2025-10-08 15:25:00
The new iOS is bad in so many ways that writing a post highlighting them all is quite pointless. By the time I’d be done typing, they’d have likely released iOS 27 (and hopefully fixed most of this nonsense). So I’m not gonna waste time doing that and simply focus on one single thing that was so bad when I first upgraded that I was genuinely considering changing career: the new iOS UI.
Look, I don’t really care about new UIs; I’m not one of those people who complain simply because things are different. I know software changes over time, that’s fine. But this UI is bad for one simple reason: you can’t access all tabs when using the phone one-handed in a convenient way. And before you start typing «Hey idiot, have you tried tapping that button with the three dots?» I can tell you that yes, I did. I know the missing options are there. But this means that literally every operation now takes two taps instead of one, and I also have to sit through an excruciatingly slow animation every time that stupid menu opens up.
If, like me, you hate this, I just wanted to let you know that there is a solution.
Go into settings -> apps -> Safari, scroll down a bit till you find the Tabs section and in there, there’s an option to change the UI with something that’s so much better.
This is the end of the PSA. Now, let me rant.
Look, I don’t think I’m an amazing designer. Or a designer at all these days. But I think I do possess at least one redeeming quality: some design-related common sense, thanks to a professor who, for 5 years, bashed me in the head constantly while I was studying design.
The main purpose of a browser is to provide access to the web. You do that through a paradigm called tabs. It’s been like that for decades. Creating a tab, closing a tab, and moving through tabs are the minimum functionalities needed to have a proper browser UI. Ok, I guess you also need to have an address bar where to type something, but I consider that part of the tab.
You cannot hide the controls for those interactions inside a menu. You just cannot. Imagine if the shutter button in your camera app was hidden behind a pop-up menu. You’d chuck that piece of shit of an app in the digital hell it belongs to. And for good reasons.
If I’m using a browser, I need to be able to create a new tab with just one click. I need to be able to access all the open tabs in one click. That’s a non-negotiable imo. And this alternative Safari UI is not perfect, mind you. The new tab button is still hidden behind an extra tap, while the middle spot in that UI is taken up by a completely useless share button, because Apple is apparently run by people with infinite wisdom.
And this is not fucking rocket science. Basically, every other browser out there is managing to do this just fine. New tab in the middle, arrows to navigate on one side, all tabs button on the right.
The point of a UI in something like a browser is not to wow or to provide joy. The point is to fucking work. How about you first do that, and then you figure out how to pour all your stupid molten glass on top of it?
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2025-10-05 21:05:00
I’m currently in “digital fasting” mode, trying to consume as little content as possible here on the internet. But I do have to be here for work, and so I still end up reading a few things here and there. Some of that content is sent to me via email by random people (always appreciate that) while other is just because I have to open links to blogs that are submitted to blogroll.org. And even though I am not on any social media platform, some of the nonsense that’s going on there still manages to reach me, albeit indirectly. Which is quite impressive, I have to say. It’s incredibly hard to both have an online presence and also completely seal yourself away from social media nonsense. And this is something that’s not going to get better anytime soon, unfortunately. Especially because the idea of a fediverse is blurring the line that separates these worlds.
One thing that’s fun to observe, though, as a very passive and disinterested spectator, is how some patterns of behaviour seem to be platform agnostic. Which is just a very polite way for me to say that dickheads are omnipresent. It doesn’t matter what tech stack they have behind them: if you give them a public way to express themselves, they’ll inevitably shit on everything and everyone and just be despicable human beings, no matter what.
And I really do believe that this is a byproduct of the public nature of social media. I sincerely doubt that they do this in private, because I don’t think it’s as rewarding. By doing it publicly, you can be part of the mob of the day, find yourself in the company of like-minded individuals (that you likely don’t know and might as well hate you in real life), and have fun berating someone. Then pat yourself on the back and get ready to join the next mob.
This is something that’s entirely absent when interactions are moved to private channels of communication. I think it’s incredibly rare for a mob to try to pile on you via email. You can just keep marking everyone as spam, not even bothering to open their messages. And they get no kick out of it. There’s no personal reward to be found in sending a shitty email to someone.
