2025-12-06 18:50:00
It’s Saturday morning, and I’m sitting here at my desk, working on client projects and sipping my coffee. While taking a break, I was clicking around the web, as one does, and found a post titled “Is Pixelfed sawing off the branch that the Fediverse is sitting on?” by Ploum (also featured on P&B).
I find this topic quite interesting, so I’m gonna take a moment to share my thoughts. I don’t have skin in the game, I’m not on any of these social media platforms, and I frankly don’t even care about the outcome of this situation. I’m just an external observer in this context.
Quick summary of the situation:
I can’t stress enough that this is just a quick summary, and you should read the original post. There’s also a discussion happening on Mastodon, if you want to see what others are saying.
I can see where Ploum is coming from, his concerns are definitely valid, and he’s motivated by good intentions. At the same time, though, I find his position a bit perplexing. Isn’t the point of an open protocol, like ActivityPub, to provide a structure that can be used by others to build whatever they want?
If someone wants to build a service, on top of AP, that only displays content of a certain type, they should be able to do so. Granted, they should make it very clear to the people who sign up for it that some filtering is happening, but if those same people are cool with that, then I don’t see the issue.
If tomorrow I wake up and I want to make an AP-based service that only serves audio content and is designed to encourage people sending voice messages to each other, I should be able to do so, without being required to also implement everything else that’s available on the protocol.
In his post, Ploum uses the idea of a TextFed service “that will never display posts with pictures”. If you ask me, that would be a totally reasonable project, especially if you want to build something that is not very resource-intensive, since you’re only dealing with text, and you don’t want to mess with media content. Why shouldn’t you be able to build such a thing on top of AP? Why should you be forced to accept videos and images coming from the rest of the Fediverse if that’s not what you want?
Also, it’s hard for me to square this whole line of argument with the concept of moderation. If you can’t trust a user to figure out by themselves that by signing up to something like Pixelfed, they only get a subset of the content available on the fediverse, then I don’t see how you can’t trust them to understand that, depending on which server they join, some other servers might be blocked. Does that mean the Fediverse should not have moderation?
A protocol is either open or it is not. And if it’s open, we should accept that some people might use it in ways we do not agree with. And that’s ok. But again, I'm not a fediverse user, so maybe my intuition here is entirely wrong. So feel free to reach out to let me know why I'm wrong.
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2025-12-05 23:00:00
For all I know, John O'Nolan is a cool dude. He’s the founder of Ghost, a project that is also really cool. You know what’s also cool? RSS. And guess what, John just announced he’s working on a new RSS app (Reader? Tool? Service?) called Alcove and he blogged about it.
All this is nice. All this is cool. The more people build tools and services for the open web, the better. Having said all that though, John:
If you want to follow along with this questionable side project of undefined scope, I'm sharing live updates of progress on Twitter, here.
You are on your own blog, your own corner of the web, powered by the platform you’re the CEO of, a blog that also serves content via RSS, the thing you’re building a tool for, and you’re telling people to follow the progress on fucking Twitter? Come on John.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-12-05 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Stephanie Stimac, whose blog can be found at blog.stephaniestimac.com.
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I’m Stephanie Stimac, a product manager and designer from Seattle, WA but I currently live in a small town in England. My background is in visual and web design, and I graduated at a weird time in terms of web tech. A good portion of my final year of university was spent learning about how to build websites in Flash and when I graduated, Flash quickly became obsolete, but I had a bit of HTML and CSS knowledge which helped me advance through my career. I was doing purely design work for the first part of my career before I joined the Microsoft Edge Web Platform team, where I started doing a handful of other things that were product management and developer relations adjacent. I’ve spec’d out features, analyzed data and user flows, created content for social media, performed user research to identify developer paint points, given conference talks, the list goes on.
I left Microsoft for a startup that moved me to Berlin but that was unfortunately short lived due to the company folding rather quickly after hiring 100+ people. Now I live in England with my husband and work for Igalia, a technology consultancy, and I’m back in the Web Platform space. It’s sort of like my role at Microsoft but less product and more project focused.
In between all this, I wrote a book that was published in 2023 called Design for Developers. It’s an evergreen guide to the basics of visual and UX design for web developers.
