2024-12-26 22:10:00
I have a growing hatred for AI-generated images in blogs. It makes me wonder if the text in the blog posts is AI-generated to some extent. It’s always disappointing seeing these images in blogs run by individuals. I expect this from corporate blogs but not indie blogs.
I’ll go one step further Nelson, I have a growing hatred towards pointless images in blog posts in general, I don’t even care if they’re AI-generated or not. If they’re there as part of the content then by all means use them but if you’re just adding a stock image from unsplash to make the page “feel” more interesting then you’re just part of the broader problem that’s plaguing the web.
Put some effort into making your page lean and only serve me what’s necessary. And no, your 2MB stock image doesn’t fit that description.
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2024-12-24 17:30:00
I am not the biggest fan of meta blog posts, also called blogging about blogging. I do think they’re sometimes useful but they’re also quite uninspiring for me to read. And that’s why I try to stay away from the topic for the most part. But a bunch of people over the past few weeks have reached out via email, asking me questions about my blog, how I run it, where is hosted etc, and so I thought it was a good idea to answer a bunch of questions here all in one go.
All my domain names are currently managed by Hover. They’re not the cheapest but I like that they don’t try to upsell crap at every possibility and the UI of the admin interface is nice. At first, my site was hosted on a DigitalOcean VPS but after a few years I moved over to Hetzner. Up until a few weeks ago it was hosted in a US datacenter but I moved it back to Europe and it’s now sitting in a datacenter in Germany. It’s also the first time I’m using an ARM-based VPS and so far everything is working perfectly. If you care about specs the VPS has 2 VCPU, 4GB of RAM, 40GB of SSD space, and 20TB of bandwidth. Costs me around 4€/month.
I am not a sysadmin, I don’t enjoy spending time configuring servers so all my VPS are managed using Runcloud. I currently have 15 servers in my admin interface and I run them for myself, for friends, and for clients. Runcloud costs me 190$/year.
My email is hosted using what’s now Google Workspace, but I started using it when it was called GSuite. I have one email account there with a bunch of aliases set up. I pay 11.50€/month and the reason why I upgraded to the Business Standard plan is because of the 2TB of Google Drive space since I can use it to backup my site automatically thanks to the backup feature that’s built into Runcloud.
As I wrote many, many times before, this site runs on the Kirby file-based cms. Currently running on v4.5.0 (on an NGINX server running PHP 8.3) I think I started I believe on v2 but I could be wrong. I started my career on WordPress but at some point I switched over to Kirby because it’s a much better tool for the type of work I do and never looked back.
I designed and coded the site myself and the current version is honestly not much different from the one that was online in 2018. Over the years I made small changes here and there to accommodate a growing archive and subsequently to have a place for the People and Blogs series but other than that things have remained stable and I don’t plan to make changes anytime soon.
I still love the structure, still love the design. I do want to rewrite my entire CSS though because the current version was written using SASS and I plan to go back to native CSS but that’s a task for 2025 me.
I still write all my posts using iA Writer both on Mac and on iPhone. I never considered looking for a different tool in all these years. Still does everything I need and I still love the minimal interface. I don’t do revisions, I don’t do drafts or any of that stuff. I am not a serious writer, I don’t really care about creating good pieces of literature. My blog is for myself, I’m fine pushing out posts with typos and broken English because that’s who I am.
Generative AI tools can go to hell.
My blog doesn’t have a theme and it’s by design. I write about the things I find interesting and that’s usually the intersection between web, tech, and people. But I also sometimes post a random haiku or a photo of my dog. Sometimes I also use the blog to do quick therapy sessions when I’m not in a healthy mental space—happens a lot lately—and it’s been great for that.
I do have a list of blog post ideas that I almost never use. Every now and again I add something in there and then I forget about it because that’s how I roll. Usually, a blog post is born because I’m either talking with someone about something or I read something online and I think I have something to say on that particular subject and in that case I open iA Writer, I write it down and then I publish it.
There’s not much planning around my writing, I write when I feel like doing it and I want it to stay like that.
This blog is designed to do the absolute bare minimum when it comes to integrating with the social web. If you look at the source you’ll see that I have almost no meta tags. I have a title and a meta description and that’s about it. I also blocked all incoming Mastodon requests to my server because their implementation of link previews is so stupid that deserves to be blocked. And there’s nothing to be fetched here anyway since my posts don’t have a social media sharing image or other meta information.
