full of genuinely kind and wonderful people. And that’s my hope, my wish, and my dream for the IndieWeb in 2030: that we focus less on what’s on the screen and more on who’s in front of it.
Because people matter. Because you matter. And in this idiotic AI age we’re going through, all this matters more than ever.
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2025-12-12 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nick Heer, whose blog can be found at pxlnv.com.
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My name is Nick, and I have a blog named Pixel Envy. I live in Calgary, which has repeatedly been rated as one of the world's most liveable cities by people who do not live here. I went to art college and stumbled into a career in web design, front-end development, branding, and (begrudgingly) search optimization. I like to read, learn about music, cook, take photographs, and — occasionally — I enjoy writing, too.
I read quickly but write slowly; I can type much faster than I can think. I am glad this is a hobby and not my actual full-time job.
I began Pixel Envy by emulating successful writers and formats. Like many people in the mid-to-late 2000s, I created many blogging dead-ends. I overcomplicated past attempts. By simplifying to a text-mostly website without comments or pictures, I was able to focus on what I wanted to do. I cribbed the links-and-articles format from writers like Andy Baio and Jason Kottke; I built more comprehensive narratives with multi-link posts like those on Metafilter and the topical clusters on Techmeme.
I fell into writing about Apple because I find the company's unique identity fascinating. I have since grown to think more deeply about privacy and digital ethics; these subjects now represent the bulk of my work.
I found my identity and voice by doing a lot of things poorly for a long time.
My biggest regrets are in the things I wrote because I thought they were things I needed to do to be taken seriously or remain relevant.
For me, the creative process is just a working process — utilitarian from start to finish. I am most often responding to something I see in the news. I check Techmeme throughout the day, I have something like 300-plus feeds in my RSS reader, and I have a Slack-based notification system. This is overkill for a hobby. The way I have it set up is thankfully not as much like drinking from a firehose as it seems in large part because I try to be quite focused in what I will write about.
Usually this comes in the form of little link posts — maybe a few per day — that are specific to topical news. I rarely link to something without reading other coverage or perspectives about the same news, and I do my best to verify what I read with primary sources. These posts help me stay aware of unfolding news, and they shape the longer-form articles I write less frequently — perhaps publishing a few per month. I have several articles I have been chipping away at for a while, and a list in Things of subjects I would like to write about one day.
I have no separate drafting stage; a post is a draft until it is published or, occasionally, deleted. The process of writing is, itself, a process of thinking, so the organization of arguments reveals itself as I put down more words. My workflow is informed by my dependence on documentary sources, and it looks mostly like reading. While I find writing a mostly utilitarian pursuit and avoid publishing anything that sounds too much like writing, I hope a shred of my personality reveals itself.
I proofread everything I write. Still, there is no better spellchecker than the "publish" button.
I am not too picky about my creative environment. These words are coming to you from beside a smouldering fire in a cabin in the Rocky Mountains, but I am not a writer who benefits from seclusion. I like to have a reliable internet connection and to be relatively unbothered by the world around me. Depending on what I am writing about, it can take a beat or two to get into the right headspace. I am at my best on my Mac, and when I am a little bit sleep-deprived. Ideally, I am outdoors on a warm day, with a nice beverage and some great music.
I am a reluctant WordPress user. It, in the process of transforming into the CMS for the world, has betrayed its name in becoming worse for websites based on the written word. However, it plays extremely well with MarsEdit, which is a truly excellent piece of software. I designed and built my WordPress theme. I am working on a redesigned website; I am always working on a redesigned website.
I prefer writing on my 2021 14-inch MacBook Pro, which is the best computer I have ever used. Longer-form articles are shaped in BBEdit and, infrequently, in iA Writer on my iPhone. Shorter-form link posts are written directly in MarsEdit. I have a handful of utility scripts to help me do things like converting quoted text into Markdown and finding duplicate reference links.
While I have experimented with various generative A.I. products, I have rarely found they improve what I have written or the process itself. I tried getting ChatGPT to give me headline ideas, but it has been trained on too many bad headlines to produce anything worthwhile. I sometimes paste articles into some generative A.I. tool or another for proofreading and it is occasionally helpful. Generative A.I. circumvents the process of thinking that comes from writing, however, so I find its utility limited, to say nothing of its frightening ethics.
