Tags: sharing

P&B: Jeremy Keith – Manu

In which I answer questions about blogging.

I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.

Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?

My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.

I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.

I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.

Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).

Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.

I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.

To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!

Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?

Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.

I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.

I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?

I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?

I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.

So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.

I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?

I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.

If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs?

I’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.

That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.

Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?

You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.

It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.

We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?

You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:

thesession.org/donate

So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.

Cheers,
Jeremy

Once Again From the Top • Jason Santa Maria

Welcome back, Jason!

My favourite bit of the archive on this site is the link that says “on this day”. It’s of no interest to anyone except me, but I love going through this little time tunnel.

Using that link this month gives me a flashback to March five years ago when The Situation was unfolding.

I remember the build-up at the end of February. We were in Galway for a birthday weekend getaway. One morning in the hotel I saw the papers were running a story that seemed so Irish to me: because of this emerging virus, people were no longer to give the “sign of peace” at mass (that’s the bit where you awkwardly shake hands with the people around you). I chuckled. Nervously.

Then we were leaving Ireland, in the taxi to the airport in Dublin the radio was on. A medical professional was urging the cancellation of the St. Patrick’s Day parade because a grand total of 2 or 3 people in the country had this virus. The DJ reacted with incredulity. It sounded like a pretty far-fetched idea to me too, because St. Patrick’s Day was just over two weeks away.

The St. Patrick’s Day parade was cancelled.

Throughout The Situation I was keeping track of things in Ireland. It was like seeing an A/B test unfolding. Everything that England was doing wrong, Ireland was doing the opposite. It wasn’t quite New Zealand, but they put scientists front and centre of their decision-making precision. Whereas here, policy was driven by wishful thinking.

I was writing about it all here on my website. I also started recording a tune every day for 200 days. Here’s the first one. See how fresh-faced I am? I decided to stop shaving during lockdown. After six weeks, I looked like this.

But to really recall what that time was like, I recommend reading Jessica’s account of 2020. The first entry is called A Journal of the Plague Week and it was published five years ago. The final entry was A Journal of the Plague Week 52 a year later.

Reflections on 25 years of Interconnected (Interconnected)

Ah, this is wonderful! Matt takes us on the quarter-decade journey of his brilliant blog (which chimes a lot with my own experience—my journal turns 25 next year)…

Slowly, slowly, the web was taken over by platforms. Your feeling of success is based on your platform’s algorithm, which may not have your interests at heart. Feeding your words to a platform is a vote for its values, whether you like it or not. And they roach-motel you by owning your audience, making you feel that it’s a good trade because you get “discovery.” (Though I know that chasing popularity is a fool’s dream.)

Writing a blog on your own site is a way to escape all of that. Plus your words build up over time. That’s unique. Nobody else values your words like you do.

Blogs are a backwater (the web itself is a backwater) but keeping one is a statement of how being online can work. Blogging as a kind of Amish performance of a better life.

Naz Hamid • Your Site Is a Home

You can still have a home. A place to hang up your jacket, or park your shoes. A place where you can breathe out. A place where you can hear yourself think critically. A place you might share with loved ones who you can give to, and receive from.

I’ve been tagged in a good ol’-fashioned memetic chain letter, first by Jon and then by Luke. Only by answering these questions can my soul find peace…

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

All the cool kids were doing it. I distinctly remember thinking it was far too late to start blogging. Clearly I had missed the boat. That was in the year 2001.

So if you’re ever thinking of starting something but you think it might be too late …it isn’t.

Back then, I wrote:

I’ll try and post fairly regularly but I don’t want to make any promises I can’t keep.

I’m glad I didn’t commit myself but I’m also glad that I’m still posting 24 years later.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I use my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and MySQL. Before that I had my own hand-cobbled mix of PHP and static XML files.

On the one hand, I wouldn’t recommend anybody to do what I’ve done. Just use an off-the-shelf content management system and start publishing.

On the other hand, the code is still working fine decades later (with the occasional tweak) and the control freak in me likes knowing what every single line of code is doing.