I’m a collector of hobbies but my focus lately has been reading, baking, photography, printmaking and creating content. I’m a mountain biker and love to hike as well as paddle board. I’ve also gotten into birding in the last year or so. There are so many different kinds, it’s incredible.
Depends on which blog you’re talking about! I’ve been blogging since about 2003 when I had a LiveJournal in high school. That evolved into a blogging and sharing about college life on Wordpress around 2008/2009 and went through a few iterations before I landed on the name The Hermes Homestead. I no longer blog there but am in the process of starting that sort of lifestyle blogging again and am building a new site with Astro and Netlify.
As for my more technical and design focused blog, I started that in 2019 about 3 years into my career at Microsoft. I wanted a space to talk about CSS, design and web browser things. This is my most visited blog, and it is attached to my personal website and portfolio though I called it “The Web Witch’s Blog” for a long time – now there’s just a cauldron with a code mark. It’s been through a few redesigns. It was very basic in terms of styling for the longest time. I’ve slowly made incremental improvements to things over the years, but this year I did a larger redesign to try and capture a bit of my witchy vibe and wanted to include more visuals, some subtle animations and view transitions.
There are a few different types of ways I post. I was doing monthly updates just covering things I had learned, big life events, what media I consumed in a month, books I read. I haven’t done this in a few months as I’m currently pregnant and was feeling burned out on everything. I’m sure I’ll pick those up again soon. I’ll also post about major career or life events.
Other posts are inspired by things I’ve experienced, for example I’m in the process of writing about the worst onboarding experience I have ever had with a credit card and the brand’s website and app. Nothing quite inspires me like a poor user experience, and I hope in sharing those experiences other people will be inspired to make sure whatever user experience they’re designing isn’t terrible. I’m also not afraid to share my terrible experiences working in tech, whether that’s about encountering conference line ups that are all men or finding out my book was scraped by Meta’s AI.
I also write about new CSS features that web developers can use but I have to want to write about these, so they usually need to have some sort of design focus or benefit.
Those are sort of the three main categories I center posts around at the moment, but generally if it fits into general life and career, I’ll write about it.
When it comes to writing the actual post, I usually just write straight in VS Code in a markdown file. I try to proofread in VS Code but I need a new spelling and grammar extension as I end up missing a few mistakes that I’ll correct as soon as I see them. Recently, I’ve started copying text over to Microsoft Word just for a quick visual to catch any misspellings. Then I hit publish. I rarely have someone else look over a post unless I am writing about something I’m little unsure about or if I’m talking about the company I work for. I don’t want to misrepresent them.
Overall, my process is kind of like writing for a diary. I don’t really overthink what I’m writing about and just post it. That being said, I often come up with many ideas for things to write about, but it really depends on the type of mental space I’m in whether those get finished or not. I have a pile of started but unfinished drafts.
For writing, I usually have to be at home or in a quiet space with some music. Sometimes I can write when I’m out at the coffee shop, but it is very dependent on the coffee shop and how busy it is.
Physical spaces 100% influence my creativity and just overall mood and wellbeing. I like to be in a space that inspires me, surrounded by things that inspire me. I have a hard time focusing if there’s a mess or I’m in a space that doesn’t speak to me. I like to be surrounded by an environment that has a vibe or a point of view.
I work from home so most of my work happens there. My husband and I have been in the process of slowly upgrading our home to be a space we enjoy being in. It’s been a slow process over the last two years, and we’re still making changes but it’s getting there and there are spots in our home I’m starting to love. But it’s also important to change up the scenery occasionally, so we’ll go out and work from coffee shops some mornings, otherwise I get stir crazy.
I also use a combination of digital and analog tools to keep track of things. I have a bullet journal I fill out every week with my calendar and personal to-do list, and I have what I consider a digital bullet journal for all my work stuff in Notion that’s formatted nicely. I do have a digital bullet journal for personal stuff I’m also starting to use again, which is helpful when I have a lot of long-term plans in the works.
For the technical blog, it’s hosted on Netlify and I’m using 11ty. The domain used to be registered with GoDaddy but I’ve been migrating all my domains over to Namecheap because I find some of GoDaddy’s practices predatory or less than user friendly.