How I had originally answered this question is that I would almost certainly have a bunch of changes as I have countless regrets. However — and this is one of my favourite things about this craft, as it encourages the writer to justify a position — I recognize I would probably feel the same regardless of the name I chose, the posts I wrote, or the technology stack I use. I do have posts I regret, and I have gone through different phases of what I believe or am willing to defend. I believe this is a process known as “learning”.
Though I have issues with WordPress, I feel certain I made the correct call from day one in using a CMS I control instead of a hosted and managed option. I understand why someone would choose to ease the technical burden. Not me, though. The customization it affords has been instrumental in building the kind of website I want to have.
One of the nicest things about using a text-based medium — as opposed to, say, audio or video — is that infrastructure can be inexpensive. I spend around $110 USD per year to host Pixel Envy, plus around $40 per year in related domain names. I do not use many images, so I do not need a delivery network or anything similarly intensive.
I offset those costs first with a small, unobtrusive, and non-behavioural ad, and then with Patreon and paid sponsorships. Sometimes I wonder if it is fair to do this for a hobby.
It feels trite to recommend Derek "Menswear Guy" Guy now that he has become a media sensation, but Die Workwear is an essential read for me. Guy's passion and ability to describe style as a language make menswear understandable and approachable.
I financially support several publications, including Defector, which is one of my favourite websites despite not being a Sports Person.
Frustratingly, a lot of good blogs are newsletters, which is just a blog delivered through email. I use Feedbin in part because it allows me to reroute new issues to NetNewsWire and treat them as standard blog posts. Anyway, I like Today in Tabs very much (and financially support it), and Web Curios.
Thank you, Manuel, for inviting me to share my thoughts here.
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2025-12-06 18:50:00
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?” by Ploum (also featured on P&B).
I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly don’t even care about the outcome of this situation. I’m just an external observer in this context.
Quick summary of the situation:
I can’t stress enough that this is just a quick summary, and you should read the original post. There’s also a discussion happening on Mastodon, if you want to see what others are saying.
I can see where Ploum is coming from, his concerns are definitely valid, and he’s motivated by good intentions. At the same time, though, I find his position a bit perplexing. Isn’t the point of an open protocol, like ActivityPub, to provide a structure that can be used by others to build whatever they want?
If someone wants to build a service, on top of AP, that only displays content of a certain type, they should be able to do so. Granted, they should make it very clear to the people who sign up for it that some filtering is happening, but if those same people are cool with that, then I don’t see the issue.
If tomorrow I wake up and I want to make an AP-based service that only serves audio content and is designed to encourage people sending voice messages to each other, I should be able to do so, without being required to also implement everything else that’s available on the protocol.
In his post, Ploum uses the idea of a TextFed service “that will never display posts with pictures”. If you ask me, that would be a totally reasonable project, especially if you want to build something that is not very resource-intensive, since you’re only dealing with text, and you don’t want to mess with media content. Why shouldn’t you be able to build such a thing on top of AP? Why should you be forced to accept videos and images coming from the rest of the Fediverse if that’s not what you want?
Also, it’s hard for me to square this whole line of argument with the concept of moderation. If you can’t trust a user to figure out by themselves that by signing up to something like Pixelfed, they only get a subset of the content available on the fediverse, then I don’t see how you can’t trust them to understand that, depending on which server they join, some other servers might be blocked. Does that mean the Fediverse should not have moderation?
A protocol is either open or it is not. And if it’s open, we should accept that some people might use it in ways we do not agree with. And that’s ok. But again, I'm not a fediverse user, so maybe my intuition here is entirely wrong. So feel free to reach out to let me know why I'm wrong.
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2025-12-05 23:00:00
For all I know, John O'Nolan is a cool dude. He’s the founder of Ghost, a project that is also really cool. You know what’s also cool? RSS. And guess what, John just announced he’s working on a new RSS app (Reader? Tool? Service?) called Alcove and he blogged about it.
All this is nice. All this is cool. The more people build tools and services for the open web, the better. Having said all that though, John:
If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of undefined scope, I'm sharing live updates of progress on Twitter, here.
You are on your own blog, your own corner of the web, powered by the platform you’re the CEO of, a blog that also serves content via RSS, the thing you’re building a tool for, and you’re telling people to follow the progress on fucking Twitter? Come on John.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-12-05 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stephanie Stimac, whose blog can be found at blog.stephaniestimac.com.