It’s very bare-bones though.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I usually open a Mardown text editor and write in that. I use the Mac app Focused which was made by Realmac software. I don’t think you can even get hold of it these days, but it does the job for me. Any Markdown text editor would do though.

Then I copy what I’ve written and paste it into the textarea of my hand-cobbled CMS. It’s pretty rare for me to write directly into that textarea.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’m supposed to be doing something else.

Blogging is the greatest procrastination tool there is. You’re skiving off doing the thing you should be doing, but then when you’ve published the blog post, you’ve actually done something constructive so you don’t feel too bad about avoiding that thing you were supposed to be doing.

Sometimes it takes me a while to get around to posting something. I find myself blogging out loud to my friends, which is a sure sign that I need to sit down and bash out that blog post.

When there’s something I’m itching to write about but I haven’t ’round to it yet, it feels a bit like being constipated. Then, when I finally do publish that blog post, it feels like having a very satisfying bowel movement.

No doubt it reads like that too.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

I publish immediately. I’ve never kept drafts. Usually I don’t even save theMarkdown file while I’m writing—I open up the text editor, write the words, copy them, paste them into that textarea and publish it. Often it takes me longer to think of a title than it takes to write the actual post.

I try to remind myself to read it through once to catch any typos, but sometimes I don’t even do that. And you know what? That’s okay. It’s the web. I can go back and edit it at any time. Besides, if I miss a typo, someone else will catch it and let me know.

Speaking for myself, putting something into a draft (or even just putting it on a to-do list) is a guarantee that it’ll never get published. So I just write and publish. It works for me, though I totally understand that it’s not for everyone.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I’ve got a little section of “recommended reading” in the sidebar of my journal:

• Split
• Web! What is it good for?
• Seams
• Hyperdrive
• Design doing
• Iron Man and me

But I’m not sure I could pick just one.

I’m very proud of the time I wrote 100 posts in 100 days and each post was exactly 100 words long. That might be my favourite tag.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I like making little incremental changes. Usually this happens at Indie Web Camps. I add some little feature or tweak.

I definitely won’t be redesigning. But I might add another “skin” or two. I’ve got one of those theme-switcher things, y’see. It was like a little CSS Zen Garden before that existed. I quite like having redesigns that are cumulative instead of destructive.

Next?

You. Yes, you.

On Transient Slash Pages • Robb Knight

This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:

I like the idea of redirecting /now to the latest post tagged as now so one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.

HTML Is Actually a Programming Language. Fight Me | WIRED

When haters deny HTML’s status as a programming language, they’re showing they don’t understand what a language really is. Language is not instructing an interlocutor what to do in a way that leaves no room for other interpretations; it is better and richer than that. Like human language, HTML is conversational. It is remarkably adept at adapting to context. It can take a different shape on any machine, from a desktop browser or an e-reader screen to a mobile app or a screen reader for the blind (so long as that device is built to present hypertext).

Hell, yeah!

Ultimately, even as HTML has become the province of professionals, it cannot be gatekept. This is what makes so many programmers so anxious about the web, and sometimes pathetically desperate to maintain the all-too-real walls they’ve erected between software engineers and web developers.

Hell, yeeeeaaaaahhh!!!

What other programmers might say dismissively is something HTML lovers embrace: Anyone can do it. Whether we’re using complex frameworks or very simple tools, HTML’s promise is that we can build, make, code, and do anything we want.

People spent a lot of time and energy in 2024 talking about (and on) other people’s websites. Twitter. Bluesky. Mastodon. Even LinkedIn.

I observed it all with the dispassionate perspective of Dr. Manhattan on Mars. While I’m happy to see more people abondoning the cesspool that is Twitter, I’m not all that invested in either Mastodon or Bluesky. Or any other website, for that matter. I’m glad they’re there, but if they disappeared tomorrow, I’d carry on posting here on my own site.

I posted to my website over 850 times in 2024.

I shared over 350 links.

I posted over 400 notes.

I published just one article.

And I wrote almost 100 blog posts here in my journal this year.

