2025-07-14 14:15:00
Week two is behind me and I have to say, I am glad I tweaked the rules of my challenge because now it is at least a challenge. Having the phone with me forces my brain to entertain the possibility of using it in random moments throughout the day and that makes the whole experience a lot more interesting.
Here’s the data from week two:
Monday : 1:20 (0:57)
Tuesday : 1:33 (1:16)
Wednesday : 2:01 (1:30)
Thursday : 2:30 (1:59)
Friday : 2:29 (2.02)
Saturday : 1:38 (1:02)
Sunday : 1:06 (0:48)Overall, the trend I saw on day one is continuing and every day, without exception, the most used apps are messaging apps that always account for more than 65% of the time spent on my phone (and sometimes that % goes up even higher).
The non-messaging time on my phone is down to pretty much nothing at this point. I’m looking at screen time right now and if I pick let’s say Wednesday, I spent a grand total of 13 minutes doing something on my phone: 1 minutes to register a read book on Literal, 1 minute on my banking app, 2 minutes on my email, and 9 minutes on Safari. That’s how I’m using my phone at the moment.
I’m only halfway through the experiment but I’m starting to think that this issue is now fixed. I can notice my brain only reaching for the phone maybe a few times a day but those occasions are easy to spot and very easy to deal with. Having said that, one thing I noticed is that I still pick it up way too much. The pickups section is reporting 71 on average for the week (it was 73 the week before, 115 before starting the experiment) and I think I can push that down to maybe 50.
So for this week three I have two extra target goals:
I’m interested to see how far I can push this because I do believe as a society we have a collective problem with phone usage and I don’t like to be part of problems.
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2025-07-11 19:00:00
This is the 98th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have but she's a girl... and her blog, rousette.org.uk
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Hello! My pseudonym online is bsag, an acronym for 'but she's a girl...' (the name of my blog, but we'll get to the origin of that later). I'm from the UK and grew up in the South East of England. I've been obsessed with animals (and more broadly nature) for as long as I can remember, so it is not a huge surprise that I ended up studying biology. For more years than seems feasible, given that it was surely only a couple of weeks ago that I finished my undergraduate degree (actually more than 30 years ago, surely that can't be right?), I have worked in academia teaching and doing research.
I have more hobbies than I have free time, so I end up doing them (and writing about them) in rotation. I read a lot from a wide variety of genres, enjoy watching films, taking photographs, walking, soldering, making and designing mechanical keyboards, spinning (fleece into yarn, not riding a static bike), riding an actual bike, tinkering with computers, knitting, using fountain pens, sewing, programming... honestly, the list goes on. I'm a person who enjoys learning, solving problems, and is attracted to things and their extremes or opposites. For example, I love 21st Century technology (well, some of it anyway), but also neolithic technology.
I have been blogging since 2002. When I started, blogs (or 'weblogs' as they tended to be known then) were starting to become popular, and I was intrigued by them. I'm interested in anything technical, and I like writing, so I decided to set up a blog. One of the motivating factors for me was to provide myself with an outlet to write freely, in my own voice, about my own interests, without the formality and constraints of academic writing. Don't get me wrong, I love the challenge and precision of scientific writing, but I also enjoy writing without those constraints, which comes back to my love of opposites again. While I was keen to connect with other people who might enjoy my writing, it was (and still is) mostly for my own entertainment.
The name came from my own experience of being a woman who is openly interested in technical things. People (mostly male people) would see me explaining or showing interest in something technical, and I would see bafflement flit across their face which — in the privacy of my own head — I would narrate as "but she's a girl...". My pseudonym came from the acronym of that phrase. My one and only regret about that is that I wish I had chosen an acronym that was a bit more pronounceable. I don't regret writing under a pseudonym though. I wanted to keep my work and personal life separate, even though I don't write anything on my blog that I would be embarrassed for work colleagues to read. Over the years, I have written as bsag on social media too, and like having this separate but consistent identity for my online self.
The blog has been through many changes of visual style and has been driven by many different blogging platforms over the years, but I don't think the tone or general content has changed that much. I used to write more often, but publish shorter articles, while my tendency now is to write much longer pieces less often. This is partly because of increasing pressures on my time, but also because social media started to provide a convenient outlet for the shorter pieces.