And that is why, even though I had nothing but enjoyable exchanges with everyone I crossed paths with online, I’ll still stick with email and DMs as the way to interact with the rest of you out there. And if you think you have a good argument to make to prove I’m wrong, I wanna hear it. My inbox is open.
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2025-10-03 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Blake Watson, whose blog can be found at blakewatson.com.
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Sure! I’m Blake. I live in a small city near Jackson, Mississippi, USA. I work for MRI Technologies as a frontend engineer, building bespoke web apps for NASA. Previously I worked at an ad agency as an interactive designer.
I have a neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It's a progressive condition that causes my muscles to become weaker over time. Because of that, I use a power wheelchair and a whole host of assistive technologies big and small. I rely on caregivers for most daily activities like taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating—just to name a few.
I am able to use a computer on my own. I knew from almost the first time I used one that it was going to be important in my life.
I studied Business Information Systems in college as a way to take computer-related courses without all the math of computer science (which scared me at the time). When I graduated, I had a tough time finding a job making websites. I did a bit of freelance work and volunteer work to build up a portfolio, but was otherwise unemployed for several years. I finally got my foot in the door and I recently celebrated a milestone of being employed for a decade.
When I'm not working, I'm probably tinkering on side projects. I'm somewhat of a side project and home-cooked app enthusiast. I just really enjoy making and using my own tools. Over the last 10 years, I've gotten into playing Dungeons and Dragons and a lot of my side projects have been related to D&D.
I enjoy design, typography, strategy games, storytelling, writing, programming, gamedev, and music.
I got hooked on making websites in high school and college in the early 2000s. A friend of mine in high school had a sports news website. I want to say it was made with the Homestead site builder or something similar. I started writing for it and helping with it. I couldn’t get enough so I started making my own websites using WYSIWYG page builders. But I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of page builders. Designing sites felt clunky and I couldn’t get elements to do exactly what I wanted them to do.
I had a few blogs on other services over the years. Xanga was maybe the first one. Then I had one on Blogger for a while.
In 2005, I took a course called Advanced Languages 1. It turned out to be JavaScript. Learning JavaScript necessitated learning HTML. Throughout the course I became obsessed with learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually, in August of 2005—twenty years ago—I purchased the domain blakewatson.com.
I iterated on it multiple times a year at first. It morphed from quirky design to quirkier design as I learned more CSS. It was a personal homepage, but I blogged at other services. Thanks to RSS, I could list my recent blog posts on my website.
When I graduated from college, my personal website became more of a web designer's portfolio, a professional site that I would use to attract clients and describe my services. But around that time I was learning how to use WordPress and I started a self-hosted WordPress blog called I hate stairs. It was an extremely personal disability-related and life journaling type of blog that I ran for several years. When I got my first full-time position and didn't need to freelance any longer, I converted blakewatson.com back into a personal website. But this time, primarily a blog. I discontinued I hate stairs (though I maintain an archive and all the original URLs work).
I had always looked up to various web designers in the 2000s who had web development related blogs. People like Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Jason Santa Maria, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.
For the past decade, I've blogged about web design, disability, and assistive tech—with the odd random topic here or there.
I used to blog only when inspiration struck me hard enough to jolt my lazy ass out of whatever else I was doing. That strategy left me writing three or four articles a year (I don’t know why, but I think of my blog posts as articles in a minor publication, and this hasn’t helped me do anything but self-edit—I need to snap out of it and just post). In March 2023, however, I noticed that I had written an article every month so far that year. I decided to keep up the streak. And ever since then, I've posted at least one article a month on my blog. I realize that isn't very frequent for some people, but I enjoy that pacing, although I wouldn't mind producing a handful more per year.
Since I'm purposefully posting more, I've started keeping a list of ideas in my notes just so I have something to look through when it's time to write. I use Obsidian mostly for that kind of thing.
The writing itself almost always happens in iA Writer. This app is critical to my process because I am someone who likes to tinker with settings and fonts and pretty much anything I can configure. If I want to get actual writing done, I need constraints. iA Writer is perfect because it looks and works great by default and has very few formatting options. I think I paid $10 for this app one time ten or more years ago. That has to be the best deal I've ever gotten on anything.
