2026-02-06 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frances, whose blog can be found at francescrossley.com.
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Hello! I’m Frances, I live in the East Midlands in the UK with my wife, back in my hometown to be near my family. I like stories, spending lots of time outside, history, and being an aunt. Right now I’m into zines, playing more ttrpgs, reading lots of biographies, and am going to take some letterpress printing classes. This year I am looking forward to camping, more reading projects, outdoor swimming, and feeding all the neighbourhood slugs with my garden veg. Just generally I’m interested in creativity, learning, fun projects, and trying new things, then blogging about it. I work in the voluntary sector and adult education, and am training to be a mental health counsellor.
In February 2025 I got into an enthusiasm about the indie web. I’ve been messing around on the internet since 2000 when I started making geocities sites. There have been many different blogs and sites since then but nothing for the past few years. I really wanted to get among it and I went from looking at some Neocities sites to having my blog up and running within hours.
Since then I've had fun adding more stuff to my site, and tweaking things, but no major changes. It took a while to settle into a rhythm - which is upbeat, chatty, 250-ish words, three to five times a week. Now I'm really happy with how it's going and it feels like I’ve only just gotten started. I love emailing with people, taking part in blog carnivals, and so on.
Mostly ideas come from or are about books I'm reading, little projects I'm doing, tv and films, other people's posts, conversations with my niblings, rabbit holes I'm going down, and stuff I enjoy. Writing helps me think, possibly writing is how I think. I try to stay positive and to write posts that are hopefully fun for other people to read.
It’s very off-the-cuff when ideas come up and I put them in a draft, even just a sentence of an idea. There's always a few posts on the go at any one time and they usually get posted within a week. I like a choice of things to be working on - which is true of most stuff, not just blog posts. Some posts like my link roundups or lists of things I've been enjoying are added to over time, then posted when they get to a good length. I've been experimenting with ‘theme’ weeks or series, which has been great fun so far.
I do think the physical space influences creativity. To keep my battery charged I need to be exposed to new ideas: reading, going to a museum, looking at art, doing things. I’ve spent years training myself out of the idea I have to be in the ideal creative environment or state in order to write. I'll write queueing at the shops or on the bus, perfectly happily. It’s more about being able to write whenever I have time or ideas. Ideally, I’d be in a field. I am almost always listening to music though.
There is deliberately very little in the way of a tech stack. I use Bear Blog, which I love very much. My domains are with Namecheap. That’s it. I didn’t want anything to complicate getting started when I was in that enthusiasm. I’m mostly on my phone or tablet so it was essential I could write, post, and fiddle, really do everything, without needing my laptop. I don’t even draft elsewhere - I write directly into the Bear Blog editor because I believe in living dangerously. No backups, we die like men.
Honestly, no. I made decisions - the platform, to use my name - and I could have made them differently but I stand by them. Those are just details - writing, thinking, sharing, contributing, and connecting with people are the real focus.
I’ve got an annual paid plan for Bear Blog which is about £40 a year plus my domain name is about £12 a year. It does not generate revenue and I don’t want or need it to. People can do whatever they like with their personal blogs and I will contribute to a tip jar, buy people’s books or zines, and so on, whenever I can.
This is the toughest question! So many great blogs. Just a few, and I’d love to see any of them interviewed: mɛ̈rmɛ̈r, Sylvia at A parenthetical departure, Ruth at An Archaeopteryx, Ním's memex, Paul Graham Raven at Velcro City Tourist Board, Gabrielle de la Puente and Zarina Muhammad at The White Pube, and Paul Watson at The Lazarus Corporation.
I’m just a big fan of everyone out here rewilding the web with fun blogs, sites, and projects. Including everything you do, Manu, with your blog, People and Blogs, and Dealgorithmed. Thank you for them, and for having me here. Another cool project: Elmcat made an interactive map of the TTRPG blogosphere. Not only is this an amazing technically but it's so inspiring to see the community and all the connections.
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2026-02-05 20:10:00
I told Kevin I was going to write this post since we were discussing this topic the other day. This is my half of the argument; maybe he’ll write an “Adblocking = Piracy” post on his site if he finds the time between one meeting and the other.
I am not the first person to write this post; I am sure I won’t be the last. Plenty of people have expressed their opinion on this subject, and so far, no consensus has been reached (and I suspect never will).
For me, the reason why the two are not the same is very simple. When I pirate something (a game, a TV show, a movie, music, you name it), the original, legal, implied agreement was pretty straightforward: someone created something and put it up for sale, and if you want that something, you have to exchange money in order to get access to said something. There are no ambiguities here, and it’s a fairly simple transaction. That’s how most of society works. There’s a more complex discussion we can have to figure out if piracy = stealing, but that’s a separate discussion, and it’s not relevant here.