Do I get inspired? I guess I do occasionally. There have been a few pieces that have rattled around in my head for a while before I just had to write them down and publish them. More often, I decide to write because I get interested in it and find myself thinking about it constantly. That feeling might build quickly, or over a number of weeks. The research (if any is needed) has generally happened as a natural part of me being interested in the thing, so I just need to gather the sources I have been using so that I can cite them. It's funny to think about, but I almost never write a draft, in the sense of writing something, and putting it aside for a while before coming back to it. I generally tend to write all in one go in a rough form, then proof-read, fix errors and tweak wording, then publish. Often that happens over a few hours on a Sunday, when I have time to devote to it. The frequent typos, awkward phrasing and long-winded sentences (not to mention my rambling prose) attest to the fact that I do not get anyone else to proof read. I once asked my husband to read a post I had written about him to check that he was happy for it to be published, but apart from that one instance, it's a solo endeavour. My tools are very simple: a text editor (currently Emacs for prose), a comfortable chair and a nice keyboard.
In my dreams, I write in a book-lined study in a small cottage in the middle of a beautiful deciduous woodland, with bird song and other natural sounds drifting in through the windows. In reality, I'm in a noisy, suburban environment in which people use petrol-powered hedge trimmers all day, and wannabe racing drivers hurtle up and down the road at reckless speeds. I just have to work with it. Sometimes I will listen to music as I write, but it has to be an instrumental piece otherwise I end up focusing on the lyrics, rather than what I am writing. Usually I write in whatever passes for quiet around here.
As I mentioned above, I have used lots of blogging software stacks over the years, including full CMSs like WordPress. Some years ago now, I got into static blogging tools, and after trying a couple, settled on Hugo. I've been very happy with that for some years now, and love the simplicity of writing in plain text (Markdown) and then pushing the files up to a host. I love not having to bother about a database, and all my writing is automatically backed up, in the sense that all my files are right here on my local drive. I host at Netlify now, which has a great set up for static blogs, and is free for users with modest needs. I keep the files in a Git repository, then when I push the changes to Netlify, it automatically builds the site and then publishes it. It can take a bit of work to get things configured at the start, but from there it is very simple, and works well with my rather slow tempo of publication.
Other than a pronounceable pseudonym, no I don't think I would do things differently. I've changed platforms a few times, as I mentioned, and that was part of my learning process (as well as an insatiable drive to tinker, if I'm honest). I see the blog as a living thing, so I expect it to go through a few metamorphoses along the way. At its heart, it's still the same animal, because I am still more or less the same inside as I was 23 years ago. Non, je ne regret rien...
It costs very little. My hosting is free, Hugo is free, so all I pay for is the domain name (about $16 a year at Gandi.net). I have in the past used blogging platforms that involved a fee, and even paid for a Linode VM on which to host it (about $14-27 a month if I recall correctly). I regard it as a hobby, so I don't mind paying the costs, and am very lucky that I am financially able to do so. My reason for starting the blog and continuing all these years was to give myself a place to be free, and for me, that includes feeling free of any obligation (real or imagined) that might come with money changing hands. I don't begrudge other people wanting to monetise their blogs at all, but it's just not something I am interested in doing. I am horribly aware that my answer to this sounds like a stereotypical 1960s hippy yelling about not selling out to The Man. Anyway, I am aware of my privilege, but given that privilege, I prefer to just put my stuff out there for people to enjoy or avoid completely, as they see fit.
This is a tough choice, because I have a RSS reader full of blogs that I read regularly.
Current readers of my blog will be aware of my current obsession with switching to Linux as my 'daily driver' (as the kids say), so I have been reading a lot of articles and watching a lot of YouTube videos on the subject. Veronica is brilliant at explaining technical things in a clear but completely non-patronising way on her blog and YouTube channel, Veronica Explains. I also love the fact that she is into re-purposing old technology.
I have read Susanna Clarke's book 'Piranesi' twice already and am currently strongly tempted by a third expedition into her startlingly vivid, unsettling world. If you ever need a perfect example of the way that books can insert a complete and yet completely unfamiliar world into your brain, this is it.
This was the 98th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with BSAG. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
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2025-07-07 17:35:00
I decided to write the updates for July's experiment on a Monday this way I always have the full previous week's worth of data to discuss. The goal for this month is to fix the muscle memory my brain has built over time that makes me reach for my phone even if I don’t have any reason to do so. The plan was to leave the phone in my bedroom, next to the meditation cushion and only pick it up if I had to go outside. The target was < 1 hour a day of phone screen time.