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I’m Stephanie Stimac, a product manager and designer from Seattle, WA but I currently live in a small town in England. My background is in visual and web design, and I graduated at a weird time in terms of web tech. A good portion of my final year of university was spent learning about how to build websites in Flash and when I graduated, Flash quickly became obsolete, but I had a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge which helped me advance through my career. I was doing purely design work for the first part of my career before I joined the Microsoft Edge Web Platform team, where I started doing a handful of other things that were product management and developer relations adjacent. I’ve spec’d out features, analyzed data and user flows, created content for social media, performed user research to identify developer paint points, given conference talks, the list goes on.
I left Microsoft for a startup that moved me to Berlin but that was unfortunately short lived due to the company folding rather quickly after hiring 100+ people. Now I live in England with my husband and work for Igalia, a technology consultancy, and I’m back in the Web Platform space. It’s sort of like my role at Microsoft but less product and more project focused.
In between all this, I wrote a book that was published in 2023 called Design for Developers. It’s an evergreen guide to the basics of visual and UX design for web developers.
I’m a collector of hobbies but my focus lately has been reading, baking, photography, printmaking and creating content. I’m a mountain biker and love to hike as well as paddle board. I’ve also gotten into birding in the last year or so. There are so many different kinds, it’s incredible.
Depends on which blog you’re talking about! I’ve been blogging since about 2003 when I had a LiveJournal in high school. That evolved into a blogging and sharing about college life on Wordpress around 2008/2009 and went through a few iterations before I landed on the name The Hermes Homestead. I no longer blog there but am in the process of starting that sort of lifestyle blogging again and am building a new site with Astro and Netlify.
As for my more technical and design focused blog, I started that in 2019 about 3 years into my career at Microsoft. I wanted a space to talk about CSS, design and web browser things. This is my most visited blog, and it is attached to my personal website and portfolio though I called it “The Web Witch’s Blog” for a long time – now there’s just a cauldron with a code mark. It’s been through a few redesigns. It was very basic in terms of styling for the longest time. I’ve slowly made incremental improvements to things over the years, but this year I did a larger redesign to try and capture a bit of my witchy vibe and wanted to include more visuals, some subtle animations and view transitions.
There are a few different types of ways I post. I was doing monthly updates just covering things I had learned, big life events, what media I consumed in a month, books I read. I haven’t done this in a few months as I’m currently pregnant and was feeling burned out on everything. I’m sure I’ll pick those up again soon. I’ll also post about major career or life events.
Other posts are inspired by things I’ve experienced, for example I’m in the process of writing about the worst onboarding experience I have ever had with a credit card and the brand’s website and app. Nothing quite inspires me like a poor user experience, and I hope in sharing those experiences other people will be inspired to make sure whatever user experience they’re designing isn’t terrible. I’m also not afraid to share my terrible experiences working in tech, whether that’s about encountering conference line ups that are all men or finding out my book was scraped by Meta’s AI.
I also write about new CSS features that web developers can use but I have to want to write about these, so they usually need to have some sort of design focus or benefit.
Those are sort of the three main categories I center posts around at the moment, but generally if it fits into general life and career, I’ll write about it.
When it comes to writing the actual post, I usually just write straight in VS Code in a markdown file. I try to proofread in VS Code but I need a new spelling and grammar extension as I end up missing a few mistakes that I’ll correct as soon as I see them. Recently, I’ve started copying text over to Microsoft Word just for a quick visual to catch any misspellings. Then I hit publish. I rarely have someone else look over a post unless I am writing about something I’m little unsure about or if I’m talking about the company I work for. I don’t want to misrepresent them.
Overall, my process is kind of like writing for a diary. I don’t really overthink what I’m writing about and just post it. That being said, I often come up with many ideas for things to write about, but it really depends on the type of mental space I’m in whether those get finished or not. I have a pile of started but unfinished drafts.
For writing, I usually have to be at home or in a quiet space with some music. Sometimes I can write when I’m out at the coffee shop, but it is very dependent on the coffee shop and how busy it is.
Physical spaces 100% influence my creativity and just overall mood and wellbeing. I like to be in a space that inspires me, surrounded by things that inspire me. I have a hard time focusing if there’s a mess or I’m in a space that doesn’t speak to me. I like to be surrounded by an environment that has a vibe or a point of view.
