2026-04-24 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nicolas Solerieu, whose blog can be found at slrncl.com/blog.
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I’m dad, designer, cyclist, designer, texture guy – currently living in San Luis Obispo, CA. My oldest kid just learned to blow his nose. The other one is in his prime baby time. These days I day dream about bikepacking and permaculture.
Born and raised in France, I landed in California in 2016. An odd mix of work ethic and ego led me to define myself through the stuff I make: all sorts of combinations of rectangles and text boxes, mostly for screens, solely because I got good enough to get paid for it. While I'm filled with gratitude for my career, I spend a humorously uncomfortable amount of time torn between ascetic ideals and pragmatism.
While I’m not a technologist, I’m not a monk either. I’m way too fidgety. Time outdoors, family life, movement, and occasional meditation keep me sane.
I adopted this domain name in 2016 as I didn't like having my real name spelled out in the URL, it felt weird. I bought my initial domain back in 2012: nicolas-soleri.eu, I thought it was clever. SLRNCL is a concatenation of my last name and my first name without the vowels. It's hard to remember, which is great since I'm not trying to play the SEO game.
I truly started to put effort into writing in 2022. The birth of my first child probably had a lot to do with it – and getting off instagram. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being a dad with an instagram account. But I’d love for my kids to one days read the blog of their silly dad.
Self-awareness and allergy to grandiosity creates a tension between craft, skepticism, and my embodied experience which I love to put into words. The blog-therapy is (still) working. It’s eating up most of my creative ego and filling my feed.
Nowadays I use the default iOS notes app. I write whenever. I edit little.
I used to have a notes.txt file on my desktop where I was putting down all interesting nuggets, like a wine cellar, hoping for them to mature. Instead, they mostly degenerated and created a bunch of anxiety from doing nothing of it.
I breed an uncomfortably large amount of thoughts daily. Most of them are unexceptional. I cultivate poor writing hygiene because I do not want to truly get into writing. Yet, there seems to be something that keeps bringing me back to words. To tame my ego and avoid creating a generational supply of passable notes I use my blog as a graveyard.
Typos are my own, I’m working on it. With AI it now feels like a mark of authenticity. Sometimes I ask my wife to proof-read, but that is rare because we end up arguing, worth it.
Following the flow of life is what makes my creative juice flow. I often write on the toilet or in public parks while keeping an eye on my kids. I thrive in “white-space” time - time in between things. So I jot down notes when I’m out and about. I’m not a coffee shop person and I hate my home office.
My website is home cooked. It runs mostly on PHP. I still have Jquery installed but I’m slowly removing all Javascript dependencies. I'm not a great dev and prefer to stay 5 years behind trends. My website is constrained by my skills. This has kept me grounded and covered most of my needs and ambitions. I don't recommend inspecting my code, it's really not great but decently light. Building stuff is a great way to keep myself grounded in the process. I use Inter as the only font because it's nice, plain, and open source. It will default to system font if Inter isn't available. Because I don't want to import anything custom or use CDN. I'm not better than Inter (and few out there are IMO).
The site is hosted by OVH in France. I’m considering self-hosting since my house produces excess solar power.
I’d use bearblog if I was not a pretentious web designer and had to start over. I recommended it to my wife, she likes it. The simplicity and authenticity of the project is lovely. That said I do not regret the torturous process of having redesigned my website tirelessly over the last decade. The process taught me a lot about myself.
My domain name + hosting cost under 20 euros/year. I do not run ads or track anything - I don’t plan or change this ever.
That means my website has had an incredible ROI considering the career opportunities it gave me. The many people who hired me all visited my website (and told me about it). I had some rewarding connections with internet strangers. My gratitude is larger than an html file can hold, and definitely magnitude greater than what it cost me to run my website.
Money is important, and I’m a lucky bastard. I don’t have anything against people monetizing their thoughts - though I’m rarely compelled by a paywall. Digital patronage and crowdfunding seems highly relevant to get out of the social media hell realm of today. It has pitfalls, the main one being requiring mass adoption which seems highly delusional. But hope and compassion are contagious while big tech fights entropy. Social media always comes back in a different form, meanwhile, html is still there. It’s the cockroach business model.
There are so many goodies out there, one link away. Sharing is fun, side projects too. In my case it took me a decade to get my head out of my own butt and realize the cost of my own ventures. I believe a lot of us are similar to me, moving through life and accumulating stuff. Cleaning up, giving up, and passing along are necessary processes. So as a closing thought I’d suggest to sit, close your eyes and think of all your stuff. If you’re comfortable with it, great. Otherwise, spring is coming.