After one week I can say that I set a goal that’s almost impossible to achieve—for reasons I’ll get into in a bit—but that this challenge is also way too easy. Easy to the point I had to tweak it already. But let me first give you some data. Screen Time on my iPhone is reporting conflicting numbers because what I see reported as total doesn’t match the sum of the various categories in the breakdown. I’m gonna list both numbers, just for the sake of completeness.
Monday : 2:33 (2:07)
Tuesday : 1:44 (1:12)
Wednesday : 1:22 (0:49)
Thursday : 1:50 (1:24)
Friday : 1:30 (0:57)
Saturday : 1:31 (1:07)
Sunday : 2:19 (1:56)These are the reported totals for each day and in parentheses I added the sum of the breakdown inside the various categories. I suspect Screen Time is including the time I’m doing meditation in the total even though the screen is not actually on—and I have my eyes closed most of the time anyway—which is why the first number is consistently higher than the second one. So I’ll focus on the second number.
As you can see, two out of the seven days I did manage to stay below 1h, a few times I was close and Monday and Sunday I was way over. To be fair to me, Monday wasn’t even July and Sunday was my birthday and I spent some extra time replying to people who wrote to wish me happy birthday so it was not a normal day.
You might be wondering why I said that getting sub 1 hour a day is almost impossible since I can clearly do it and this is why: I use Telegram to stay in touch with my significant other. Every morning I spend some time chatting with her before she starts her work day and we do the same late in the day. Those two moments alone are often almost an hour combined. Which means to stay sub 1 hour a day I’d have to either cut those moments short—and I have no interest in doing that—or I’d have to not use my phone and go use my Mac which is frankly an idiotic thing to do. Telegram—and to a lesser degree Apple Messages—are always the two most-used apps on my phone. As an example, let’s pick Thursday. 1h and 24 minutes of actual usage: that’s 84 minutes. Out of those 84 minutes, I have 44 on Telegram, 28 on Messages. That’s 72 minutes right there. That means that I used my phone for a grand total of 10 minutes that day for literally everything else.
Now, Telegram usage might be high. But I know for a fact that the reason why it's high is because I am not currently living with my partner. And I say that I know it for a fact because when we are together, telegram usage drops to almost zero. And so I consider that a non-issue.
Ok, that was the almost impossible part of the experiment but how about the “way too easy” part? Well, the plan was to leave the phone in my bedroom, on the floor, in an attempt to fix the muscle memory. The problem with that plan is that it makes fighting against that automatic behaviour way way too easy. Because I’m not an addict. I’m not going to stand up and go in the other room to check my phone. That’s just not going to happen. And so it became an “out of sight, out of mind” type of situation. It felt strange the first two days and by the third one, I was already leaving the house without my phone. But again, that is not a challenge to the automatic behaviour because I can’t fight against the urge to pick the phone up if the phone is not there. Which is why by Thursday I decided to make it harder and I’m now carrying the phone with me. I pick it up, I lay it face down on the table or on the desk and I carry on with my life. But it’s right there, I can reach it if I wanted to and that makes it at least a tiny bit harder because my brain does have that option.
But to be honest with you, I don’t think it will make much of a difference. I think next week’s numbers are gonna be pretty much the same, probably lower. I might have overestimated the effect of this issue on my life or maybe I have underestimated my ability to deal with it. That said, I do plan to carry on with this setup for the rest of the month and I’ll keep posting weekly updates because it’s fun.
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2025-07-06 18:30:00
According to my mother, I was birthed into this world late in the morning, on the 6th day of July in the year 1989 (a small part of me is bummed that I didn’t arrive into this world at precisely 10:11 am). That means today is my 36th birthday.
Contrary to other people, I never cared about posting something on July 6th here on the blog. Since 2017, the year I stared this blog, I only posted twice on July 6th: back in 2018 I wrote a blog post about typography and spacing in CSS—something I have to revisit considering my approach has changed quite a bit—and last year I posted a picture from my weekend getaway. In that post, I wrote:
There will be a time to share and elaborate on all the mental struggles and the inner difficulties. But that day is not today.
Well, that day could be any day, so it might as well be today. I am currently sitting at my desk, typing this blog post. I won’t spend a weekend away this year to celebrate my birthday. In fact, I’m not celebrating my birthday at all. For reasons unclear to me, thinking about my 36th birthday has put me in weird moods over the past week or so which is probably why I don’t feel like celebrating.
That said, I did spend some time thinking about gifts. And more specifically, what I should gift to myself. I found that to be a fun mental exercise. Like many people—most people?—I do have things I want. Some are things I want but can’t afford to buy as a present to myself: a house, a piece of forest. Those will have to wait.