The old lifestyle blog is on Wordpress and is still hosted on GoDaddy, and I’m probably going to end up paying someone to migrate it all to Namecheap for me because my migration attempts have been headache inducing. I want to keep the blog up even if it’s not active, but I’m tired of paying an exorbitant amount just for an SSL certificate compared to other providers. I think it’s criminal GoDaddy charges you the amount they do for SSL when you get an SSL certificate for free.
The new lifestyle blog will be hosted on Netlify (like most of my websites), with a Namecheap domain, and I’m building it with Astro.
For the technical blog, no I wouldn’t change anything. It’s tied to my name and career. I’m happy with Netlify and 11ty.
For the lifestyle blog, I wouldn’t use Wordpress again. It has its benefits but for the functionality I want and need, I think it’s overkill for what I personally am trying to achieve. I like having more control over the layout and design and I’m happy to be building the new one with Astro. As for the name, I only wish I had chosen something that was a bit more open instead of something that was so aligned to a specific period of my life (The Hermes Homestead). It doesn’t fit where I’m at anymore, but I feel like the new name is more open and maybe starting with a fresh slate isn’t so bad.
If I combine everything, I think it’s about $350 a year for all my blogs including URLs and hosting but I expect that to be reduced significantly once I move everything away from GoDaddy. (For reference, I just got an email from them telling me that my SSL for one of the URLs I’m letting expire won’t renew and they want £90 a year just for the SSL certificate.)
On the technical blog, I do generate a little bit of revenue but not a lot. I sometimes include affiliate links, and I do run ads on the homepage, but it is one spot in the sidebar. I don’t want an intrusive experience with ads because there’s nothing I hate more than landing on a page that is so covered in ads you can’t navigate through the page (looking at all you food blogs.) I was recently on a food blogger’s page and went to the print recipe page to try and read the instructions more easily and they had even put ads on the print page. I don’t want to replicate that experience, so I try to keep things as minimal as possible.
I really don’t mind if people are trying to monetise their content unless it’s so overwhelming full of ads that I can’t view the content. At the end of the day, I don’t know what a person’s situation is, and we live in a rather precarious and unstable time for many people when it comes to employment. Monetising could help someone reach a goal more quickly or give them a little more freedom or room to breathe in their budget.
I’ve been given product in exchange for writing a review and I don’t mind that kind of partnership. I think affiliate links are a great way to monetise without being intrusive. I use Carbon Ads for my technical blog and don’t mind their style because it’s very minimal.
In terms of supporting other bloggers, I’ll click an affiliate link or engage with their content but I’m not currently paying anyone via Patreon or a subscription, though I have in the past.
I love Henry Desroches’ content over on henry.codes and stillness.digital.
Olu Niyi-Awosusi also has a lovely blog over at olu.online and I love reading their work.
Maggie Appleton’s Garden is also full of incredible writing.
If you’re a developer trying to level up your skills outside of code, my book Design for Developers, is available on Amazon and Manning.
My colleagues host an interesting podcast that covers a range of technology topics called Igalia Chats.
On the more casual side of things, I’ve been vlogging and trying to improve my video editing abilities over on YouTube. Typically sharing my life in England and more style focused content over there.
And a final shoutout to my husband, who is constantly building absolutely wild things with CSS. He’s working on getting his blog up but for now he’s got a few links on his website.
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 118 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Eric Gregorich and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-11-30 18:25:00
As of today, I run three different newsletters, all powered by Buttondown: there’s my recently announced Dealgorithmed, my outdoors-focused From the Summit, and the People and Blogs series. I also send my blog posts via email, if you prefer to consume content that way.
They all require double opt-in. Which means that if you signed up for one of them, you should have received a second email, asking you to click a link to confirm your subscription. Sometimes those land in the spam folder, sometimes they don’t arrive at all. That’s just the unfortunate reality of emails in 2025.
I just checked, and a solid 10% of the people who have signed up for Dealgorithmed have not confirmed their address. This is a reminder to check your inbox and click the confirmation link otherwise, you will not receive the first edition when it goes out on January 1st.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-11-28 23:10:00
You’re sitting at a table. In front of you, a series of plates. They’re full of shit (like some people). Not the same shit, mind you. It’s different types, produced by different animals, in different quantities. The unfortunate reality of the situation is that you have to eat the contents of one of those plates. Yeah, it sucks, I’m sorry. But you just have to.
