2026-06-26 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anne Lee Steele, whose blog can be found at aleesteele.com.
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I’m Anne. I’ve spent almost a decade in what I call the ‘open ecosystem', the first five years as a lurker and participant, the second five as a researcher and facilitator. I’ve done ethnographic studies of OpenStreetMap, was the Community Manager of The Turing Way, and have held a variety of fellowships with organisations ranging from the Internet Society to the Software Sustainability Institute. Outside of all these things, I would call myself an artist-of-sorts, maybe to say that I make art more than I embody the spirit of an artist, per say. But I sometimes throw the title around anyway. I guess I’ll say it: I’m a researcher, facilitator, and artist.
I was a big ‘micro’ blogger in my teens, using platforms like Xanga, Livejournal, and Flickr to document my teenage life. Then I inevitably moved to Tumblr alongside many angsty and artsy teenager girls right as Facebook started to take off in parallel, before moving to Instagram (and using it as a kind of ‘blog’ for years). I’ve gone through the inevitable cycles of use then rejection, of deleting and reactivating all my social media accounts. My original Facebook account is gone now.
When I started grad school in 2019, I started my blog as a method of sharing more about my life and research when I moved to Geneva. I think it came out of the joint desires for self-expression and a desire to get out of social media. We now collectively call this platform decay “enshittification”, but I really felt like what I was putting online was performative more than anything else. The blog felt like shouting into a voice, yes, but it was my shout, on my own website, in a void of my own creation. There’s no like button for that.
I often just create a new page on Obsidian or VSCode and just start to write. Sometimes it all comes out in one go - sometimes the draft will take years to fruition (and yes - I’ll often backdate that post to when it was created, not when it was published). There’s actually a secret draft folder on Github that hosts all my drafts in progress.
Out of all the creative processes, I find writing the most difficult, but also the most transformative. I rarely enjoy the process, but always feel better, or have more clarity, or understand something or myself better, afterwards.
In parallel to writing, I’m very much a power user of are.na which feels like a more instinctual, affectual, and social form of thinking out loud. I think a lot of the nascent themes contained there eventually end up on the blog in some form or another.
I’m a big listener of NTS radio (specifically the Breakfast Show with Flo) and use earth.fm a lot. Sounds really create a space for me - and are a way I stay grounded and aware, no matter where I might be working. If I have control over that however, I tend to need a big desk for books and papers of all kinds - maybe I need a messy desk in order to have a cleaner mind. I absolutely believe that physical spaces influence creativity. When I’m writing something long form for example, I’ll usually surround myself physically with books and visual artifacts (photos, sketches, and other detritus) related to the topic, almost like it’s a living alter to the work, or an externalised process of thinking that starts with the visual, then becomes injested and cognitive. I’ve been on the move for the past year or so, and I’ve really felt its impact on my creativity: in some ways I’m more spontaneous, but less deep and situated with my thinking. I have no doubt that this is because of my perpetual motion.
My website (and blog attached to it) is very simple. I used to host my website on Github Pages, but now it’s built on Netlify (very open to alternatives - please reach out!). I used to use Heroku before it was shut down. The whole website and codebase is on Github. You can see more about the ethos of the website, and specifically the practices I am aiming to adopt better practices for accessibility and open practices on this easter egg of a page (which you can find by clicking the sticky note in the footer): aleesteele.com/design
Field Notes from my Desktop is the name of both my blog and newsletter these days. I feel all sorts of ways about having a newsletter now – I’ve only sent out one so far. It’s a very different feeling to have a captive audience, some of which have been subscribed automatically after an event I’ve facilitated, or joined from the web. I don’t know if I like it, but it feels like in the age of information glut, there’s something about the inbox that remains sacred for many folks. I want to respect that, and maybe want to think of it as a seeding process...
For my blog, I remain dedicated to maintaining it as is, without any real changes. Looking back, I guess I would have held myself accountable to finishing more blogs in the moment: when that whiff of an idea, or a concept, or an event or reflection has completely capitvated me and I feel the need to write about it. Unfortunately I have so many half-finished blogs not because I didn’t like the topic, but rather because it was such a struggle and a slog to finish, that I didn’t bring it fully over that crest into fruition. Maybe I should have ritualised it.
At the same time, I don’t want to be too hard on myself. I did the best I could at the time. Maybe the newsletter is meant to be the rhythm, and the blog is the burst of free jazz.