Then I have other things that I could buy and are currently saved in a wishlist. And yet none of those items felt like an appropriate gift to myself this year. Ultimately, the answer to the gift question came to me while sitting in meditation. There are two things I should gift myself: kindness and time.
I am very self-judgmental and there are many, many aspects of who I am that I don’t enjoy. I look at myself and all I see are the failures and shortcomings. I see the things I didn’t manage to do. I see the things I did poorly. I see the times I disappointed others. I see the times I let others down. I see my inability to take proper care of my body. I see my inability to take things seriously.
I see many things that I don’t like. And I judge. Judging is what I do when it comes to myself. That is something I’m apparently very good at. I know it’s bad. I know it doesn’t improve the situation. And yet I still do it.
But that is why I want to gift myself those two things. I want to gift myself the same kindness I’m usually capable of extending to others, because deep down I know I deserve it. And I want to gift myself the time to change things, without putting needless pressure on myself. Because I’m not already 36. I am just 36.
My current life experiments are all focused on the mind but I noticed that I’m very unhappy with my body, for a variety of reasons. But unlike my mind, I know that is not something I can fix quickly. Which is why I’m gifting myself time, in addition to kindness. Time to do things properly, time to take care of myself. I’m going to gift myself one year to turn things around and I can’t wait to write about this again on July 6th, 2026.
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2025-07-06 02:05:00
It’s been almost a week since my June experiment ended and I’m starting to notice some interesting and unexpected long-lasting effects. I’m saying unexpected because this was not some crazy long experiment—28 days doesn’t seem like a lot to me—and yet it was apparently long enough to cause some rewiring in my brain.
In June I didn’t read news of any type. And even though we’re now in July, my brain has no interest in staying up to date with, well, basically anything. Not world news, not local news, not even tech news. I’m not actively avoiding them like I was doing in June—if someone sends me an article I read it—but I’m not actively seeking them. Which is interesting. Especially for tech news that is more on the entertainment side of things compared to world news.
Let’s digress a moment briefly to discuss the privilege of not reading news. I understand the sentiment behind the whole idea that having the choice of ignoring the news is a privilege. Part of me even agrees with it. At the same time though I also know that I have one and only one life to live and there’s no good reason to make myself needlessly miserable. The only outcome is that I become crankier and angrier with the world and I’m a worse version of myself for the people around me. So yes, it is a privilege, and I’m taking full advantage of it because the alternative is actually worse.
My brain has also stopped searching for audio content. I’m not missing podcasts one bit, precisely zero times I felt the need to reinstall my podcast player app. The other day while scrolling through the thousands of entries that had accumulated in my RSS reader during my digital fasting I stumbled upon a link to Matt Mullenweg’s interview on Decoder. This is obviously content that’s very close to my interests and so I said to myself “Let’s give this one a listen”.
As per my self-imposed rule, I stopped what I was doing and decided to do some stretching for my back while I was listening. I think I lasted around 10 minutes before getting incredibly bored. Hearing them talking did nothing for my brain and so I hit stop and got back to work.
And it’s not just podcasts. I’m typing this and there’s no music in the background. To give you some context, my Spotify Wrapped of 2024 reported 94108 minutes of music and 49832 minutes of podcasts (and I was also using Casts as well to listen to a bunch more). Now I’m working with no music in the background, I’m driving with no music, I’m not even listening to music while I’m downstairs cooking. This is so incredibly interesting to me.
It’s interesting because I’m now wondering what other things in my brain I can rewrite this easily. Because this was not hard to do. And maybe it’s because my brain was already primed by my weird lifestyle or maybe it’s because I’m also now meditating 35 to 50 minutes a day. And it’s possible that this is just a temporary effect. Still, I find this development fascinating especially because I’m conducting my July experiment—not going to tell you how that is going—and I’m wondering what else I can experiment with. If you have ideas let me know.
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2025-07-04 19:00:00
This is the 97th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Nick Simson and his blog, nicksimson.com
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Hello! I’m Nick, a graphic/interaction designer and blogger. I currently live in Albuquerque, a desert city in the Southwestern United States. I’m married to a visual artist and together we are raising a preschooler and a small dog.
I grew up in Upstate New York as a bit of a misfit creative kid. I spent hours by myself in my room every day, messing around on a Commodore 64 and drawing my own comics. My parents bestowed two incredible gifts to me in my youth: an electric guitar and amp when I turned 13, and dial-up internet.