So you understandably start going through the thought process of figuring out which one is the “best” one. You start examining the shape, the texture, the animal that produced it. You start finding reasons to pick one over another. You start rationalising, trying to justify your decision to the other people who, like you, also need to pick which one to eat.
It’s a process. A shitty one, I might say. But in going through this ordeal, you start losing track of the only thing that really matters: this situation fucking sucks, and there’s no good answer. The only reasonable thing to do is to pick the plate with the least steamy, smelly, nasty pile of shit and then figure out a way not to find yourself in that situation ever again.
Sometimes eating shit is unavoidable. The only thing you can do is make it as painless as possible.
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2025-11-28 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Karen, whose blog can be found at chronosaur.us.
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Hello! My name is Karen. I work in IT support for a large company’s legal department, and am currently working on my Bachelors in Cybersecurity and Information Assurance.
I live near New Orleans, Louisiana, with my husband and two dogs - Daisy, A Pembroke Welsh Corgi, and Mia, a Chihuahua. Daisy is The Most Serious Corgi ever (tm), and Mia has the personality of an old lady who chain smokes, plays Bingo every week at the rec center, and still records her soap operas on a VHS daily. My husband is an avid maker (woodworking and 3D printing, mostly), video gamer, and has an extensive collection of board games that takes up the entire back wall of our livingroom.
As for me, outside of work, I’m a huge camera nerd and photographer. I love film photography, and recently learned how to develop my own negatives at home! I also do digital - I will never turn my nose up at one versus the other. I’ve always been into assorted fandoms, and used to volunteer at local sci-fi/fantasy/comic conventions up to a few years ago. I got into K-Pop back in 2022, and am now an active participant in the local New Orleans fan community, providing Instax photo booth services for events. I’ve also hosted K-Pop events here in NOLA as well. My ult K-Pop group is ATEEZ, but I’m a proud multi fan and listen to whatever groups or music catch my attention, including Stray Kids, SHINee, and Mamamoo. I also love 80s and 90s alternative, mainly Depeche Mode, Nine Inch Nails, and Garbage.
And yes, I may be named Karen but I refuse to BE a “Karen”. I don’t get upset when people use the term, I find it hilarious.
So I have been blogging off and on since 2001 or so - back when they were still called “weblogs” and “online journals”. Originally, I was using LiveJournal, but even with a paid account, I wanted to learn more customization and make a site that was truly my own. My husband - then boyfriend - had their own server, and gave me some space on it. I started out creating sites in Microsoft Frontpage and Dreamweaver (BEFORE Adobe owned them!), and moved to using Greymatter blog software, which I loved and miss dearly.
I moved to Wordpress in - 2004 maybe? - and used that for all my personal sites until 2024. I’d been reading more and more about the Indieweb for a while and found Bear, and I loved the simplicity.
I’ve had sites ranging from a basic daily online journal, to a fashion blog, to a food blog, to a K-Pop and fandom-centric blog, to what it is today - my online space for everything and anything I like.
I taught myself HTML and CSS in order to customize and create my sites. No classes, no courses, no books, no certifications, just Google and looking at other people’s sites to see what I liked and how they did it. My previous job before this one, I was a web administrator for a local marketing company that built sites using DNN and Wordpress, and I’m proud to say that I got that job and my current one with my self-developed skills and being willing to learn and grow. I would not be where I am today, professionally, if it wasn’t for blogging.
I’ll be totally honest - I don’t have a writing process. I get inspiration from random thoughts, seeing things online, wanting to share the day-to-day of my life. I don’t draft or have someone proof read, I just type out what I feel like writing.
When I had blogs focusing on specific things - plus size fashion and K-Pop, respectively - I kept a list of topics and ideas to refer back to when I was stuck for ideas. That was when I was really focused on playing the SEO and search engine algorithm game, though, where I was trying to stick to the “two-three posts a week” rule in an attempt to boost my search engine results. I don’t do that now. I do still have a list of ideas on my phone, but it’s nothing I am feeling FORCED to stick to. It’s more along the lines of that I had an idea while I was out, and wanted to note it so I don’t forget. Memory is a fickle thing in your late 40s, LOL.
