2026-07-03 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Andy Baio, whose blog can be found at waxy.org.
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Hi, my name’s Andy Baio. I’m a writer and coder living in Portland, Oregon. You might know me from my blog, Waxy.org, where I’ve written for 25 years about the internet. If you’ve never heard of it, I rounded up some of the highlights from my first decade of blogging in 2012, and the second decade in 2022.
You may also know me from some of my other projects? I ran the XOXO festival in Portland for 12 years from 2012 to 2024, launched (and relaunched) the events community Upcoming.org, and I helped build Kickstarter as a long-time advisor and their first CTO.
Along the way, I coined the term “supercut,” produced a chiptune tribute to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue, and got threatened with lawsuits a bunch of times. (I did some other stuff, too.)
These days, I’m mostly helping my wife Ami with her game design studio, Pink Tiger Games. We’ve self-published seven conversational party games since 2017, with three more slated for later this year.
Before I started Waxy.org, I mostly sent links via instant messenger to my friends who had blogs. I knew I was good at finding things online, and after the umpteenth friend told me to start my own blog, I finally did. I wanted a place of my own online, somewhere to experiment and write about weird corners of internet culture, online community, and copyright, as well as a sandbox for new experimental projects of my own.
By the time I launched Waxy in April 2002, I felt like I was late to the blogging trend, which in hindsight, seems ridiculous. I was still pretty early, as it turns out. Within a year, I’d been interviewed by the New York Times and other major papers dozens of times for news stories I’d either broken or somehow found myself tangled up in.
The name, Waxy.org, came from a Perl script I’d written the year before to search for available .com, .org, and .net domains using every dictionary word in the English language. (I also picked up Meaty.org, which I never ended up using, and Upcoming.org, which I did.) “Waxy” didn’t really mean anything, but I’d been using “waxpancake” as my alias for years so it seemed like a good fit.
I added a linkblog, Waxy Links, to the sidebar about 18 months after launch, which became a good outlet for quick links that didn’t warrant full posts. I redesigned the site in 2008 with a cleaner design and better mobile support.
After 14 years of blogging, I switched from Movable Type to WordPress in 2016, with a new redesign that I slowly improved in the years since. I recently added redesigned archives and search, which I’m pretty happy with.
It’s always under construction, a work in progress — like me, you, and the rest of the internet.
I used to do much more investigative journalism, but these days, Waxy is primarily a linkblog where I point to fun or interesting things I find online. Unless I stumble on a story too compelling to ignore, forcing me to pull the string and see where it leads.
Those story ideas and links can come from anywhere. I’m a voracious consumer of information online, and I’ve always joked that Waxy is the natural byproduct of endlessly procrastinating from doing other things by looking at the internet.
I subscribe to around 450 feeds in Inoreader, my RSS reader, and skim it all nearly every day. I follow another 1,000 or so people each on Bluesky and Mastodon, with custom lists for each so I don’t miss particular people. I’m in dozens of Discords, many with people sharing their work or pointing out good stuff they find online, and nearly 100 mostly-niche subreddits covering many of my interests. I use tools like Sill and Scour to find signal in the noise, and even built a link aggregator of my own that I used for years to find good links on Twitter, until Elon shut down the API.
My frequency of posting has waned over the years, first cannibalized by social media and then by larger life and work stuff. I’ve recently found myself drawn back to it, posting more regularly, trying to wake those atrophied writing muscles. Even if I’ve slowed down, it’s hard to ever imagine stopping entirely.
I used to be able to work from anywhere, typically a coffeehouse or library, and tune out the rest of the world on my laptop with a good pair of earbuds.
As my eyesight’s worsened, I find that working on a large monitor is more of a necessity than a luxury for any serious length of time, especially if I’m coding.
I also used to love working around others, but these days, I tend to like retreating to the quiet of my basement office. No music, no sound. Just a quiet hum of my computer and the sounds of my keyboard.