Here are some cherry-picked highlights:

• January: Continuous partial ick — Voigt-Kampff.
• March: What the world needs — Write for yourself.
• April: My approach to HTML web components — Naming custom elements, naming attributes, the single responsibility principle, and communicating across components.
• June: Filters — A web by humans, for humans.
• August: Frostapalooza — A truly special event.
• November: The meaning of “AI” — Naming things is hard, and sometimes harmful.

Authors Apart

Another handy list of where you can get works published by A Book Apart authors.

Authors Together

In 2024, A Book Apart closed its doors after publishing a much-loved collection of more than 50 brief books for people who make websites. The rights to each book have reverted to the authors — hi, that’s us — and we’ve put together this semi-official directory to help you find our books in their new homes.

…now including Going Offline.

I wrote a book about service workers. It’s called Going Offline. It was first published by A Book Apart in 2018. Now it’s available to read for free online.

If you want you can read the book as a PDF, an ePub, or .mobi, but I recommend reading it in your browser.

Needless to say the web book works offline. Once you go to goingoffline.adactio.com you can add it to the homescreen of your mobile device or add it to the dock on your Mac. After that, you won’t need a network connection.

The book is free to read. Properly free. Not the kind of “free” where you have to supply an email address first. Why would I make you go to the trouble of generating a burner email account?

The site has no analytics. No tracking. No third-party scripts of any kind whatsover. By complete coincidence, the site is fast. Funny that.

For the styling of this web book, I tweaked the stylesheet I used for HTML5 For Web Designers. I updated it a little bit to use logical properties, some fluid typography and view transitions.

In the process of converting the book to HTML, I got reaquainted with what I had written almost seven years ago. It was kind of fun to approach it afresh. I think it stands up pretty darn well.

Ethan wrote about his feelings when he put two of his books online, illustrated by that amazing photo that always gives me the feels:

I’ll miss those days, but I’m just glad these books are still here. They’re just different than they used to be. I suppose I am too.

Anyway, if you’re interested in making your website work offline, have a read of Going Offline. Enjoy!

For Love of God, Make Your Own Website - Aftermath

Unfortunately, this is what all of the internet is right now: social media, owned by large corporations that make changes to them to limit or suppress your speech, in order to make themselves more attractive to advertisers or just pursue their owners’ ends. Even the best Twitter alternatives, like Bluesky, aren’t immune to any of this—the more you centralize onto one single website, the more power that website has over you and what you post there. More than just moving to another website, we need more websites.

The Free Web - The History of the Web

I am going to continue to write this newsletter. I am going to spend hours and hours pouring over old books and mailing lists and archived sites. And lifeless AI machines will come along and slurp up that information for their own profit. And I will underperform on algorithms. My posts will be too long, or too dense, or not long enough.

And I don’t care. I’m contributing to the free web.

Please publish and share more - Jeff Triplett’s Micro.blog

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

Also, developers:

Write and publish before you write your own static site generator or perfect blogging platform. We have lost billions of good writers to this side quest because they spend all their time working on the platform instead of writing.

Designers, the same advice applies to you: write first, come up with that perfect design later.

It turns out I’m still excited about the web

While I’ve grown more cynical about much of tech, movements like the Indieweb and the Fediverse remind me that the ideals I once loved, and that spirit of the early web, aren’t lost. They’re evolving, just like everything else.

Noodling in the Dark – Lucy Bellwood

How RSS feels:

I have a richer picture of the group of people in my feed reader than I did of the people I regularly interacted with on social media platforms like Instagram.

The secret power of a blog – Tracy Durnell’s Mind Garden

If you only write when you’re sure you’ll produce brilliance, you’ll never write.

POSSE: Reclaiming social media in a fragmented world

This rhymes nicely with Mandy’s recent piece on POSSE:

Despite its challenges, POSSE is extremely empowering for those of us who wish to cultivate our own corners of the web outside of the walled gardens of the major tech platforms, without necessarily eschewing them entirely. I can maintain a presence on the platforms I enjoy and the connections I value with the people there, while still retaining primary control over the things that I write and freedom from those platforms’ limitations.