2025-06-06 19:00:00
This is the 93rd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Benji and his blog, benji.dog
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Hi, I'm Benji and I'm a software engineer from Ecuador. I currently live in Minneapolis with my wife, our two kids, and our cat.
I moved to the US for university to study Computer Science. Originally, I was thinking of continuing on to do research as I had great experiences with the professors and projects I worked in but life happened and I found myself looking for jobs. A lot of what I had learned in university that far was less practical for the jobs I found myself applying to. Luckily, I ended up finding a job with amazing coworkers who I got to learn a ton from.
Professionally, I do a little bit of everything and jump between working on mobile and web apps. I like this level of change as it allows me to continue learning and working with different platforms and projects everyday.
When I'm not working, I'm usually building some new Lego or MagnaTiles structure with my kids, playing video games, or watching movies.
Over the years I started several one-off blogs which usually followed the development of whatever project I was working on at the time. These were all short lived and never really got updated once I stopped working on the projects.
The biggest thing keeping me from starting a blog was that I couldn't settle on a name. I didn't want to use my full name and nothing else really worked for me. At some point in 2015 I found out that the Top Level Domain (TLD) .dog was a thing so I thought it would be funny to get the name "benji.dog" as most of the time when I introduce myself to someone and they learn my name they say: "oh, like the dog?". Maybe its just funny to me 😄.
Originally this was just a pretty basic landing page which linked out to other places. Some time later I started a "making websites" group at work as several coworkers were interested in having a their own personal websites. This is when I got interested in the IndieWeb and I started adding things as I found features in the wiki that I liked.
Today, my site is my primary place for publishing things I do. If I watch a movie, read a book, bookmark an interesting post, post a photo, or just generally want to write about anything, it goes on my site.
Most of the posts on my site are either short notes or media tracking so I usually just write these on my phone and publish them immediately.
For the longer posts on my site, the process can vary wildly. I have written a whole post in an hour and published it right away and I have also published posts after having them in different stages of draft for years.
There are several posts in my drafts folder that I know I will never publish. I still find myself being highly critical of my writing and I find that writing a draft even if it will never be made public is good practice. I do revisit these drafts every so often in case any of the ideas there are good starting points for a new post.
I've been working from home for a long time and my desk is really the only place where I can sit down and write or code anymore. This has more to do with comfort than creativity though.
I don't really think I have an ideal creative environment. I usually have a notebook and pen with me everywhere I go and I find myself writing down anything that comes to mind whether its writing out ideas or drawing little characters.
The current iteration of my site is built with Eleventy and I've been using that since 2019. All of the code for it is on GitHub and whenever I make a change, the site gets rebuilt and deployed on Netlify.
The bit that brings it all together is a separate project I wrote. It doesn't really have a name but since it's implementing a serverless micropub endpoint I just named it micropub (I should change that). This is also deployed to Netlify and uses functions and GitHub's (or GitLab's) API to make commits and push new content to my site's repo. Since it's using micropub, I could then use any of the many different Micropub Clients to add, edit, or remove new posts to my site.
A little over a year ago I decided to build my own micropub client so that I could add movie watch posts to my site directly instead of using a different platform for keeping track of that. This project is called sparkles and if your site supports IndieAuth and Micropub, then you could also use this to write posts. It now supports most other type of posts so it's the only way I add things to my site now. Because I built it as a Progressive Web App (PWA), it's also on my phone's homescreen so I can easily create posts from anywhere.
I have often thought that maybe my domain name wasn't the best choice as it's expensive and sometimes confusing to say out loud. I have yet to think of anything I like more and it still makes me smile.
Because I've been so comfortable with my current setup for so long, I haven't had a chance to try out all the different options out there. I do still very much like static site generators so I would probably like to try out other options now to see if I would still end up in the same place. But realistically, Eleventy does everything that I need it to do so it would take some serious convincing to get me to change that.
However, since I have less free time now than I used to when starting out, I would probably start with a selfhosted blogging solution and for that I really like GoBlog.
I pay about $60/year for the two domain names I use for my site, one being a short domain to make links easier to share. That's the only real cost for my site as I'm still on Netlify's free tier and haven't really had any issues there. My site doesn't generate any revenue and this is something that I'm ok with for me.
It's great that there are so many different ways for people to make money from their blogs and if you want to do it, you should.
I have a blogroll and I think all of those sites are amazing! I try to keep it updated as I discover new personal sites too.
As for who to interview next, I'd love to hear from:
The internet used to be fun is a collection of articles about the internet from the past and I find the articles in this list inspiring. They also serve as a reminder to continue building the web that I want to see.