I have multiple RSS feeds available and I usually send out my posts via email to the people who enjoy consuming content that way. That’s more than enough I’d say. I don’t automatically post links to my content anywhere and the more I follow the social media landscape the more I’m convinced I’m blessed to be someone who doesn’t give a shit about all that crap.
That should cover basically all there is to say about my site and the way I run it. If for some reason you still have questions feel free to ping me via email at [email protected] and I’ll be more than happy to answer whatever question you have.
Happy holidays 🎄
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2024-12-20 20:00:00
This is the 69th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Zinzy and her blog, zinzy.website
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Hey, I'm Zinzy! In early August, Manuel invited me to be a guest in his wonderful People & Blogs series. I'm writing this and it's late October now; here I am.
In many ways, I'm a very Dutch person: I like cheese, flowers, milk, and not standing out. I am also Afropean, gay, non-binary, and neurodivergent, which means there's always something about me that stands out. This is why I'm blessed to call Amsterdam home, where everybody is a little different all the time.
I love puzzles, I live with unrelenting curiosity, and I like helping people find what they need. I suppose this is why, despite academic adventures in linguistics and theology, I eventually became a designer by day, and a community builder by chance. One of my favorite projects right now is All Saints Amsterdam, a radically inclusive and very young Episcopal church.
First and foremost, though, somewhere, I'm still the kid who taught herself to build websites at age 11. I am an advocate for an Internet that is open, independent, transparent, cozy, and small.
I like to think of the personal website as one of the corner stones of the Internet. I treat them as rooms, as homes that I get to enter, motherfucking websites that can hopefully stand the test of time, unlike so much of what we see on the Internet today. In many shapes and forms, my personal website has always attempted to fulfill these roles.
Zinzy.website is an all-in-one place, your one-stop shop for learning about me on the Internet. I've tried, in the past, to maintain a personal website and a professional one, but I've always experienced this setup as disingenuous. (This is not to say that you, reader, are disingenuous for having different websites for different parts of your life.) I suppose it stems from my continued nostalgia for a time on the Internet when the personal was professional, and the professional personal.
I taught myself to build websites in the mid 90s. Seeing things appear on a screen felt like looking through a mirror at my hand drawing an object. I could not have been more fascinated. Soon, it became a way to experiment with the art of self-publication. It helped me explore the Internet, interact with others, and look far and wide beyond my little bedroom at home.
As a teenager, I made the first of what I'd consider to be a blog: a collection of dated posts the visualization of which required no manual alteration to be refreshed beyond publishing a post. My blog has known many names in the past, most of which I've forgotten. The parts of it I do remember are archived on zinzy.website/museum, my favorite still being DoYouLikeMyTightSweater.com.
Simone Silvestroni in his own People & Blogs interview summed up quite nicely what happens on my website: "She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn't enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website."
My website is at the mercy of constant pruning, reshaping, reimagining. On our own websites, we have full control over what our words look like; form and content are in perpetual interplay. On zinzy.website, I tell stories with words as much as I do without them. I've tried maintaining a changelog of what I modify on the website, but it was a ridiculous effort. Whenever I feel the itch, I'll get started on a redesign that's usually finished within an hour or two.
I collect fleeting thoughts and oneliners with whatever's ubiquitous, on a sheet of toilet paper if I must. When I feel the itch to turn it into something, I sit down to hover around a first paragraph for a while until I find myself asking: "what am I trying to say here?" Some of the long-form content that I write brushes up against the lyrical essay, so tone and cadence are what I initially focus on. My writing starts because I think something sounds good, and then I spend the rest of the process trying to figure out why.
The majority of my writing sits in the category slices of life: an ode to the mundane ongoingness of my time in the world. It may be an experience I had, something I didn't understand, something that irked me, media I consumed, something I value, an idea I have, what I'm up to now. It's what I like to see on personal sites, and it's my rejection of the design industry's unwritten rule that every designer should try to be a thought leader. I'm not just a designer, and my website reflects that.
One of the reasons it took me three months (sorry Manuel!) to answer a simple set of questions is that I returned from a transformative trip and found myself rethinking what I was actually doing with my life, which is to say what I was doing with my website. Lately, I've been struggling even more with performativity and self-presentational techniques common amongst IT professionals. Turning my front page into a photo blog has helped me return to the small and simple.