Somehow I attended university on an academic scholarship, and declared a major in graphic design (actually, it was called “visual communication” back then). I started working as a graphic and web designer at another state university in 2011. I owe so much of my career to that first web manager who sent me a link to Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article and said “your job is to help us figure this stuff out.” 14 years later, I am working somewhere else, but still figuring stuff out.
Outside of work, I am trying to get better at guitar. My wife plays violin, and we have a few people here in Albuquerque we like to play music with. I also enjoy following sports, especially New York Mets baseball and New York Liberty basketball right now. My other teams are the Bills, the Knicks, and the Sabres. If anyone knows of a professional ⚽ club that can break my heart in equal measure, let me know.
A requirement for graduating with my degree was to turn in a website version of my design portfolio. So I registered the domain name nicksimson.com in February 2008 and went to work.
V1: A graphic design portfolio of student work. Hosted website builder tool Squarespace also has a little blogging feature. I make a “News” section. A recession happens and I do not generate much “news.” I carry this website around with me for a few years, picking up a little freelance work here and there. I eventually get hired in an entry-level staff designer role.
V2: Imposter syndrome! I’m embarrassed by my XHTML squarespace site and all my earnest blog posts. I replace the site with a proper HTML5 responsive one-page lander (no blog) while I hit the books, learning to be a proper Web Designer.
V3: I fork a Jekyll template in 2014 and make it my own, hosting a site for free on GitHub Pages. I am following people like Jen Simmons and Brad Frost, and want to share all the cool webby stuff I’m learning on the job. The blog goes dormant again between 2016 and 2020.
V4: I’m stuck at home, due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, and decide to rebuild my blog, this time with Eleventy and Netlify. I start attending Homebrew Website Club meetings and meet a bunch of other web builders and bloggers. I grow tired of Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads, and try out Micro.blog as a replacement to these things. Now I’m maintaining two blogs.
V5: I use WordPress to tie my microblogging and long form blogging all under one roof. I am all in on the Block Editor and full-site editing. I install most of the IndieWeb plugins. My blog is connected to the Fediverse and the social web.
V6 (current version): The WordPress founder and project lead sues the company hosting my website. I question how much of my future I want tied up in this software. I simplify things a bit: back to static site generation, back to Netlify. I also disconnect from a number of social media platforms.
The need to blog comes from a desire to share. I have two types of entries on my blog: notes, which are around 300-500 characters, and posts, which are usually longer and have a title. My notes are often links or quotes I want to share, and sometimes fleeting thoughts or jokes. Posts take me longer to write and publish, which is why there may only be one or two per month.
If I see something on the web I want to bookmark on my blog, for example, I will start a new markdown document in VSCode and use a YAML front matter tag of “Bookmarks” Since its all done manually, I have to remember to put my tags in alphabetical order. I use tags pretty liberally on my blog, and they do help me find and reference my older stuff.
When I get an idea for a new post, I start a new note in Apple Notes, where it might start out as a bulleted list outline and get refined over time. This allows me to start typing out a post on my phone in bed, or on the go, and iCloud sync lets it appear on my laptop where I can polish things up. Apple Notes is not a Markdown editor and the autocorrect feature is quite annoying. I should probably look into Obsidian or something to upgrade my workflow.
Everything happens in one draft usually. When I feel like a post is ready in Apple Notes, I copy and paste the plain, unformatted text into VSCode and use Markdown or HTML to format things, add hyperlinks, etc. I proof read in the browser (localhost) before I publish. I don’t use AI tools to write and I don’t have a human editor besides me. The best tip I ever heard for bloggers is to “write the way you speak.” I really aim for plain language but I have my own idiosyncrasies, like heavy use of ellipsis (…) or using words like “idiosyncrasies”.
Often I get inspired to write a response to something I’ve read, or something that happened in daily life. While my blog is very much a journal, I'm careful to make sure details I’m sharing publicly are just about me. I try not to write about stuff from my job or publish photos of my kid’s face. Sometimes I participate in writing challenges. In February 2024 I wrote about type every day of the month, and that series is still one of the most popular things I’ve done with my blog.
I am lucky enough to have a home office—a spare bedroom in our home that I work out of. I’m able to justify this since I have a remote job during the week. Having a dumpy little room with easy access to one’s books and guitars and trinkets is a joy and a privilege I want more people to have.