There are several online IndieWeb Events which are a great way to chat with others who share a love for personal websites. Even if you haven't yet started your site, the community here has been really inspiring to me.
Lastly, here is Cabel Sasser's talk from XOXO 2024. Ever since I first watched this, I've been reminding myself to "send the nice email" when I see someone's website I like. There's so many amazing things that people are creating on their websites and I think it's a good thing when we take a moment to tell each other that.
This was the 93rd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Benji. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him 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) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (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 — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (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) — Courtney (RSS) — Dan Ritz (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Stefan Bohacek (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Mario Figueroa — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield — Pete (RSS) — Pete Millspaugh (RSS) — Martin Matanovic (RSS) — Coinciding Narratives (RSS) — Arun Venkatesan (RSS) — fourohfour.net (RSS) — Jonathan Kemper — Matt Langford (RSS) — Bookofjoe (RSS) — Marius Masalar (RSS) — Jim Mitchell (RSS) — Grant Hutchins — Simon Howard (RSS)
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2025-06-06 13:45:00
I don’t climb. I have no interest in climbing. And yet I so often find myself in places that are famous in the climbers world. Another person would see this as a signal life is sending their way.
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2025-05-30 19:00:00
This is the 92nd edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Sebastián Monía and his blog, site.sebasmonia.com
To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.
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My name is Sebastián, I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in the early 80s.
I have been working as a software developer since 2004. Over time I did a bit of everything in terms of technologies, but also roles: pure coding, team lead, analyst... I got into programming as a way to run more games in an aging 486 computer. I was 14, and I quickly realized that programming was not gonna free up more memory (unlike playing with config.sys and unloading stuff), but I got hooked into building little programs.
I was never good at building things with my hands, the abstractness of code suited me better :) It wasn't my first career choice. As a teen, I wanted to study astrophysics - inspired by a lot of Carl Sagan books. But I thought that if I did that, I would have to move to another country, and I didn't want to leave even my hometown. That's not the end of the ironies, I also thought that the alternative was to stay and end up in a teaching job, which I didn't think I was cut out for. Yet I became a TA in college (briefly) and after that experience, prepared talks and presentations at most of my jobs >_>
I live with my wife and son in New York City (if you are familiar with the NYC metro area: I don't really live in NYC). I spent 10 years in Denver before that (if you are familiar with the Denver metro area: I didn't really live in Denver). We moved to USA when our son was 8 months old, which was a bit stressing, but here we are. I was also still working on my engineering degree, which at this point I don't think I will ever complete.
Despite being Argentinian, I never cared for football, until the kiddo and I started attending Colorado Rapids games in Denver (at his request). Seeing the game live made me appreciate it and understand it in a new way. We are still fans, and we go to matches when they play close to NYC. Watching the games on TV is a weekly appointment for us. Football is one of our biggest topics, we talk players, tactics, tournaments. I read football books...combining passion with nerdom is fitting for me, I guess.
As for other hobbies and things I enjoy...
I love everything animated, from deeper adult-oriented movies to silly cartoons for kids. My favorite medium is stop motion, because it creates fantasy out of physical, tangible, things.
I have been getting back into reading, I used to complete a few books a year and for no particular reason I stopped at some point. A shame!
I also like playing videogames, rarely if ever online, and mostly independent (smaller) games.
I used to stargaze, but gave away my telescope right before moving here - I had stopped using it much.
I sometimes write code as a hobby, too.
I've been meaning to write an about page for my blog, I should totally copy and paste this :) Speaking of which...
I toyed with the idea of blogging many times over the years, when I was younger I used to write a lot. But as with many other things in life, I felt (blogging, writing open source, etc) was best left to people more qualified than me. I finally created a (very short lived) blog about configuring Emacs (a text editor) in Windows in 2017. But publishing a new article was convoluted, and I didn't quite find the tone for it, so I abandoned it.
Speaking of Emacs, it is a 70s/80s editor, but has support for advanced features (like, undoing in only a portion of your document at a time, and multiple clipboards), which gave a new bar to evaluate technology. More importantly, it is also free and open software. And over time, the ideals of making technology accessible, open, free and privacy respecting, started getting into me.
In 2023, I found out about Gemini. Not the Google product! A "protocol": a way to access pages that is not the Web, but its own thing. And it is really small, has no tracking etc. I found an easy to use service to publish a "capsule" (the Gemini term for page). So I created one! Which I won't link, because you need a special browser to access it.