I use WordPress with my own custom-written theme, using the Advanced Custom Fields plugin to handle all the special fields necessary for my linkblog. I use a custom bot to cross-post my links to Bluesky, and a plugin called Share on Mastodon to post things there. (I stopped automatically cross-posting to X/Twitter years ago, for obvious reasons.) Everything’s hosted on a DigitalOcean droplet along with a bunch of other side projects, with Cloudflare managing the domain and DNS.
I would have started collecting email addresses from the very beginning. I’ve never really liked reading newsletters by email, and I read almost every newsletter I subscribe to through my feedreader, which gives me so much control over my attention. But I never considered that people would start to shift their attention away from the web, or that feedreaders would largely go away, so I never tried to build a mailing list for my own projects.
The ability to directly reach the people who care most about your work, outside of the capricious nature of social media algorithms, is essential. It’s my one big regret, and I hope to change that soon.
My blog has never cost much to run, and never made much money. I used to have a dedicated server that cost $150/month, but these days, it’s running around $50/month on a shared instance with some other projects of mine.
The visibility and reach from writing on Waxy opened a lot of doors for me, though. I met so many amazing creative people through blogging, and it gave me a platform for launching projects that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. I met most of my friends, directly or indirectly, through the writing I did on Waxy.org.
I did run ads on my blog for a few years, experimenting with Google ads from 2004 to 2005 and, in 2006, joining as one of the first members of The Deck, Jim Coudal’s pioneering unobtrusive, privacy-centric boutique ad network that helped support sites like Daring Fireball, Kottke.org, Ze Frank, The Morning News, A List Apart, and many others. It paid me a reliable $1,000/month for ten years, until shortly before it wound down in 2017. I haven’t made any direct income from my blog since then.
I think anything that supports independent writers/bloggers, artists, or other creators on their own terms is a good thing, whether it’s through Kickstarter, Patreon, or more commonly, through paid subscription newsletters. I have major issues with Substack’s management, but I credit them for normalizing the idea of directly paying bloggers a recurring monthly fee. But please use Ghost or Buttondown instead.
Oh, god, too many to list. Off the top of my head, Marcin Wichary’s Unsung is probably my favorite new blog, constantly updated with new insights about user interfaces and design. Nobody notices things the way that Marcin notices things.
Matt Muir’s Web Curios is like a month’s worth of good links crammed into a single post every Friday. I don’t know how he’s done it so well for so long.
Depths of Wikipedia’s Annie Rauwerda isn’t a traditional blogger, but spreads her curatorial eye between two Bluesky accounts, two Instagram accounts, TikTok, a newsletter, a touring live stage show, and a very good personal website. She’s just so funny and weird and good. I wish she had an RSS feed that combined it all. Maybe I’ll make one for her.
I think David Friedman’s Ironic Sans is incredibly underrated, moving from a traditional blog to more of a newsletter format, with weird little side projects and games along the way. He’s been continuously great for 20 years.
I’d love to see Jason Kottke interviewed. More than anyone I can think of, he’s carved out a Kottke-shaped hole for himself on the web, growing it into a sustainable living through direct reader support over nearly 30 years. Even now, he continues to refine and adapt and evolve his site in surprising ways.
The last project I worked on was the permanent archive for XOXO that launched in April, collecting everything we did related to the festival. The site was a huge undertaking, bringing together every lineup, schedule, recap video, conference talk, and standalone website that we ever made into a single permanent archive, filled with little photos and ephemera from the festival.
XOXO was a huge part of my life for 12 years, easily the most creatively rewarding and emotionally exhausting work of my career, and I’m really proud of how the archive came out. At the very least, go poke through the video archives. The featured tag highlights some of our favorites, like Cabel Sasser’s wonderful talk from our final year.
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2026-07-02 00:10:00
This morning Mr Overkill sent me the link to the AI Compass test, which I guess is a spin on the famous political compass test. It’s a bunch of questions—27? 29? 15? Who knows!—and at the end you get your location on the map and your archetype, from a list of 30. It’s harmless fun, and I found the results so far to be fairly accurate. If you end up taking the quiz, let me know if your result was accurate. Or even better, blog about it!