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2026-04-23 15:10:00
I was catching up with some tech news yesterday and every time I read one of these “I woke up with a USD 18k bill in my Cloud account” articles, I am reminded about how fucking stupid—and predatory—this whole industry can be.
The ability to set hard spending caps should be required by law. I think that’s another issue the EU should decide to tackle at some point. If I know I have a budget available, there should be an option for me to configure your service so that you don’t allow me to spend more than that. And if my product or site goes down as a result of that, it’s a choice I get to make.
But the reason why hard caps are usually not an option is obvious: companies get to make more money this way. Hurray for capitalism! The sad part is seeing allegedly smart people arguing that no, the actual reason is that it’s a complex problem to solve, and no-one has figured out how to do it yet. An excuse so pathetic that it’s not even worth getting mad about it.
There are people discussing plans to build moon bases, put servers in orbit, build digital gods, and yet setting a hard cap on billing is a complex problem to solve. Sure, I believe that.
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2026-04-17 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com.
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I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudonym I picked up long ago. Sort of an alter ego I guess. I like how it rolls off the tongue, so I stuck with it. I was a writer (and a bit of a journalist) and a teacher before I found my way into IT. Today I’m a sort of manager who still writes plenty of technical documentation and attends a lot of meetings.
I had a few blogs in the past, but when I started working for the medical center which I'm still working for today, 8 years ago, I decided to record my quest to learn technology in a blog. Soon after I started there, I was looking for an app to write checklists and bullet points, and I found Orgzly. It seemed minimal, and I liked that it just writes everything to text files. I had no idea what org-mode was (or Emacs for that matter), and after a few weeks with the app I was deep down in rabbit hole.
So the start of my current position, along with learning Emacs and org-mode gave me a boost to start blogging what I was learning. I think it was my boss back then or one of my co-workers who didn't understand why I couldn't just use one of the many note-taking apps that were already available to us. That question, along with my reputation of always asking many of my own whenever we had meetings, had me come up with the idea that I should just call my blog “The Art of Not Asking Why,” hinting at one of my favorite books, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was just organic like that. “The Art of Not Asking Why” is kind of long, so I started to abbreviate it with “TAONAW” (I pronounce it "Tao-Now"), and I liked how it sounded... so here we are.” (the name of the book should be all caps…)
Today, my blog is a mix of quick thoughts and longer posts, both of which are handled well by design by Micro.blog, my blogging platform, which I’m very happy with. For short posts (300 characters or so, "tweets" and "toots" basically), I usually use my iPhone or Android.
Longer posts usually start in Emacs org-mode as a draft, and then are edited by hand before I pass them through Grammarly and/or AI for typos and various checks. AI is excellent to find broken links, technical terms that I might want to expand on ( and suggest links to those), and switching back to org-mode so that my draft ends up being updated with the same post, typo and error-free (or almost free) on my blog.
For screenshots, I use SnagIt, which is paid for by my job (I write plenty of technical documents). Snaggit is excellent, and I'd pay for it in a heartbeat myself if I had to. For photos, which I take with my Sony camera or iPhone, I use Apple Photos these days for light editing. I also have Darktable and Krita on my Linux desktop, both of which are free, excellent tools that are highly underrated in my opinion. They give me all the power Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom used to give me, without costing me a dime and just make me feel good to use.
My posts usually come from different experiences I go through, technical or otherwise. Sometimes I look in my journal and modify an entry from there to a post, at other times I go to my old blog and import a post from there and add it to my blog with the original timeline, yet other times I got over my images and pages on my blog - there’s always something to do, beyond just writing the posts. I think that’s part of the fun. A good blog grows with you, and you learn to tell more about yourself as you progress.
I used to work from coffee shops, but today I mostly blog from home. My apartment is quiet and less distracting, and the best time for me to write is in the morning (if I have enough time available), so this combination usually wins me over. I need to focus when I write, and I don’t like to get distracted, which is another reason why home is usually the best place. I absolutely love my noise-cancelling Sony WH-1000XM6 (and the WH-1000XM5 before those) headphones, which have been a life changer for me, a person who can get distracted when my neighbors from across the hall return home. My mechanical keyboard, a Kensis Freestyle Edge RGB, is about 7 years old now and I love the feel of the mechanical keys under my fingers. The ergonomic setup (it's a split keyboard) helps my wrists, and my standing desk helps my concentration further. When I write, I also listen to music: electronic or classical. Songs with lyrics usually distract me.