With adblocking, on the other hand, the implied agreement is more complex. To start, while browsing the web, I don’t know upfront if the link I’m about to click on has ads or not. So the argument that you shouldn’t use adblockers because you have accepted to be served ads while consuming a specific piece of content is shaky at best in my view. I could see that argument being more valid if ads weren’t displayed straight away, and I was given the option to leave the site before ads were displayed to me, but this is not what’s happening on the web.
Then there’s the issue of what being served an ad means. Do I have to watch the ad? Does it have to be displayed on my screen? If ads are displayed on the sidebar of your website, and I keep that portion of the browser outside my screen on purpose, is that adblocking? I’m literally not allowing the ads on my screen after all. If the ads load and I have a script that, after 100ms, replaces them with pictures of cats, is that ok? If I design an adblocker that grabs all the ads on your page and moves them all to the bottom of the page, and I never reach that portion of the site, is that ok?
The moment your data has reached my computer, I should be free to interact with it however I see fit. And if I decide to strip away most of the junk you sent my way, it’s my right to do so, the same way it was my right to stand up and walk away or change channel when TV ads were running.
Adblocking is not piracy. And actually, I think more people should run adblockers. Actually, all people should run adblockers and force businesses to reconsider how they monetise their content.
But I’ll be curious to hear from the people who are in the “adblocking is piracy” camp. Kevin, go write that blog post.
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2026-02-05 01:20:00
In the spirit of the open web, I’m writing this post to disagree with something someone else has posted on their own site. Specifically, a post titled “Ad Blockers helped kill the open web” by Christian Heilmann.
I 100% agree with Christian when he writes that:
The experience for users who don’t employ [ad blockers] is different, though, to the extend that the web is becoming unusable.
What I disagree with is what follows:
Here’s the thing: I am 100% sure these things are connected. The more people block ads, the more aggressive advertising became. To the extend that a newspaper site of today reminds you of illegal download or porn sites of the early 2000s.
This is a generalization that’s maybe true in some cases. Maybe. Maybe if we’re only talking newspapers and other news sites, maybe that’s true. Again, maybe. I suspect there are other factors at play in the newspaper landscape, and it’s not just a matter of people blocking ads therefore, we need more ads.
But the title of the post isn’t “Ad Blockers helped kill newspapers” but rather “Ad Blockers helped kill the open web”. That’s a much different claim, one that I strongly disagree with.
The argument about not wanting to be tracked, I agree, is debatable. Some people don’t want to be tracked but are happy to do the tracking on their own sites. Still, I do think it should be my right not to be tracked around, and if the only way to do that is run tracker blockers, then so be it.
But there is a difference between tracking prevention and blocking ads. Not every ad is predatory and designed to record your actions
There probably is a difference, but honestly, the burden shouldn’t be on the user to figure it out. And so blocking everything seems to be the best course of action. Also, you can totally still run ads even when people have adblockers. They can’t be programmatic ads, sure. And they might be less effective (debatable), but that’s not a problem for the users to deal with. It’s a business issue.
I agree that the web platform failed at figuring out a way to deal with monetisation. Everything ultimately falls back on Ads because it’s the only idea that “works”. But to me, the issue is that we have an overabundance of content, and most content is not worth paying for. Most content is not worth anything.
This post is worth nothing. Before the web, nobody was going to pay anything to read something like this. At best, I could write it and send it to a newspaper as an opinion piece, and maybe they’d be interested in publishing it. But for some reason, the web has morphed our perception of content to the point where everything needs to generate money because everything is considered valuable.
Well, it isn’t. The vast majority of sites on the web don’t need to make money. The vast majority of sites on the web cost very little to keep going. Adblockers have not killed those sites because there are no ads to be blocked there.
To circle back to the topic of payments, Flattr was a good idea. Funnily enough, I even had the same idea years ago before discovering that someone had already built it (obviously). But that’s also not really a solution. Because the reality of the web is that if you provide something for free, most people are not going to pay for it.
A physical paper I also skim at the store before purchasing it to see if it is worth it.
This is also an already solved problem. Sites can have paywalls or limited free content previews. It doesn’t have to be an all-or-nothing approach.
The problem with the web is that for years, corporations and individuals, who were running big and small sites, were happy to slap Google ads on their sites and cash in on the money while simultaneously helping make Google the dominant force it is today. And then enshittification kicked in, and Google started fucking those people over. This is the classic case of a shortsighted move from a previous generation that is screwing the subsequent ones.
All that said, the open web is not dead. Maybe a small subset of sites whose business depended on publishing content for free is dying. And maybe it's a good thing. But I’m not gonna feel sorry for running dual adblockers both at the browser and the network level. Surveillance capitalism fucking sucks, and we should maybe start fixing that before we worry about adblockers.