I usually draft in Writer and then preview it on my site locally to proofread. I have to proofread on the website, in the design where it will live. If I proofread in the editor I will miss all kinds of typos. So I pop back and forth between the browser and the editor fixing things as I go.
I can no longer type on a physical keyboard. I use a mix of onscreen keyboard and dictation when writing prose. Typing is a chore and part of the reason I don’t blog more often. It usually takes me several hours to draft, proofread, and publish a post.
I mostly need to be at my desk because I have my necessary assistive tech equipment set up there. I romanticize the idea of writing in a comfy nook or at a cozy coffee shop. I've tried packing up my setup and taking it to a coffee shop, but in practice I get precious little writing done that way.
What I usually do to get into a good flow state is put on my AirPods Pro, turn on noise cancellation, maybe have some ambient background noise or music, and just write. Preferably while sipping coffee or soda.
But if I could have any environment I wanted, I would be sitting in a small room by a window a few stories up in a quaint little building from the game Townscaper, clacking away on an old typewriter or scribbling in a journal with a Parker Jotter.
I've bounced around a bit in terms of tech stack, but in 2024, I migrated from a self-hosted WordPress site to a generated static site with Eleventy. My site is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN)—a shared hosting service I love for its simplistic homemade admin system, and powerful VPS-like capabilities. My domain is registered with them as well, although I’m letting Cloudflare handle my DNS for now.
I used Eleventy for the first time in 2020 and became a huge fan. I was stoked to migrate blakewatson.com. The source code is in a private repo on GitHub. Whenever I push to the main branch, DeployHQ picks it up and deploys it to my server.
I also have a somewhat convoluted setup that checks for social media posts and displays them on my website by rebuilding and deploying automatically whenever I post. It's more just a way for me to have an archive of my posts on Mastodon than anything.
Because my website is so old, I have some files not in my repo that live on my server. It is somewhat of a sprawling living organism at this point, with various small apps and tools (and even games!) deployed to sub-directories.
I have a weekly scheduled task that runs and saves the entire site to Backblaze B2.
You know, I'm happy to say that I'd mostly do the same thing. I think everyone should have their own website. I would still choose to blog at my own domain name. Probably still a static website. I might structure things a bit differently. If I were designing it now, I might make more allowances for title-less, short posts (technically I can do this now, but they get lumped into my social feed, which I'm calling my Microblog, and kind of get lost). I might design it to be a little weirder rather than buttoned up as it is now. And hey, it's my website. I still might do that.
Tinkering with your personal website is one of life's great joys. If you can't think of anything to do with your website, here are a hundred ideas for you.
I don't make money from my website directly, but having a website was critical in getting my first job and getting clients before that. So, in a way, all the money I've made working could be attributed to having a personal website.
I have a lot of websites and a lot of domains, so it's a little hard to figure out exactly what blakewatson.com itself costs. NFSN is a pay-as-you-go service. I'm currently hosting 13 websites of varying sizes and complexity, and my monthly cost aside from domains is about $23.49. $5 of that is an optional support membership. I could probably get the cost down further by putting the smaller sites together on a single shared server.
I pay about $14 per year for the domain these days.
I pay $10.50 per month for DeployHQ, but I use it for multiple sites including a for-profit side project, so it doesn’t really cost anything to use it for my blog (this is the type of mental gymnastics I like to do).
I pay $15 per month for Fathom Analytics. In my mind, this is also subsidized by my for-profit side project.
I mentioned that I backup my website to Backblaze B2. It's extremely affordable, and I think I'm paying below 50 cents per month currently for the amount of storage I'm using (and that also includes several websites).
If you also throw in the cost of tools like Tower and Sketch, then there's another $200 worth of costs per year. But I use those programs for many things other than my blog.
When you get down to it, blogs are fairly inexpensive to run when they are small and personal like mine. I could probably get the price down to free, save for the domain name, if I wanted to use something like Cloudflare Pages to host it—or maybe a free blogging service.
I don't mind people monetizing their blogs at all. I mean if it's obnoxious then I'm probably not going to stay on your website very long. But if it's done tastefully with respect to the readers then good for you. I also don't mind paying to support bloggers in some cases. I have a number of subscriptions for various people to support their writing or other creative output.