I have two computers. A MacBook Pro M2, and a System76 thelio mira, currently running Kubuntu, which is also my gaming computer. From these two, I lean slightly toward using the Mac for my writing because I take most of my photos with my iPhone and the Micro.blog desktop app that I use is for macOS.
My blog is hosted on Micro.blog, which is a hybrid of a social platform and a blogging platform in one. Micro.blog uses Hugo to build the blog and Micropub for the social network. It also syndicates to other social networks like Tumblr and Medium and plenty more that I don't use. It’s a rather unique place that follows the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) principles. I like the fact that I can download all of my data, which includes my posts, my media and my CSS/HTML templates, any time I wish and take them elsewhere. That’s how the web should be. When I joined Micro.blog I had to register my own domain, which I did, but these days you can also get a domain through them, and I believe you can also get a certificate through Let’s Encrypt in one go. It's a bit confusing at the start since the concepts of a social network and a blog (=website) are different aspects in our minds, but they don't have to be that separate.
No. What I know today and the tools I use are the best ones for me at this point. If anything, I’d encourage myself to have learned to use Emacs much earlier and to have adhered to POSSE long ago; that would have saved me from losing work on Medium and Blogger, which are now long gone. I recommend micro.blog wholeheartedly.
My plan on Micro.blog (hosting) costs $100 a year, which isn't horrible when you break it down to $8 and change per month. Micro.blog comes with many additional tools (such as hosting podcasts, encrypted notes, storing videos and more) which are worth it in my opinion. My domain costs about $30 a year.
I absolutely hate how ads work on the internet today, and I will never have ads on my blog, but I believe it's OK to ask for support or, as I like to think of it, "tips." If someone likes something I wrote, they are welcome to leave a tip. I don't need it however to keep the blog going, thankfully.
I don’t have a long list, and I think most of the folks I know were already covered in this series. I will highlight a few that are more active:
I’d love, love to see more non-techie folks on POSE-style blogs. I’m not talking about Medium or Tumblr; these are Silos. Some exist, here and there. There used to a be a priod, back when people published on movable type and wordpress was still something new no one knew about, where I was following a diner waitress from Jersey, a fighter pilot who was a patriot in the good kind of way, and of course, there was the USS clueless (I think he’s still around, in retirement). Now, you have to be in the industry to do anything like that. I had a conversation with my partner the other day and he just shrugged. The term “silo” (he uses Tumblr) is so regular now that it’s like explaining water to a fish. And it’s a shame. Those that are different, micro.blog included, seems to require some knowledge of what, I guess, used to be common knowledge if you wanted to be online. I don’t know. Perhaps if I was still a teacher, I’d teach these internet “basics” to teens.
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2026-04-16 17:15:00
I realised that the thing that bothered me the most about that stupid tabs discussion was the shallowness. Vertical vs horizontal tabs in a browser is not a deep philosophical topic worth of major explorations, that goes without saying, but you can still approach it with some nuances. And that’s the main issue with most of modern discourse: everything is—or tries to be—some sort of hot-take. Because being reasonable is boring. Being reasonable and working through a topic doesn’t generate strong reactions. And you don’t go viral for having a reasonable opinion.
Take this piece for example, titled “Vertical browser tabs are better and you should use them”. There’s an immediate question that needs to be answered there: better based on what? In David’s case, the argument boils down to essentially this:
It’s a simple matter of screen real estate. Virtually every modern computer display is widescreen, which is to say it’s wider than it is tall. Websites and web apps, meanwhile, are practically always vertical experiences.
This is as reasonable as it is wrong. I am staring at a 32-inch 4k monitor at this very moment. My browser window is almost always either square-ish or vertical. Because most sites are not designed to scale above a certain width in pixels, so there’s no point in wasting horizontal screen real estate. But it does make sense to use vertical space since I can read more text at once without having to scroll. So in my case, having tabs on the side makes absolutely no sense.
And mine is just one potential use case that throws the entire “vertical browser tabs are better” argument out the window. I’m sure there are plenty more. And this is not just true for this pointless “debate”. It’s true for most things. But modern discourse moves too fast to go deep into anything. Discussions tend to stay surface level with hot takes flying left and right. You see it in tech, you see it in politics—especially in politics—you see it everywhere.