That last point is what pushed me towards creating a regular Web blog. The true resistance to the modern, privacy invasive, and bloated web, isn't to go away to a different place. The best way to fight is from the inside: to stay in the web and keep it real, independent, interesting. Outside of walled gardens and social networks (yes, even Bluesky and Mastodon, the new darlings. Such a contrarian, I know).
My email service includes hosting of static files as web pages, I figured I could use that for the blog, and thus "Hoagie's small corner of the internet" was born :)
I have ideas at random times. Sometimes I write while waiting for something else to happen at work, other times I have ideas while walking, and make a quick note on my phone to write about them later. For a couple posts, the ideas come and go, simmering for a few days, until the way to go about them clicks. One time, I wrote about having no idea what to write about :)
I publish the text within a couple hours of typing it - and many times almost immediately, after a quick spell check. And then I have to go back and correct the text, because spelling is not the only thing that can go wrong when writing. Who knew... >_>
I only draft and revisit the (few) pure technical posts, to make sure that the code has no errors, and the explanations flow correctly.
So far, I haven't had to delete any content for being too silly/confidently wrong/hurtful, and maybe if that happened I would think of having someone proof reading the text. But on the other hand, I like the idea that my blog is stream-of-conscious-y.
The one thing I would say I "need" to write is either my mechanical keyboard, or using my personal laptop (that happens to have a keyboard I like. Or that I am used to. Maybe both). It's the digital version of having the right pen.
Other than that, I can write anywhere. I noticed that the more personal a post is, the more likely it is that I write it at my desk, at night.
I do believe that the physical space can make a difference. I haven't tested it for a blog post yet, but I am one of those people who equate writing code with writing prose: closer to a craft than an engineering practice. I've been stuck in the past with a coding problem, and moving to a different area, or working from a coffee shop for a day, got the thoughts flowing again.
My hosting only supports static files, so that settled a lot of technical decisions right there. But I always knew I didn't want to tie myself to a tool (site generator, framework, etc). Part of the fun of the site was coming up with my own "publishing tools". So I write directly in HTML, and have a few commands in my editor to synchronize the content, add formatted footnotes, links to images, etc. The whole thing, can be found in SourceHut. I don't expect it to be re-usable at all, but you can take a look, if you are curious. The downside to this custom tooling, is that there are features that that are still unsupported, like tag navigation. Some day...
The domain is a subdomain of the one I used for my email, sebasmonia.com. Which is the why of the funky website URL, too.
Well, speaking of the URL, it would be nice to have something...different. I am not sure what. The name is a mouthful, and while I don't care for concealing my identity in any way, having my full name right there feels...dorky :)
I know other sites do that too, but in my case it wasn't a conscious and confident choice. So, dorky.
Other than that, no, I wouldn't change too many things. The blogging is happening at a somewhat regular cadence (knocking wood), and the fact that I have a very simple site helps me publish often: I feel like I found my way of making it all work.
Sometimes I wish I should have started earlier! But then, I wouldn't have the same confidence to "put myself out there". Wishing for changes is a slippery slope...it happened when and how it happened for a reason. (Probably a less meaningful reason that we give the universe credit for. Usually chance. And that is OK, too.)
The blog is, in a way, free? Because I am paying for the email and domain anyway. But since that's a lame answer, here are the costs:
My position regarding monetization: I think people should do whatever works for them.
One of the curious changes I had when I became more concerned about free software and privacy and all that jazz, is that I am more likely to pay for my tools and services. Example, paid email instead of Outlook.com/GMail/etc. And I started donating to people who wrote libraries and tools I found useful. I have made small donations, here and there, to independent websites, too.
In my own blog, I don't see the need. I think if I monetized it (which I hadn't considered until this question), I would write thinking of an audience, it would spoil the mmmmm voice? I have right now.