I web master best in public togetherness that honors how hell is other people. I love a good coffee place: me, a screen, and people around me who leave me alone. Noise-cancelling headphones with an endless Spotify loop of those ridiculous lo-fi instrumental beats that underscore the Plan with Me garbage I watch on YouTube. Website tinkering usually happens on Saturday morning at our local Coffee Company.
My writing environment depends on the content I'm writing. Since it usually accompanies a certain level of unrest, I do it wherever I find myself: at work during my lunch break, at home in the kitchen, on the tram. Early-stage writing happens anywhere, editing always happens in the same place.
When I feel a piece is almost there, I move to Visual Studio Code and fire up my localhost, so that I can see what it looks like in the browser. I often run my localhost over my IP address so that I can see it on my smartphone as well. To iron out any typos or mistakes, I listen to a blog post with Speechify (referral link), my text-to-speech software of choice. I think the most profound part of my writing happens when I look at it in the browser.
I build my website with Hugo, it lives in Github, and is served through Netlify. My domains have been with bHosted, a tiny Dutch company, since the early 2000s.
On touch devices, I like Working Copy, and on my machines I use Visual Studio Code. It's important to me that what I put on the Internet begins on my website, and because the Micropub standard and I aren't the best of friends, I do enjoy the iOS shortcuts that let me post notes and photos to my website in just a few seconds.
I use CSS framework Tailwind for styling purposes; not because my website needs it, but because it helps me collaborate with engineers on my team. I can't believe we ever wrote vanilla CSS.
I'll answer this by telling you about my most important Internet-related values and how I acquired them.
I had to look up the one expense my website requires: a domain at 40 euros per year. I don't monetize my website, even though there's a "buy me coffee" link hidden on some page somewhere. The websites I most like to visit are personal websites created for the sheer gratification of having brought something personal to the Internet. The moment a personal website turns into a fulltime job, I've found I tend to lose the reason for coming there. I don't spend money on anybody else's blog, but I've subscribed to a handful of Patreon tiers of people who are, for example, independent researchers who happen to also have a website. Andy Matuschak is a good example of this.
I'm a visual thinker (my partner calls me a super recognizer), and websites are best in their natural state where I can see them for what they are. I can't even find enjoyment in using an RSS reader, so I just have a long list of websites I like on my Bookmarks page. I don't really care if you published a new post. Sometimes I just want to be around you for a bit. Top of my head, three of my favorites include eatock.com, matthewsmith.website, and patrickrhone.net for the way they tell me about their makers, and the surprises I encounter there.
One thing that makes me not like other girls is that I have a bad day if the Wayback Machine is down. Sure, it's awesome that Kottke is still around making "fine hypertext products since 1998", but remember those blue lines from 2013?! And remember that very naughty 1095-day photo project that Naughty James completed in 2006? Whatever happened to that guy?! And what about Heather Champ's blog, with those Polaroids that were the last known to man at the time? When I think of it, the fact that some genius thought to archive the internet as early as he did, I'm overcome with gratitude and humility.
Okay, so the previous paragraph made me so nostalgic that "who do you think I should be interviewing next" only elicits a disappointing response. I miss Aaron Swarts. I want to know what he'd think about the Internet today, what he'd be writing about, what his website would look like. (Isn't is sad that the link under his name doesn't even have https yet? Where does time go?) I miss Dooce and the candor, wit, and vulnerability with which she welcomed the Internet. I struggle with how I learned so much about her, and how I'll still never know what she was thinking and feeling in her last moments in the world.
On a happier note, I want to hear from Patrick Rhone, Derek Powazek, from Maggie Mason. The bloggers from before responsiveness. People who were publishing slices of their lives so that we can publish slices of our lives. What's it like to still have a personal website today? Do you miss the good old days? How has your website changed over time? How has the Internet changed for you?
To everyone taking it upon themselves to find ways, continuously, to share parts of who they actually are on the Internet for everyone to see, unfiltered: thank you. Keep doing what you're doing. I feel this thing of ours is a rare dialect at risk of extinction.
To everyone not reading this because they're on some street corner balancing their phone on a bench so they can record a poorly performed dance for TikTok: no.