There’s also people who think that taking nuances into consideration is a bad thing altogether, because the only reason why someone might want to drill down into a topic is to drag a discussion into the mud and stop progress, obviously. We can ignore the fact that complexity hides in the details, while agreeing on something at a surface level is as easy as it is pointless. But maybe that’s the goal sometimes: to agree on something at a surface level, feel all good about ourselves and achieve absolutely nothing in the process.
The overwhelming majority of ideas and opinions exist on a spectrum. And I am of the belief that sharing and debating where we should position ourselves, on that spectrum, is important. And if you disagree, you're wrong.
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2026-04-14 22:15:00
The other day, as I was driving home, I had the bad idea of listening to the most recent Waveform podcast, where they were discussing vertical vs horizontal tabs in browsers (and many other things). The whole discussion was truly painful to listen to, you’d hope people who talk tech for a living have some more elaborate takes on this kind of stuff, and yet, the whole discussion was very, very dumb.
I am not going to discuss the merits of vertical vs horizontal tabs, but I am going to say that if you are a fan of vertical tabs, you probably want to check out browser.horse, which has, in my opinion, the best take on vertical tabs I’ve seen so far.
It’s obviously not for everyone, especially because it’s a browser with a subscription—for what should probably be an add-on on top of your regular browser—but still, it is a clever idea, that goes beyond simply putting tabs on the side.
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2026-04-10 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Meeuwsen, whose blog can be found at blog.frankmeeuwsen.com.
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Hi, I'm Frank. A somewhat older, beardy, less grumpy digital Gen-X'er from Utrecht, the Netherlands. Since October 2025 I've been self-employed. I work as a trainer/coach/writer on using AI in a creative and responsible way and I help knowledge workers with their digital awareness, digital skills and personal knowledge management.
My whole career has been online. Since I stumbled on this internet-thing in 1993, graduated in 1996 and joined one of the first free Internet Service Providers in the Netherlands. We would now call it a startup. Back then we were cowboys doing crazy stuff.
In 1997 I started at an internet agency with two of my close friends. I left in 2009 to become self-employed, had some incredible adventures as a freelancer at the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences, telecom companies, publishing houses. An IoT startup brought me back into agency life, went bust in 2019, and I ended up back at my old agency for 6 years. In October 2025 I went solo again.
I live in Utrecht with my lovely wife and two kids. We are obedient to the true master of our family, Bowie the cat. We spend time reading, watching movies, visiting concerts, going on walks, playing D&D as a family and mostly just chilling through our lives.
I recently became a member of the Metal Business Club. A business club for anyone who also likes their music loud. Which gives you an idea of my musical taste.
In 2000 I stumbled upon a Dutch site from a guy who was just describing his day-to-day life. Sharing links, publishing short posts. I worked at an internet agency where we made our own CMS but I had never seen this thing called a blog. I clicked through on an orange button with the word Blogger on it, signed up, made my first post of a site I just visited... and that was that. I was hooked. Even though we made CMS systems for our clients, it hadn't occurred to me I could do this myself. I didn't need an editorial team, a studio, a radio tower. I could just... blog. I named my first blog Punkey, which was my nickname on IRC in the years before. And that's how it all started.
I fully engaged in the Dutch blogosphere. Since it was so small, we all got to know each other pretty fast, also because of the meetups we organized at least once every six months or so. I got active in a Dutch online magazine called about:blank, where we wrote about the Dutch blogscene. We also hosted weblogawards called the Dutch Bloggies.
In 2010 I wrote a book "Bloghelden" (Blog Heroes) about the history of the Dutch blogosphere. You can still read it for free online if your Dutch is OK.
My first blog Punkey.com lasted only five years, from July 2000 to July 2005. But after that I had plenty of other blogs:
Frank-ly (2002 - 2009) was the first agency blog in the Netherlands. I started it, left the agency in 2009, the blog continued without me. It's no longer live. What does live on is my infamous post from 2006 where I write off Twitter as a fad. One of my better mistakes.
Whatsthenextaction (2004-2008) was my English-language blog on Getting Things Done. A forerunner in what later became the productivity blogging industry. At some point it got picked up by CNN and Time Magazine. Web Archive Link.
Lifehacking (2007-2015) is the one that still stings a little. With a growing group of authors we put this term on the Dutch map. I tried to turn it into a sustainable online and offline publication. That didn't work out the way I wanted. In 2015 the site and all the posts passed to new ownership.
Digging the Digital (2014-2023) is the longest running blog I had. I changed the plumbing a few times (Ghost, Jekyll, WordPress) and it's the blog where I wrote a lot about the indieweb and owning your own platform.