I work from home so most of my work happens there. My husband and I have been in the process of slowly upgrading our home to be a space we enjoy being in. It’s been a slow process over the last two years, and we’re still making changes but it’s getting there and there are spots in our home I’m starting to love. But it’s also important to change up the scenery occasionally, so we’ll go out and work from coffee shops some mornings, otherwise I get stir crazy.
I also use a combination of digital and analog tools to keep track of things. I have a bullet journal I fill out every week with my calendar and personal to-do list, and I have what I consider a digital bullet journal for all my work stuff in Notion that’s formatted nicely. I do have a digital bullet journal for personal stuff I’m also starting to use again, which is helpful when I have a lot of long-term plans in the works.
For the technical blog, it’s hosted on Netlify and I’m using 11ty. The domain used to be registered with GoDaddy but I’ve been migrating all my domains over to Namecheap because I find some of GoDaddy’s practices predatory or less than user friendly.
The old lifestyle blog is on Wordpress and is still hosted on GoDaddy, and I’m probably going to end up paying someone to migrate it all to Namecheap for me because my migration attempts have been headache inducing. I want to keep the blog up even if it’s not active, but I’m tired of paying an exorbitant amount just for an SSL certificate compared to other providers. I think it’s criminal GoDaddy charges you the amount they do for SSL when you get an SSL certificate for free.
The new lifestyle blog will be hosted on Netlify (like most of my websites), with a Namecheap domain, and I’m building it with Astro.
For the technical blog, no I wouldn’t change anything. It’s tied to my name and career. I’m happy with Netlify and 11ty.
For the lifestyle blog, I wouldn’t use Wordpress again. It has its benefits but for the functionality I want and need, I think it’s overkill for what I personally am trying to achieve. I like having more control over the layout and design and I’m happy to be building the new one with Astro. As for the name, I only wish I had chosen something that was a bit more open instead of something that was so aligned to a specific period of my life (The Hermes Homestead). It doesn’t fit where I’m at anymore, but I feel like the new name is more open and maybe starting with a fresh slate isn’t so bad.
If I combine everything, I think it’s about $350 a year for all my blogs including URLs and hosting but I expect that to be reduced significantly once I move everything away from GoDaddy. (For reference, I just got an email from them telling me that my SSL for one of the URLs I’m letting expire won’t renew and they want £90 a year just for the SSL certificate.)
On the technical blog, I do generate a little bit of revenue but not a lot. I sometimes include affiliate links, and I do run ads on the homepage, but it is one spot in the sidebar. I don’t want an intrusive experience with ads because there’s nothing I hate more than landing on a page that is so covered in ads you can’t navigate through the page (looking at all you food blogs.) I was recently on a food blogger’s page and went to the print recipe page to try and read the instructions more easily and they had even put ads on the print page. I don’t want to replicate that experience, so I try to keep things as minimal as possible.
I really don’t mind if people are trying to monetise their content unless it’s so overwhelming full of ads that I can’t view the content. At the end of the day, I don’t know what a person’s situation is, and we live in a rather precarious and unstable time for many people when it comes to employment. Monetising could help someone reach a goal more quickly or give them a little more freedom or room to breathe in their budget.
I’ve been given product in exchange for writing a review and I don’t mind that kind of partnership. I think affiliate links are a great way to monetise without being intrusive. I use Carbon Ads for my technical blog and don’t mind their style because it’s very minimal.
In terms of supporting other bloggers, I’ll click an affiliate link or engage with their content but I’m not currently paying anyone via Patreon or a subscription, though I have in the past.
I love Henry Desroches’ content over on henry.codes and stillness.digital.
Olu Niyi-Awosusi also has a lovely blog over at olu.online and I love reading their work.
Maggie Appleton’s Garden is also full of incredible writing.
If you’re a developer trying to level up your skills outside of code, my book Design for Developers, is available on Amazon and Manning.
My colleagues host an interesting podcast that covers a range of technology topics called Igalia Chats.
On the more casual side of things, I’ve been vlogging and trying to improve my video editing abilities over on YouTube. Typically sharing my life in England and more style focused content over there.
And a final shoutout to my husband, who is constantly building absolutely wild things with CSS. He’s working on getting his blog up but for now he’s got a few links on his website.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
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Make sure to also say thank you to Sixian Lim and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.