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2026-06-29 12:55:00
I stopped tracking books using apps or services, even though there are good ones out there. I have two little shelves in my bedroom, on the left I put books I want to read, on the right the ones I have read. The plan was to empty the one on the right halfway through the year and post a picture here on the site to remember what I have read. This is that picture, and those are the books I have read so far in 2026.
A lot of Terzani, a lot of stories about death and suffering, about misery and tough times, but also a lot of stories about nature and mountains. The fiction-to-non-fiction ratio is probably 3:1, which is unusual for me, considering I read non-fiction almost exclusively for most of my life, but that’s fine.
Look forward to fill up the shelf again and post a second picture here on the site somewhere in late December.
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2026-06-29 01:55:00
I’m sitting on a rock, in the middle of a forest. On my right, not even 30cm away from me, a dog panting like crazy, because even though it’s almost 8pm, it’s still way too warm for his liking. To be fair, anything above freezing probably fits that description. Behind me, the ruins of a church that was, and no longer is. A stone arch and a few chunks of walls are all that’s left. I don’t know what happened to this church. I could probably look it up, but I don’t need to do it. Knowing would not add anything to my experience of sitting here.
Is it important to know how things end? Is it important to know when something has ended? Some things are clearly easy to know when they’re done: I have a bottle of water that’s almost empty, and the end is gonna come pretty fast. Other things are a lot trickier. When does a life end? I remember reading that the medical definition of death keeps evolving as our technology progresses and we’re able to bring people back to life. Maybe in the future we’ll be able to upload our brains to the matrix and “live” forever, who knows.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the end of things lately, as my mind wandered around, stressed out by a series of things not worth discussing. And thinking about the end of myself is weirdly comforting. The classic this too shall pass. Everything is transitory after all, and life itself is impermanent. We’re here now, we might be gone tomorrow.
And when gone, what’s left? Maybe just ruins, traces of our past, books left on a bookshelf, photos in a box, a blog online perhaps, destined to be washed away quickly like everything else in the digital world.
If you’re wondering where I’m going with this post, I’m afraid the answer is nowhere. I’m just sitting on a rock, in the middle of nowhere, thinking about death as a way to figure out how to go through life.
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2026-06-26 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com.
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I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in what I call the ‘open ecosystem', the first five years as a lurker and participant, the second five as a researcher and facilitator. I’ve done ethnographic studies of OpenStreetMap, was the Community Manager of The Turing Way, and have held a variety of fellowships with organisations ranging from the Internet Society to the Software Sustainability Institute. Outside of all these things, I would call myself an artist-of-sorts, maybe to say that I make art more than I embody the spirit of an artist, per say. But I sometimes throw the title around anyway. I guess I’ll say it: I’m a researcher, facilitator, and artist.
I was a big ‘micro’ blogger in my teens, using platforms like Xanga, Livejournal, and Flickr to document my teenage life. Then I inevitably moved to Tumblr alongside many angsty and artsy teenager girls right as Facebook started to take off in parallel, before moving to Instagram (and using it as a kind of ‘blog’ for years). I’ve gone through the inevitable cycles of use then rejection, of deleting and reactivating all my social media accounts. My original Facebook account is gone now.
When I started grad school in 2019, I started my blog as a method of sharing more about my life and research when I moved to Geneva. I think it came out of the joint desires for self-expression and a desire to get out of social media. We now collectively call this platform decay “enshittification”, but I really felt like what I was putting online was performative more than anything else. The blog felt like shouting into a voice, yes, but it was my shout, on my own website, in a void of my own creation. There’s no like button for that.
I often just create a new page on Obsidian or VSCode and just start to write. Sometimes it all comes out in one go - sometimes the draft will take years to fruition (and yes - I’ll often backdate that post to when it was created, not when it was published). There’s actually a secret draft folder on Github that hosts all my drafts in progress.
Out of all the creative processes, I find writing the most difficult, but also the most transformative. I rarely enjoy the process, but always feel better, or have more clarity, or understand something or myself better, afterwards.
In parallel to writing, I’m very much a power user of are.na which feels like a more instinctual, affectual, and social form of thinking out loud. I think a lot of the nascent themes contained there eventually end up on the blog in some form or another.