Physical space totally influences creativity: I spent years of my life working in a windowless basement room with a leaky ceiling at the “deferred maintenance” corner of our university campus. It was quite challenging to come up with creative concepts and solve other people’s problems when you have the background noise of water slowly dripping into a bucket or a car hitting a speed bump directly over your head because someone decided to build offices into the same level as a parking garage and put you in the middle of it.
I was blown away by my own productivity once I started working at home. I now sit in front of a window that lets in just enough light and has a great view of my apricot tree and the Sandia Mountains all year long. I can close the door and put up a 'do not disturb' sign while I’m taking a call. My office is where I get most my work done, but I do enjoy moving my laptop into our dining area, or on the couch with my stinky dog to surf the web and work on my blog.
The whole website is a static site programmed and generated with Origami, an open source project run by Jan Miksovsky. Jan was incredibly generous with his time, helping me set up the site exactly the way I wanted it to work, and giving me the room to start learning the language in the process.
My blog is a collection of markdown files in a Git repository. There’s no CMS. I have a local version of my site on my computer and when I commit a change to GitHub, Netlify builds the site and deploys a new version. For a taste of how Origami works, you can check out this file, called site.ori. It's the nucleus of my website: There’s RSS and JSON feeds in there, markdown to HTML, and a directory of slash pages. If you’re familiar with NodeJS or running npm commands, or using a static site generator like Eleventy, you can probably figure out what’s going on under the hood.
My domain is registered through Namecheap, but I use Netlify for DNS. The only other dependency besides Origami is a JavaScript-powered search library called PageFind. Contact forms are also Netlify, with Akismet for spam protection. I’m also exploring adding map images to geolocated posts with the MapBox API.
The web is this inherently noisy, chaotic place. Trying to tame it into a genteel, country club atmosphere never works out well either. I wish I learned this lesson much earlier and wasted less time in various walled gardens and silos that only looked nice on the outside. I’m so much happier on my front porch on my little block of our noisy digital neighborhood.
That said, writing on your own website can get a bit lonely. Ever since reading Leon’s "Blogging collectively" post from last year, I have a desire to invite a few others into my world and make something new, like a collaborative bloggy zine.
As far as platforms are concerned, I only trust systems that let you easily import and export your content, and don’t add a bunch of junk to your markup, so you can move around easily. I’ve been so fickle with my tech choices over the years that I’ve repeatedly broken links and feeds on the various versions of my site. There is such an art to good URL design.
I don’t know if I would register a .com again when so many expressive alternatives exist today.
My domain name is registered through Namecheap, where the price of a .com is already up to $17 USD a year, plus the ICANN fee. For email I pay $6 +sales tax each month for a Google Workspace account, which I’m not proud of, but it does a decent job of filtering out guest post inquiries and SEO services spam. My setup with Netlify is simple enough that I do not need to pay for hosting, but I feel like I should pay the company something, so I started using their basic server-side project analytics for $9 a month.
I used to pay a lot more for managed WordPress hosting, and put a support this website link in my footer back then, with links to my Bookshop.org affiliate store and ko-fi profile. I just added a simple membership tier and I’m in the process of designing some fun stickers to sell through a ko-fi shop. I know very well that the tens of dollars I could earn each year won’t replace income from my day job, but it goes a way toward covering my various costs, or could even help me fund future side projects.
I do take issue with others monetizing their personal blogs, since they are my competition and this is a zero-sum game. 😜
So I have a lot of people and blogs listed on my /following page, several who have been featured on People and Blogs before. I tried to check out the P&B archives and come up with some names and blogs that haven’t seen featured here before:
If anyone out there seriously wants to dip their toe into HTML and CSS, check out the website piccalil.li. They publish so much helpful free content and a couple of paid courses, too. I keep this one bookmarked, mostly because I can’t spell Piccalilli.
Check out Mike Aparicio’s wonderful Dogs of Dev to meet the canine companions helping out your favorite web developers each day.
You can check out my wife’s artwork at eleanoraldrich.com. I put her site together years ago, and it probably needs a redesign, but she does a great job keeping it all up to date.
I also built theordinarythings.com for my favorite Albuquerque-based band. My pal Jackie and her group have already written and recorded four albums worth of material. Selfishly, I want to make more websites like this one in the future, so get in touch if you want/need a decent website to show off your music.
Finally, I didn’t make circlejerk.blog, but I enjoy reading this machine-generated satire of some myopic tech bro takes.
This was the 97th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Nick. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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