This was the 69th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Zinzy. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
You can support this series on Ko-Fi and all supporters will be listed here as well as on the official site of the newsletter.
Jamie Thingelstad (RSS) — Piet Terheyden — Eleonora — Carl Barenbrug (RSS) — Steve Ledlow (RSS) — Paolo Ruggeri (RSS) — Nicolas Magand (RSS) — Rob Hope — Chris Hannah (RSS) — Pedro Corá (RSS) — Colin Walker (RSS) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Kevin Humdrum (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Frank Meeuwsen (RSS) — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (RSS) — Robin Harford (RSS) — Bryan Maniotakis (RSS) — Barry Hess (RSS) — Ivan Moreale — Ben Werdmuller (RSS) — Cory Gibbons — Luke Harris (RSS) — Lars-Christian Simonsen (RSS) — Cody Schultz — Brad Barrish (RSS) — Nikita Galaiko — Erik Blankvoort — Jaga Santagostino — Andrew Zuckerman — Mattia Compagnucci (RSS) — Thord D. Hedengren (RSS) — Fabien Sauser (RSS) — Maxwell Omdal — Numeric Citizen (RSS) — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Veronique (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Jeremy Felt (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Kev Quirk (RSS) — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Kechi Ladapo (RSS) — Naz Hamid (RSS) — Lincoln Stewart (RSS) — Ken Zinser (RSS) — Jan — Grey Vugrin (RSS) — Luigi Mozzillo (RSS) — Alex Hyett (RSS) — Andy Piper — Hrvoje Šimić (RSS) — Travis Schmeisser — Doug Jones — Vincent Ritter (RSS) — Shen — Fabian Holzer (RSS) — Zenpen — Courtney (RSS) — Karl Prieb — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS)
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2024-12-17 00:50:00
If there’s one thing I learned about myself over the years is that there’s much still I don’t know about myself and the way my brain works. And the more I pay attention to it, the more I discover aspects of myself I wasn’t aware of.
One thing I became aware of recently is that I’m quite incapable of asking others for pretty much anything important or consequential. I’m incapable of asking for favours when it comes to important things, I’m incapable of asking for money, and I’m especially incapable of asking for help, even if I feel that some help might be needed. And this is not a pride thing mind you. It’s not because I think I don’t need help and I can do everything by myself. The opposite is true actually. I do like a good challenge but I also don’t really have a high opinion of myself and more often than not I find myself thinking that I’m not the best person for the job at hand.
But that’s not the main reason why I’m incapable of asking for help. What’s stopping me is usually an irrational fear of disappointing others. And I say irrational because if I stop and think about it I understand that at a conceptual level, there’s nothing wrong in asking for help and I know that people around me would probably be happy to help out. But a part of me refuses to do it for some reason. And it’s been like that since I can remember.
Asking in general is something I struggle with. Almost exactly a year ago I came up with the idea of the one a month club and to this day I sometimes still struggle to accept that it’s there and people donate. And what’s funny is that when the roles are reversed I jump at every possible opportunity to help others even if helping can become a burden for me. I just refuse to pass on the opportunity to help another human being if can be helpful in some way.
And no, this is not some weird Christian mindset, I’m not trying to earn a spot in paradise, I’m not baptised, I couldn’t care less about that stuff. I just think that if we’re not helping each other out when we can, then what even is the point of living on this wet rock, floating in space?
I know, my mind is weird. Maybe all minds are. Who knows. Anyway, another therapy session done, time to get back to work!
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2024-12-16 04:05:00
Motionless moonlit night
Dog panting on the grass
Winter is near
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2024-12-15 19:10:00
Doing some admin this Sunday morning (funny, I typed morning and I heard the bells in the distance ringing because it’s actually noon): I updated my about page and I’ll keep adding to it because I want to move there all the info I have scattered in the various slash pages because it makes no sense to have bits and pieces all over my site when I can have all neatly organised on my about page.
Also, social media updates! I joined Bluesky…kinda. I created a profile for People and Blogs and also created a starter pack with all the P&B guests I managed to find on the platform. I don’t plan to be very active there and I think it’s just going to be another way for me to inform people about the new interviews. It costs me nothing and if I can drive more people towards the interviews and that can in turn result in more traffic to other people’s blogs that’s great because it’s the entire point of the series. Have a great Sunday everyone!
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