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2026-02-03 16:20:00
Visited Palmanova plenty of times in my life but never paid attention the writings at the center of main square.
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2026-01-30 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikita Prokopov, whose blog can be found at tonsky.me.
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I am from Siberia. I studied CS there, got my first job in IT, and moved to Germany in 2018. Apart from programming, I am passionate about movies and filmmaking, UI design, experimented with standup, play badminton.
I started writing in LiveJournal when I was still in uni, found a very nice Russian-speaking FP community there. Had a lot of eye-opening and often very heated discussions. Experimented with publishing in collaborative blogs (Habr, approximately Russian dev.to) but felt that author’s identity gets lost there.
Personal blog was my attempt at reaching a wider English-speaking community. Livejournal was already dying by then, and I was smart (lucky?) enough to not choose Medium (TBH, it looked very promising in 2014).
I am pretty happy with that decision. The older you get, the less you believe any startup has your best interests at heart. This leads to the only possible conclusion: self-hosting. It is hard to start but once you get your core audience there’s no limit to your growth.
I usually collect ideas for a while (pictures, phrases, links, thoughts). This happens in the background and can take years. Once it reaches critical mass, I sit down to organize it all in a coherent whole.
I don’t do separate drafts; it’s more like a pile of ideas — first pass — reflection — reorganization/cleanup — review — publish.
A mandatory part of the reflection phase is questioning myself: why am I writing this, nobody is going to read it, this is stupid/silly/trivial/too complicated. That’s how you know you are writing something truly great.
I usually ask a friend or two for feedback, Grammarly/ChatGPT/built-in Apple AI to do proofreading.
I can only write in Sublime Text because it’s a tool I use daily for coding and it has become second nature to me. I feel very uncomfortable in any other tool when some minor detail behaves slightly different from what I am used to. iA Writer is fantastic and I tried to reproduce it as close as possible, its only downside being not being Sublime Text.
I recently bought a NuPhy keyboard (Air60 v2 Cowberry) for my PC because of its compact size and cute looks, but was surprised that it sounds amazing and now I am addicted to typing on it.
Apart from that, no: any place, any time, any device. No sounds, no music, as I find both distracting.
I used to use Github pages but got tired of Ruby/Jekyll local installation breaking on macOS every year or so. I don’t blog often, so it’s the worst: you come back to your blog once every few months, completely without context, and you need to spend hours just restoring it to the status quo. Wrote my own engine in Clojure and has been happy ever since.
For some reason I didn’t go with the static generator route. I do a good old CGI style approach, with an actual server rendering your pages. It’s more fun that way, and allows for more interactivity, although I didn’t explore it much yet.
No, I am totally happy with where I am.
Server costs €35/mo, but I co-host a lot of other projects there. Domain is €25/year.
I used to have Patreon, but it was not just for blog, also for my open-source projects. I never tried monetizing writing, not sure how well that would go, but I have nothing against it.
Off the top of my RSS feed:
Fira Code is a nice programming font you might like.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 127 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Jonathan Kemper and the other 122 supporters for making this series possible.
2026-01-28 21:00:00
One of the blogs I’ve been paying closer attention to over the past few weeks is patrickrhone.net since he’s doing a great job in commenting and sharing both the awful things that are happening in Minnesota, where he’s based, but also some of the positives that are coming out from a moment this tragic.
Reading through his posts made me appreciate how important it is, in moments like these, that we still have the ability to share snippets of reality directly with each other.
Most people will likely remember when mainstream social media could be used as a force for change at a societal level. The Arab Spring is an obvious example. But that was more than a decade ago, and the social media landscape is very different right now, different to the point where I suspect something like that would not be allowed to happen again.
But the existence of personal sites, run by people who are willing to live and share their experience of what’s happening around them, remains an incredibly valuable tool in the context of digital resistance.
Judging by the reports I saw, there are attempts to crack down on Signal groups and the other ways people use to communicate and organize, so I think the more spread out, the more distributed, the more decentralized these movements are, the harder it becomes to keep them under control.
And maybe this is probably the best use case for something like Mastodon, where a multitude of instances can go online easily and make it very hard to censor them all. It might not have the same reach as the mainstream platforms, but I think it’s a lot more resilient and harder to silence.
Countries always have the option to go nuclear and block the entire Internet; we’ve all seen that happening before, but I suspect that’s harder to do in places where most of society needs the Internet to function properly.
And related to this, the other day Seth shared on his blog a link to macrowave and the first thought I had was that this—or similar ones—could become another incredibly useful tools in the context of organized resistance.
All this to say that if you have enough knowledge to set up a personal site, a forum, a Mastodon instance, or any other way to help people share what's happening and connect with each other, that’s probably something worth doing at this point in time.
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