I have no monetization plan, and currently don’t monetize anything I do for the blog. In fact, I pay to use Buttondown at the moment, and I’m debating whether to do that (currently $9 USD a month since they changed their membership plan). I pay for my domain, which is £12 GBP annually.
Now I’m mixing blogs and newsletters! I’ve been such a periodic reader of a bunch of different things that I tend to save on are.na, that it’s hard to pick out a few.
I’ve been a passionate reader of the Marginalian and the Creative Independent for many years. At this point, both are less blog, and more of a wiki-like resource about life, creativity, ecology, and all sorts of topics that make life meaningful and mysterious. I’ve also used read and used Open Culture for many years – which is also a blog-of-sorts. I recently learned about The Examined Mind.
One person whose writing practice I look up to is Shannon Mattern, an academic anthropologist turned New York Librarian-of-sorts and my friend Jonathan Gray who has a fantastic (and consistent!) public writing process. Both of them are academics with public practices - and while I’m not an academic, I do have a research-informed process.
I also love Julian Stodd’s blog on leadership and organisational practices. He’s done a lot of deep and open thinking that I’ve appreciated about the topic, and has stayed loyal to old school Wordpress.
This question inspires me to bring together a more curated list of blogs I’ve read and followed over the years, and also to recognise the shortfalls of my own ‘blogging’ practice. I have saved blog instances (meaning individual blogs), but I haven’t ‘followed’ a single blogger in a really long time actually. Is that because of the newsletter because I don’t use RSS feeds?
I’m developing a series of mapping meditations, based on Pauline Oliveros’ Sonic Meditations. If you have a map or a meditation to share, please reach out.
I also run internet infrastructure walking tours in London, in an effort to make invisible infrastructures more embodied and playful. This year, I’ve been experimenting with a monthly walk, and you're welcome to join one using Luma.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 147 interviews.
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2026-06-23 14:25:00
I’m hosting July’s IWBC and the timing is perfect since I split my reading year into to halves, which means I’m starting with an empty shelf in July. The book I picked is “To Have or to Be” by Erich Fromm.
I read this book now more than 20 years ago, and I remember having a great impact on young me. And so I started wondering what current me would think of it. And the IWBC is a good excuse to pick it up a second time.
If you decide to read it and post a review on your blog, make sure to send me a link and I'll be more than happy to link it here on the blog.
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2026-06-19 20:00:00
If you are subscribed to People and Blogs, you might have noticed that today’s newsletter arrived from a different address. That’s because the always lovely Zach has officially become the new custodian of this series. The peopleandblogs.com domain name has been transferred, the mailing list has been migrated (from Buttondown to Buttondown), and the RSS feed has been redirected.
As I wrote in a previous post, I’m gonna publish three more interviews here on the site before officially saying goodbye to the series on July 10th. But contrary to what I wrote months ago, I decided that I’m not gonna keep the interviews archived here on the blog, and instead I’ll redirect them all to their new location.
Keeping them here would be obviously good for me, it’s extra traffic that comes to the site, but I don’t care about traffic, and I much prefer to send people towards Zach’s site and help the series grow that way. I’m very happy that the series will continue on, and I’m excited to see where Zach will take it. As I said to him, this is his series now, he can and should do whatever he wants with it, and I look forward to seeing it evolve over the next months and years.
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2026-06-19 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Edoardo Baldi, whose blog can be found at edoardob.blog.
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Hello! I’m Edoardo, in my thirties, born near Milan (Italy) and raised in the Alps of the same region, to escape the boredom of too flat a horizon. I studied physics, first in Milan, then abroad in Switzerland, where I spent a little over four years on a PhD that convinced me academic research wasn’t for me – or so I thought, since I didn’t stray too far. In the following years I became a “research software engineer”, meaning a software developer who works closely with research. It took me a while to realize that, despite the many benefits, that work had become a routine I was taking too much for granted. Or better: I had lost sight of why I was staying there; why I kept choosing that configuration for my life. Now I’m trying to figure out if teaching the two subjects I’m most passionate about – math and physics – is what I want to do in the next chapter of my career.
I can never get enough of hiking in the mountains, especially over multiple days – as long as my body agrees. And sharing an experience with other people who love the same thing is my ideal vacation. Books, writing – I don’t know how many experiments with novels and short stories I’ve done over the years – and puzzles of all kinds (including programming challenges, even though I’m a particularly slow coder) are some of the activities that can easily fill my free time.