My space absolutely influences my mindset for writing. I prefer to write in the early morning, because my brain operates best then. (I know I am an exception to the rule by being an early bird.) I love weekend mornings when I can get up really early and settle into my recliner with my laptop and coffee, and just listen to some lofi music and just feel topics and ideas out. I also made my office/guest bedroom into a cozy little space, with a daybed full of soft blankets and fluffy pillows and cushions, and a lap desk.
In all honesty, my preferred location to write is at a coffeeshop first thing in the morning. I love sitting tucked in a booth with a coffee and muffin, headphones on and listening to music, when the sun is just on the cusp of rising and the shop is still a little too chilly. That’s when the creative ideas light up the brightest and the synapses are firing on all cylinders.
Currently, my site is hosted on Bear.
I used to be a self-hosted Wordpress devotee, but in mid-late 2024, I got really tired of the bloat that the apps had become. In order to use it efficiently for me, I had to install entirely too many plugins to make it “simpler”. (Shout-out to the Indieweb Wordpress team, though - they work so hard on those plugins!) Of course, the more plugins you have, the less secure your site…
My domain is registered through Hostinger.
To write my posts, I use Bear Markdown Notes. I heard about this program after seeing a few others talking about using it for drafts, notes, etc.
I honestly don’t think I’d change much! I really love using Bear Blog. It reminds me of the very old school LiveJournal days, or when I used Greymatter. It takes me back to the web being simpler, more straightforward, more fun. I also like Bear’s manifesto, and that he built the service for longevity.
I would probably structure my site differently, especially after seeing some personal sites set up with more of a “digital garden” format. I will eventually adjust my site at some point, but for now, I’m fine with it. (That and between school and work, it’s kind of low on the priority list.)
I purchased a lifetime subscription to Bear after a week of using it, which ran around $200 - I don’t remember exactly. I knew that I was going to be using the service for a while and thought I should invest in a place that I believed in. My Hostinger domain renewals run around $8.99 annually.
My blog is just my personal site - I don’t generate any revenue or monetise in any way.
I don’t mind when people monetize their site - it’s their site and they can do what they choose. As long as it’s not invading others’ privacy or harmful, I have absolutely no issue. Make that money however you like.
Ooooh I have three really good suggestions for both checking out and interviewing!
Binary Digit - B is kind of an influence for me to play with my site again. They have just this super cool and early 2000s vibe and style that I really love. Their site reminds me of me when I first started blogging, when I was learning new things and implementing what I thought was cool on my site, joining fanlistings, making new online friends.
Kevin Spencer - I love Kevin’s writing and especially his photography. Not only that, he has fantastic taste in music. I’ve left many a comment on his site about 80s and 90s synthpop and industrial music.
A Parenthetical Departure - Sylvia was one of the first sites I started reading when I started looking up info on Bear Blog. They are EXTREMELY talented and have an excellent knack for playing with design, and showing others how it works.
One of my side projects is Burn Like A Flame, which is my local K-pop and fandom photography site. I actualy just started a project there that is more than slightly based on People and Blogs - The Fandom Story Project. I’m interviewing local fans to talk about what they love and what their feelings are on fandom culture now, and I’m accompanying that with a photoshoot with that person. It’s a way to introduce people to each other within the community.
Two of my favorite YouTube channels that I have recently been watching are focused on fashion discussion and history - Bliss Foster and understitch,. If you like learning and listening to information on fashion, I highly recommend these creators.
I know a TON of people have now seen K-Pop Demon Hunters (which I love, and the movie has a great message for not only kids, but adults). If you’ve seen this and are interested in getting into K-Pop, I suggest checking out my favorite group, ATEEZ. If you think that most K-Pop is all chirpy bubbly cutesy songs, let me suggest two by this group that aren’t what you’d expect: Guerrilla and Turbulence. I strongly suggesting watching without the translations, and then watching again with them. Their lyrics are the thing that really drew me into this group, and had me learning more about the deeper meaning behind a lot of K-Pop songs.
And finally, THANK YOU to Manu for People and Blogs! I always find some really great new sites to check out after reading these interviews, and I am truly honored to be asked to join this list of great bloggers. It’s inspiring me to work harder on my blog and to post more often.
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 118 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Chris Hannah and the other 127 supporters for making this series possible.