I’m a big listener of NTS radio (specifically the Breakfast Show with Flo) and use earth.fm a lot. Sounds really create a space for me - and are a way I stay grounded and aware, no matter where I might be working. If I have control over that however, I tend to need a big desk for books and papers of all kinds - maybe I need a messy desk in order to have a cleaner mind. I absolutely believe that physical spaces influence creativity. When I’m writing something long form for example, I’ll usually surround myself physically with books and visual artifacts (photos, sketches, and other detritus) related to the topic, almost like it’s a living alter to the work, or an externalised process of thinking that starts with the visual, then becomes injested and cognitive. I’ve been on the move for the past year or so, and I’ve really felt its impact on my creativity: in some ways I’m more spontaneous, but less deep and situated with my thinking. I have no doubt that this is because of my perpetual motion.
My website (and blog attached to it) is very simple. I used to host my website on Github Pages, but now it’s built on Netlify (very open to alternatives - please reach out!). I used to use Heroku before it was shut down. The whole website and codebase is on Github. You can see more about the ethos of the website, and specifically the practices I am aiming to adopt better practices for accessibility and open practices on this easter egg of a page (which you can find by clicking the sticky note in the footer): aleesteele.com/design
Field Notes from my Desktop is the name of both my blog and newsletter these days. I feel all sorts of ways about having a newsletter now – I’ve only sent out one so far. It’s a very different feeling to have a captive audience, some of which have been subscribed automatically after an event I’ve facilitated, or joined from the web. I don’t know if I like it, but it feels like in the age of information glut, there’s something about the inbox that remains sacred for many folks. I want to respect that, and maybe want to think of it as a seeding process...
For my blog, I remain dedicated to maintaining it as is, without any real changes. Looking back, I guess I would have held myself accountable to finishing more blogs in the moment: when that whiff of an idea, or a concept, or an event or reflection has completely capitvated me and I feel the need to write about it. Unfortunately I have so many half-finished blogs not because I didn’t like the topic, but rather because it was such a struggle and a slog to finish, that I didn’t bring it fully over that crest into fruition. Maybe I should have ritualised it.
At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I did the best I could at the time. Maybe the newsletter is meant to be the rhythm, and the blog is the burst of free jazz.
I have no monetization plan, and currently don’t monetize anything I do for the blog. In fact, I pay to use Buttondown at the moment, and I’m debating whether to do that (currently $9 USD a month since they changed their membership plan). I pay for my domain, which is £12 GBP annually.
Now I’m mixing blogs and newsletters! I’ve been such a periodic reader of a bunch of different things that I tend to save on are.na, that it’s hard to pick out a few.
I’ve been a passionate reader of the Marginalian and the Creative Independent for many years. At this point, both are less blog, and more of a wiki-like resource about life, creativity, ecology, and all sorts of topics that make life meaningful and mysterious. I’ve also used read and used Open Culture for many years – which is also a blog-of-sorts. I recently learned about The Examined Mind.
One person whose writing practice I look up to is Shannon Mattern, an academic anthropologist turned New York Librarian-of-sorts and my friend Jonathan Gray who has a fantastic (and consistent!) public writing process. Both of them are academics with public practices - and while I’m not an academic, I do have a research-informed process.
I also love Julian Stodd’s blog on leadership and organisational practices. He’s done a lot of deep and open thinking that I’ve appreciated about the topic, and has stayed loyal to old school Wordpress.
This question inspires me to bring together a more curated list of blogs I’ve read and followed over the years, and also to recognise the shortfalls of my own ‘blogging’ practice. I have saved blog instances (meaning individual blogs), but I haven’t ‘followed’ a single blogger in a really long time actually. Is that because of the newsletter because I don’t use RSS feeds?
I’m developing a series of mapping meditations, based on Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations. If you have a map or a meditation to share, please reach out.
I also run internet infrastructure walking tours in London, in an effort to make invisible infrastructures more embodied and playful. This year, I’ve been experimenting with a monthly walk, and you're welcome to join one using Luma.
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 148 interviews.
People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.
2026-06-23 14:25:00
I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm.
I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time.
If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me a link and I'll be more than happy to link it here on the blog.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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