Having always loved tinkering with computers, I think I started writing random things online quite early. If I remember correctly, it was on LiveJournal or MySpace, prehistoric stuff now. I discovered WordPress during high school, following a guy from my same school who wrote ironic essays on philosophy topics. I tried to emulate that model, but I didn’t get very far as it wasn’t my thing. Years later, with some friends fond of cinema, again on WordPress, I started a collective blog where we wrote our opinions on the movies we watched, often together. The name of the blog – Sweet Sue and Her Society Syncopators – was a tribute to a classic 50s American comedy. (I’ll let you work that one out.)
During my PhD, I collaborated on and managed the university cinema club’s blog. At the time, however, I also started publishing my very personal ideas on books and movies on another blog, whose name or domain I honestly don’t even remember now. I think I tried to recover something from that blog via the Wayback Machine, with no success.
Fast-forward several years, I realized why none of those blogs had survived: I was writing on commission – I loved the perk of press screenings, but writing something afterwards was non-negotiable. Or I was performing for some imagined audience by covering whatever was trending, not what I actually cared about. I could say that my personal blog was born when I decided that my online space would be only a public personal journal: the only rule was to write about what interested me the most, in the way that felt most natural. This is still the reason behind my current blog. How long is it going to survive? I don’t know. It did well, so far, with ups and downs.
Beyond my hiking recaps, almost everything I write starts from curiosity – a science-based question (“if I ate an apple a day for a year, how many kg of peel could I accumulate?”), something I want to understand well enough to explain, a brain teaser that sometimes keeps me awake. Since it’s often something I don’t know, a research phase almost always follows – and I admit that, sometimes, it derails my intention to write. I keep a dedicated note for each idea, where I track its evolution. When I feel like I’ve reached a conclusion of sorts, I then sketch out a structure and use it as a guide for the first draft. Curiously, all my notes are in English, but the first draft of anything I write is always in Italian. Then I translate into English, and very often rewrite some parts that don’t flow very well in the other language. And yes, I often use Claude for a final proofread: I’ve given it strict instructions on what it can and can’t touch, and how. The content is always mine, and I’m careful to keep it that way: I don’t want to end up with a voice I no longer recognize as my own.
As for the tools, my personal notes live in an Obsidian vault – because they must be plain text files – and I write all my drafts almost exclusively in iA Writer. It’s been my first choice for many writing projects, at least in their early stages. One feature I particularly love is its support for authorship, without violating the plain text pact.
When I sit down to write the first draft, I have only one need: to be alone in a fairly quiet environment. Honestly, I’ve never tried writing in a public place, like a café – and the few times I did write on a train, it was surely due to a deadline I couldn’t avoid.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s more the act of moving through space that stimulates what I might call creative thinking – which I take to mean authentic rather than original, as in “totally new”. And I’m also convinced that the environment influences my creativity, but I couldn’t say how or why. Often I’ve only realized much later that I had visited an environment from which I returned with ideas I considered creative – whether these didn’t go very far is another, unresolved story.
I think I’ve tried dozens of frameworks to create a blog, starting with the large family of static-site generators. After several attempts, intrigued by some input from Manu, I gave Kirby a chance and discovered that it met all my needs. One above all: my blog’s content must be in plain text, as I don’t want to deal with any kind of problem taking it with me, wherever it might be in the future. So, for the moment: Kirby CMS, hosted on a fairly basic server managed by Hetzner. The domain is registered on Porkbun, and the DNS is managed by Cloudflare. I’ve also written a dozen custom plugins to tweak many aspects of my website because, for me, tinkering with the mechanics of a personal blog is part of the joy of having one. I just can’t resist – and I keep telling myself “tinker less, write more”.
I would probably study web design and web technologies properly from the start – I mostly stumbled into this stuff through my day job. I say this to avoid having to settle for some preconfigured service that isn’t right for me.
I would love to have a domain like firstname.blog, but the problem isn’t availability so much as the popularity of my name. And, honestly, I’m not ready to pay $200 a year for a personal website.
The maintenance costs for my blog are quite low: 4€ and something a month for the server, plus the annual cost of the domain – about 20€. Kirby CMS requires a one-time license (100€, renewed every four years), and this is the only expense I periodically re-evaluate: the moment it no longer aligns with my needs, I will have no problem planning a migration elsewhere. In fact, I’ve already done it several times as a stress test, but for now I don’t feel the need to.