Here are some blogs I'm impressed with in no particular order. Many of these people have been featured in this series before.
I'd like to take this opportunity to mention Anne Sturdivant. She was interviewed here on People & Blogs. When I first discovered this series, I put her blog in the suggestion box. I was impressed with her personal website empire and the amount of content she produced. Sadly, Anne passed away earlier this year. We were internet buddies and I miss her. 💜
I'd like to share a handful of my side projects for anyone who might be interested.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 109 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Ryan M and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-10-02 01:10:00
Back in February 2024, I published a blog post about my new—at the time—site. One of the things I mentioned in that post was that this site had a guestbook.
Quick aside: a guestbook, for those of you who might not know, is something that used to be fairly common on the web of the late 90s, early 2000s, but slowly fell out of fashion as more and more people moved to social media and people stopped caring about personal sites for the most part.
This site doesn’t have comments, and the only way to interact with me is to either send me an email (I love those) or to ping me on iMessage if you’re on the Apple ecosystem. But I wanted to give people a way to leave a mark of their passage, which is why I implemented a guestbook. I think guestbooks in general are awesome, and some are so much fun to browse. I mean, just look how fun Eva’s guestbook is.
Anyway, I mentioned I had a guestbook, and a link to it has been sitting at the bottom of every post ever since. It’s also linked at the bottom of every post if you read this site using RSS. And I mentioned it in passing every once in a while inside my posts. And yet, I still often get messages from people telling me they didn’t know this site has a guestbook. Which is totally fine, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to spend their days on my site, but it makes me wonder how many other things I assume are obvious to everyone who visits this site but actually aren’t.
For example, do you know I have a weekly series called People and Blogs and every Friday for the past 2+ years, I have published an interview featuring an amazing person and their personal site? It’s mentioned everywhere on this site, all the 100+ interviews are in the archive down below, but maybe some people don’t actually know that?
Do I have to mention that in addition to this site, I also maintain blogroll.org? And that if you have a personal site, you can submit it to it?
And do I also have to mention that everything I do is very generously supported by some super kind and awesome people who have signed up for my One a month Club? An idea that has its own dedicated website, thanks to Jarrod.
Every time I mentioned these things, a part of me cringes and feels bad because it sounds so self-promoty, but then I get those emails and I’m reminded that the only way for people to know the things you do exist is if you remind them that they do, in fact, exist.
And if you already knew about all these things, I’m sorry.
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2025-10-01 00:20:00
If you’re reading this blog using RSS or via email (when I remember to send the content via email), you likely didn’t notice it. And if you’re reading my blog in the browser but are not a sharp observer, chances are, you also didn’t notice it. A new version of my site is live. At first glance, not much has changed. The typeface is still the same—love you, Iowan—the layout is still the same, the colours are still the same. For the most part, the site should still feel pretty much the same.
So what has changed? A lot, especially under the hood. For example: I have rewritten the entire CSS, and I’m no longer using SASS since it’s no longer needed; interviews are now separate from regular content at the backend level and have their own dedicate URL structure (old URLs should still work, though); the site is now better structured to be expanded into something more akin to a digital garden than “just” a blog.
Since I had to rewrite all the frontend code, I took this opportunity to tweak a few things here and there: quotes have a new style, the guestbook has been redesigned (go sign it if you haven’t already), typography has been slightly tweaked in a couple of places, and the site should now scale much better on very big screens.
More importantly, though, P&B interviews now have a more unique design—and a new colour scheme—something that makes me very happy. There are so many things I want to do for this series, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to this, so I’m happy to have at least managed to give them a more unique identity here on the site.
This space is still a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress, so expect things to change over time as I fine-tune minor details here and there.
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2025-09-27 21:25:00
Over the past couple of years, I've used Literal to keep track of the books I've read and that I’m reading. When you mark a book as completed, Literal, like probably every other site and app of this type, asks for a review, which includes a 1-to-5 star rating.
I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5.
I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.
Anyway, I find myself reflecting on this because as I’m—painfully slowly—working on an updated version of my site, I’m considering adding a books section to it and was debating what to do when it comes to ratings. I’ll likely end up doing something similar to what Netflix does (or did; I have no idea if it’s still like that, since I don’t watch Netflix).
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