This is a difficult one, as I am working through the list of People and Blogs to keep adding bookmarks :) But excluding people already featured in P&B, a few recommendations:
To no one's surprise, if they ever read my site, or made it this far in the interview, I will share some random commentary :)
This was the 92nd edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Sebastián. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him 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) — Sixian Lim (RSS) — Matt Stein (RSS) — Winnie Lim (RSS) — Flamed (RSS) — C Jackdaw (RSS) — Fabricio Teixeira (RSS) — Rosalind Croad — Mike Walsh (RSS) — Markus Heurung (RSS) — Michael Warren (RSS) — Chuck Grimmett (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 — Jarrod Blundy (RSS) — Andrea Contino (RSS) — Sebastian De Deyne (RSS) — Nicola Losito (RSS) — Lou Plummer (RSS) — Leon Mika (RSS) — Neil Gorman (RSS) — Reaper (RSS) — Matt Rutherford (RSS) — Aleem Ali (RSS) — Nikkin (RSS) — Hans (RSS) — Matt Katz (RSS) — Ilja Panić — Emmanuel Odongo — Peter Rukavina (RSS) — James (RSS) — Adam Keys (RSS) — Alexey Staroselets (RSS) — John L — Minsuk Kang (RSS) — Naz Hamid (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) — Courtney (RSS) — Dan Ritz (RSS) — Jeremy Bassetti (RSS) — Luke Dorny (RSS) — Thomas Erickson — Herman Martinus (RSS) — Benny (RSS) — Annie Mueller (RSS) — SekhmetDesign — Gui (RSS) — Jamie (RSS) — Juha Liikala (RSS) — Ray (RSS) — Chad Moore (RSS) — Benjamin Wittorf (RSS) — Stefan Bohacek (RSS) — Prabash Livera — BinaryDigit (RSS) — Radek Kozieł (RSS) — Marcus Richardson — Emily Moran Barwick (RSS) — Zach Barocas (RSS) — Gosha (RSS) — Manton Reece (RSS) — Silvano Stralla (RSS) — Mario Figueroa — Benjamin Chait (RSS) — Cai Wingfield — Pete (RSS) — Pete Millspaugh (RSS) — Martin Matanovic (RSS) — Coinciding Narratives (RSS) — Arun Venkatesan (RSS) — fourohfour.net (RSS) — Jonathan Kemper — Matt Langford (RSS) — Bookofjoe (RSS) — Marius Masalar (RSS) — Jim Mitchell (RSS) — Grant Hutchins — Simon Howard (RSS)
If you like this series and want to help it grow, you can:
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
2025-05-29 15:45:00
Almost exactly one year ago I wrote a follow-up post to comment on the newly—at the time—released website by the folks over at The Browser Company, a name I still find incredibly hilarious. It was all about their Arc browser, their big ambitions, and how they were going to I guess revolutionize everything. Ok, maybe that’s me paraphrasing.
Here we are, a year later. Arc is now officially “dead”. Not really dead dead, but pretty much dead. But fear not, there’s a new product on the horizon, and it’s another browser but with AI. Shocking I know.
Now, look, I don’t have anything against the people who work at TBC. I assume they’re a lovely group of talented, hard-working people and I wish them nothing but the best.
I’m only annoyed—frustrated?—by their CEO. And not even by him personally, I don’t know the man. For all I know he could be the most awesome person on the planet earth. I’m annoyed by his CEO persona because the amount of bullshit he’s spewing out is staggering. The other day he posted a way too long blog post to explain why they’re saying goodbye to Arc and they’re all in on AI browsing and it was a doozy.
What people actually used, loved, and valued differs from what the average tweet or Reddit comment assumes.
Look, I’m no CEO. I don’t manage people for a living, I don’t invest millions into stupid products and yet even I knew that. Let’s not forget that this was a product with no business model. The 5th chapter in their idiotic “We might not make it” marketing stunt was about not making money. And forget about making actual money, they didn’t even manage to make a video to explain how they were going to make money.
Browsers are not commercially viable products, not at scale at least. Sure, you might make a niche and quirky product some people would pay for but you’re never going to get to mass adoption on a paid product when the competition comes preinstalled on every device, it’s free, and it’s subsidized by other massive businesses.
And let’s not forget: they weren’t even making a fucking browser. They were making a fancy chromium skin. Because the role of a browser, at its core, is to make network requests, parse HTML, render CSS, and run JS. They weren’t interested in taking care of those things. They were happy to let other people do that work which, for a company called “The Browser Company” that thinks that:
the browser is the most important software in your life — and it wasn’t getting the attention it deserved
Is quite telling. And in the blog post, he even tried to gaslight everyone by saying “That’s why most browsers don’t dare to try new things. It’s too costly. Too complex to break from Chrome”. If that’s the case Josh then explain to me why a project like Ladybird is managing to make progress in precisely that direction with probably a fraction of the manpower and financial resources you had.
The reason why most projects are happy to adopt Chromium is because building the browser is the hard part and they’re happy to take the easy route and skip that part of the process. At least be honest.
Anyway, now they’re pivoting to AI, like literally every other tech company out there that thinks AI will magically transform everything and be more important than fire and electricity. And in this pivot the bet is that:
webpages — apps, articles, and files — will become tool calls with AI chat interfaces
Happy to be proven wrong but I call bullshit on that. Most content is not going to be consumed inside chat interfaces. Hell, the other side of the AI debate is arguing we don’t need a screen at all and we’re just going to talk to all these AI tools in no time. So which one is it? I guess no one knows.