My website generates no revenue, nor have I ever tried to make it do so. Personally, I have nothing against monetising a personal website, provided it’s done honestly. If I were to do it, I probably wouldn’t rely on platforms like Substack – only because I like building things myself. Even today I financially support some blogs because I believe in the work of the people behind them – or to give a friend a small nudge to keep going.
A good part of the blogs I follow, or like to return to from time to time, I discovered thanks to “People & Blogs” – or through “Ye Olde Blogroll”. I think it’s unlikely that anyone reading this page doesn’t know either of them; but if that’s the case, I invite you to take a look, exploring even the older, less obvious stuff.
I want to mention a friend’s project, halfway between a personal blog and a photography portfolio, that I had the pleasure of contributing to. I’m very fond of it: partly for my friendship with the author, and partly because it circles a theme that has quietly followed me for years: the sense of belonging to a place, or to multiple places; the idea, the concept, the experience of what we call home. The project is “Stay Stay Stay” by Elettra Pistoni: if you’re not into reading about this topic, her pictures are well worth a look. I also think she would more than gladly welcome the opportunity for this interview, but I’ll leave the decision to those in charge.
I’ve lost count of how many newsletters or feeds I’ve subscribed to over the years, and it doesn’t really matter. I’ve reached the point where the list of online content I follow consistently has no more than ten items. Among these, two blogs and a newsletter (in Italian) that I return to quite regularly, even to reread older things:
I’ll take this as a cue to share a bit of what’s going through my head – two thoughts and a side project that will maybe see the light someday.
Finally, a heartfelt thanks to Manu for offering me the opportunity to share a bit of myself with this community!
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 147 interviews.
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2026-06-19 02:15:00
I spent a lot of time recently reflecting on the things that make me happy and unhappy. And one thing that has emerged from all this meandering inside the inner workings of my brain is that the web is making me unhappy.
The web, as a whole, is a big place and as Bo said «Anything that brain of yours can think of can be found» which is both a blessing and a curse. Because even though my content diet is quite strict—compared to most people at least—I’m still fucked by the fact that I am a curious person and there’s an infinite amount of interesting things to be found out there on the web.
The problem is that there’s also an infinite amount of depressing and/or enraging shit out there on the web, and even though I’m not on any social media platform of any kind, I’m still exposed to that crap. And I’m tired of that. Which is why I’m wondering if it’s possible to completely decouple from the web.
I need to be “on the web” for work, since I code sites for a living, and so quitting the web entirely is not really an option at the moment. But consuming content? That is not something I have to do. And nobody is forcing me to do so.
Spending more time paying attention to the way my body feels made me realize how much I neglected taking care of my mind recently. And that’s clearly not good since those two things go hand in hand, «mens sana in corpore sano» and all that. And so I might actually try “quit” the web as a source of content and see what happens. I suspect I might end up reading more books, which is good since the goal was to read at least 36 of them this year, and I’m currently 115 pages into number 25.
Am I going to miss out on a lot of stuff? It’s possible. But aren’t we all constantly missing out on a lot of stuff anyway? Wish me luck.
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2026-06-17 13:25:00
A week or so ago, I posted about my currently ongoing fitness challenge where the goal was to go down from the almost 90kg I was weighing to below the oldest measurement I had on record, which was an 85.3kg.
Side note: that’s the oldest but not the lowest, because I do have an 81kg on record, but that’s honestly not a healthy weight for me.
I know that day-to-day weight can fluctuate considerably, I know that body composition changes a lot when you’re dieting, and I know that weight will also change a lot depending on how much I’ll train because muscles are denser and generally speaking “heavier” than fat. As much as I enjoy being an idiot and doing random shit, I am not entirely clueless about all this stuff.
All that said, I hopped on the scale this morning, as I do every morning since I started this challenge, and I guess not eating pasta and pizza is working.
Now, this is just one measurement; I can be back up tomorrow, and it means nothing in the grand scheme of things. I’m still figuring out a workout routine that works for my brain, and it’s an enjoyable process. But the summer is yet to start, there are 100 or so days in front of me to get in better shape, and I need to keep training. I'll be honest though: this is such a fun experiment and I'm having a blast.
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