Digging the Digital (2023 - present) Same name but a different URL. No more difficult titles (for now), just my name in the URL. Simple. WordPress became too heavy and too much for me. I wanted to get back to the basics of blogging, writing. Simple pieces of typing and not too difficult with themes, plugins and formatting. So I run everything on the great Micro.blog service.
It is not a really strict set of rules I follow. Actually, it never was. I always have a swipe-file with ideas in Obsidian, I've collected through the years. But to be honest, that's a big pile of files I hardly look at. Since 2025 I use Sublime as an Idea Discovery Engine. Sublime is the lovechild of Pinterest and Obsidian. You can save links, texts, video, images, audio, podcast-snippets. Put them on a canvas, connect them, find related ideas from other Sublime users and mold your own thoughts. I love to use Sublime to find new ideas, connect them and use it as a jump-off point for my own writing.
Besides that, blogposts also appear when I just have a thought. Or something I see and want to respond to. So nothing fancy. Just writing.
Sometimes I have Claude Cowork interview me on a subject or idea and use Hex (open source speech to text tool) to talk it oud loud. The unfiltered mess that comes out goes into Obsidian, where I puzzle the pieces into an actual post. It's surprisingly effective for me.
I don't have AI write the post for me. I tried this in the past, it never worked out really well. The voice is off, the thinking isn't mine. AI helps me shape my thoughts, but I stay in the driver's seat to publish the finished post.
And then there's the post-publish ritual: Somewhere between 10 seconds and 10 hours later, I spot the typos. Every blogger does this. Don't let AI ruin that experience of post-publish-typo-spotting!
I need it to be quiet. That's it. I need to focus on what I write and how the story evolves on screen. It doesn't matter if I'm in my studio, in the living room or somewhere in a coworking space. A physical space doen't influence my creativity. I've been blogging for so long, I don't need a specific creative environment to get me started. Just the energy, time and half of an idea.
Right now, everything runs on Micro.blog. It's a Hugo based blog with some specifics for the Micro.blog service but that's it. Locally I use Obsidian to write, with the Micro.publish-plugin from Otávio. I also use Drafts for shorter posts sometimes, in which I use an action to publish directly on my site.
For images and screenshots, I use the Bulk MB Image Uploader MacOS Shortcut from Jarrod Blundy's Heydingus Shortcuts Library and tweaked it a bit. It's not a perfect setup but it works. I might vibecode a better setup in the near future with these building blocks. Maybe create my own editor with shortcuts and workflows that are tailored to my way of working.
I would definitely stay focused on one domain and one name. I've had so many different domain names for different types of blogs, because I thought I needed all these different platforms and focus. Sometimes it is useful, especially when I use blog software for commercial purposes. But my personal site, from the early 2000-days to now, I would try to keep it more focussed on the same domain. While changing weblog software on the background. You could say I'm Jack-Batying Light ;-) (all the love to Jack, he is pushing the possibilities of blogging software!)
I only pay for my domains and hosting. I try to keep old domains as long as possible. The yearly costs of domains in total are €55. Micro.blog is $50 a year (€42). So give or take €100 a year. I don't create direct revenue from the blog. But because I've been around so long it gave me an extensive network of interesting people who want to work with me on digital fitness, AI and new technology. So there are indirect revenues, which I think is the best way in the long run. If people want to monetize their personal blog, go ahead! I don't mind you sell your zine, stickers, workshop and other stuff through your blog. Just don't put ads on them. Or do it the Dense Discovery way, with artisanal, value-aligned sponsors who fit in the format.
I am so happy to see a renaissance of the personal internet. New search engines, cross-overs to digital gardens and personal knowledge management. That said, let me first drop some bloggers who have been around as long as the web.
Some others worth recommending
I have been quiet on my blog lately, something that happens to most of us. For me, it is because of work and a sideproject I'm working on. This is called CreativeNotes, in which I interview creative professionals in the Netherlands about how they use paper notes in their creative process. I'm exploring that pivotal moment when creatives consciously choose an analog tool over a screen. I want to document how paper notes not only help bring focus and flow, but often serve as the essential building blocks of the final creative product.
By collecting stories and notebook images from a wide range of creators, I'm looking for patterns in how ideas develop on paper. What I find may be useful for anyone who thinks for a living.
You can learn more about the project (in Dutch) here: https://notes.frankmeeuwsen.com/over-creativenotes
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 138 interviews.
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