But you know what I do know? That almost all these AI browsers have no business model. Because they traded being Chromium-based with being Chromium-based AND having a financial dependency on AI providers for all the API calls they’re making to power these apps. Because, in the same way, they were not making a browser before, they’re not making the AI part of the AI tools now either. And what is stopping Google from integrating into Chrome the same AI capabilities all these companies want to build in their fancy browsers? Well guess what Google just announced? Shocking, I know.
And sure, it’s not the same, all these browsers have their special fancy ways of doing things but you know who doesn’t care about that? The general audience. Because you know what most people do? They use what comes preinstalled on their devices. So yeah, good luck competing against that.
Now, while I’m here let me tackle a somewhat related issue I’ve been thinking about lately and that is the idea that AI is going to become the default layer between users and the web. We all yelled and screamed because the web has too many gatekeepers, we all lamented Google search results going to shit, and we all celebrated when new search engines were coming up. Why would I be happy trading a search result page filled with links—even if ranked in a flawed way—for a block of text that gives me an opinionated answer and maybe some links?
The sources used for that answer could easily be the first 3 results of the currently flawed SERP for all I know but at least now I can skip those. Also, should I just trust Google and OpenAI to give me unbiased results? Seriously?
But more importantly, there’s something else about this whole idea of chatting-with-a-computer-to-get-answers-from-the-web that I find incredibly off-putting: the complete lack of potential for serendipity. Clicking on links and landing on random sites has the potential to take me in unexpected directions. And also the web is filled with creative people who have incredibly interesting sites from a visual point of view. All that is absent in a chat-based world and that’s something I just can’t personally accept for myself. Feels like such a boring way to browse the web.
AI has so much potential and interesting use cases but so far I feel terribly uninspired by what I’m seeing out there.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-05-27 15:20:00
I did a few random experiments with my life over the years and they were always interesting. Life has this tendency to set itself in some sort of autopilot mode and you slip into weird habits without realizing it. So the idea of forcing myself to do things differently is quite appealing.
And since June is almost here I thought it was a good idea to try something and see what happens. There are two things I’m gonna try to do in June:
The first one is something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time: what happens if I turn the input dial of my digital life down to zero? That means no podcasts, no videos, no movies, no TV shows, no RSS feeds, you get the idea. I think it could be quite an interesting experiment and so I’m gonna try it. A couple of rules in place: I do need to check blogs when people submit them to blogroll.org and so I’m gonna keep doing that and I also have to read the interviews people send me for People and Blogs. I don’t want to simply park those two projects aside for a month so those will stay. I’m also going to allow myself some input if someone sends me something and specifically asks me to consume that content to provide feedback. That’s because I don’t want to be a jerk and if someone wants my feedback I want to be able to provide it. Those are the rules on the input side.
The extra time I’m gonna gain is going to be used for a couple of things: reading books, because I have a bunch I want to finish, working and increasing the output level, and doing meditation.
Now, about this last one: I wanted to get back into meditation for quite some time. I’ve been doing it on and off for almost 20 years at this point and I feel the need to make it a solid part of my daily routine now more than ever. The problem is that I suck at being consistent and so I’m gonna use this as an excuse to force myself back on the cushion.
June starts on a Sunday and the plan is to write a follow-up post every Sunday throughout the month to document how things are going. And to make this even more fun I managed to drag Kevin into this madness.
I think it’s gonna be fun and hopefully, I’ll get to learn something new about myself and how my brain works.
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
2025-05-24 15:35:00
I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and while I was listening to a discussion about the latest updates coming from Google and their potential impact on the web I had a sudden realization: when tech reporters say “the web” they don’t mean the web. When these people talk about the web they’re talking about the web they’re part of: they talk about the web that is powered by advertising and by tracking, the web that needs traffic to sustain itself. The commercial web is what they talk about.
That is certainly part of the web, I’ll give them that, but it’s definitely not the whole thing. The web, the “information system that enables content sharing over the Internet through user-friendly ways meant to appeal to users beyond IT specialists and hobbyists”, the one that was here from the beginning, before Google, before ad tech, before socials, that web is here to stay. That web is not going to be killed and squashed by AI-powered summaries and by AI-powered search results.
Because life knows how to be poetic, the same day the Internet Phone Book arrived at my doorstep, another very tangible—and very yellow—reminder that the web is here to stay. Because the true soul of the web is not the never-ending quest to make money, but rather the desire to create, to express ourselves, to connect. And those are here to stay.
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