2025-10-01 00:20:00
If you’re reading this blog using RSS or via email (when I remember to send the content via email), you likely didn’t notice it. And if you’re reading my blog in the browser but are not a sharp observer, chances are, you also didn’t notice it. A new version of my site is live. At first glance, not much has changed. The typeface is still the same—love you, Iowan—the layout is still the same, the colours are still the same. For the most part, the site should still feel pretty much the same.
So what has changed? A lot, especially under the hood. For example: I have rewritten the entire CSS, and I’m no longer using SASS since it’s no longer needed; interviews are now separate from regular content at the backend level and have their own dedicate URL structure (old URLs should still work, though); the site is now better structured to be expanded into something more akin to a digital garden than “just” a blog.
Since I had to rewrite all the frontend code, I took this opportunity to tweak a few things here and there: quotes have a new style, the guestbook has been redesigned (go sign it if you haven’t already), typography has been slightly tweaked in a couple of places, and the site should now scale much better on very big screens.
More importantly, though, P&B interviews now have a more unique design—and a new colour scheme—something that makes me very happy. There are so many things I want to do for this series, but I just don’t have the time to dedicate to this, so I’m happy to have at least managed to give them a more unique identity here on the site.
This space is still a work in progress. It will always be a work in progress, so expect things to change over time as I fine-tune minor details here and there.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs
2025-09-27 21:25:00
Over the past couple of years, I've used Literal to keep track of the books I've read and that I’m reading. When you mark a book as completed, Literal, like probably every other site and app of this type, asks for a review, which includes a 1-to-5 star rating.
I suck at this. I genuinely don’t know how to rate things on a scale, which is why the vast majority of the books I rate are either 4 or 4.5.
I think Netflix got it right with its thumbs-up, thumbs-down system, with the extra option to give something two thumbs up if you really liked it. Anything more complex than that feels a bit like overkill to me because what’s the difference between 3-star and 3.5-star books? I’m asking because I genuinely don’t know.
Anyway, I find myself reflecting on this because as I’m—painfully slowly—working on an updated version of my site, I’m considering adding a books section to it and was debating what to do when it comes to ratings. I’ll likely end up doing something similar to what Netflix does (or did; I have no idea if it’s still like that, since I don’t watch Netflix).
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs
2025-09-26 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Kris Howard, whose blog can be found at web-goddess.org.
Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter.
The People and Blogs series is supported by Dan Ritz and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club.
If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.
Heya! I'm Kris Howard, and as of September 2025, I've been blogging continuously for 25 years. 😳 I grew up in rural Indiana, had a couple of brief working stints in London and Munich, and have lived nearly all of my adult life in Sydney, Australia with my husband Rodd (aka The Snook).
I started my career as a web developer in the dotcom boom and eventually went on to manage projects and lead teams. I ended up in Developer Relations for AWS, where I travelled all over telling folks why they should use the cloud. It was a lot of fun until everything became all about AI. In 2024 I joined the Snook in early retirement (at age 47), and for the past year I've been reading books (remember books?!), hanging out with friends, indulging in my craft hobbies (knitting, sewing, and now weaving), volunteering, travelling around Australia, and generally trying to spend a lot less time in front of a computer.
I was on work-study in university, and they assigned me to work in the dining hall. That sucked, so I scrambled to find something better. I ended up working in the Computer Department just as my university was connecting everyone to the Internet. I learned HTML and built websites for myself and my dorm, and in 1996 I launched a fan site for my favourite author that's been running ever since. Fun trivia: I hosted that on roalddahl.org until the Dahl estate reached out about acquiring the domain name. I happily transferred it to them, and in return I got to meet Felicity Dahl and visit his writing hut in Buckinghamshire!
By that time I had left uni and was working as a web developer in London. I started testing out Blogger (which back then would actually FTP static files to your own webhosting!) in September 2000 and launched my blog properly a couple months later at web-goddess.co.uk. The name was a bit of a joke, a nickname that a Scottish friend gave me because of how much time I spent online. Originally my goal was just to document my life overseas for friends and family, and to share silly things I found on the Internet. When the dotcom crash hit at the end of 2001, I ended up moving to Sydney with my Australian boyfriend and changed the domain to web-goddess.org instead. For a long time I ran off my own custom PHP CMS (which I even distributed) before moving to Wordpress ten years ago.
My blogging energy has waxed and waned over the years. There were long stretches when I just syndicated content from places like Instagram and Google Reader to the blog rather than write. Since retiring from full-time work I've really renewed my focus on it as the home for all my content online. I've migrated all my posts from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to the blog, and I now syndicate out from the blog to Mastodon and Bluesky. Every day I go back through my archives and clean up broken links. (So much linkrot.) I miss the Web of the early 2000s and I'm trying to keep my little corner of it thriving.
My process is fairly casual, and I don't usually write extensive drafts before publishing. Back in the olden days, I used it basically like Twitter - just dashing off a thought or sharing a link multiple times a day. Nowadays I tend to be a bit more deliberate with what I share. Occasionally I'll get Rodd to review something, especially if it touches on our personal life (like my posts about our retirement finances). I've occasionally dabbled with creating a series of posts on a theme, like when we tried cooking our way through the Jamie's 30 Minute Meals cookbook (still by far my most popular posts ever!). When we were living in Munich, I made a point of documenting all of our travels around Europe, knowing I'd want to look back on those trips later.
I tend to write my posts in the Wordpress classic editor in a web browser. I'm comfortable with that workflow, but I've also used the Gutenberg block editor on occasion. I also occasionally post from the Wordpress app on my phone. Last year I figured out that I could post via Apple Shortcuts using the Wordpress API, which has made it really easy for me to share photos when I'm away from the computer.
Definitely. We renovated our house last year and I took the opportunity to design the office-slash-craft-room of my dreams. I've got a ridiculously wide curved monitor, a super clicky Keychron mechanical keyboard, and a very silly NES mouse. I've got a comfy chair and a desk I can adjust up and down with the press of a button. I've got everything I need within arm's reach whether I'm blogging, knitting, or sewing. Having a pegboard with lots of tools on it fills a part of my soul I didn't realise was empty! I also tend to listen to music when I'm at the computer (Apple Music via Echo Dot speaker).
I started out with my own hand-coded PHP-based CMS, which I used for fifteen years on various shared hosting providers. Eventually I realised that my rudimentary coding skills weren't meeting the security bar anymore, and I reluctantly let a friend persuade me try out Wordpress. To my surprise, I loved it and ended up migrating roalddahlfans.com over to it as well. It's not without its occasional headaches, but I haven't had any major problems in the last decade. During the initial months of the pandemic, I decided to migrate both sites from their shared webhosting over to Amazon Lightsail (since I was working for AWS at the time and wanted to learn more about the service). Both sites are hosted in the US and use the Wordpress blueprint on Linux (2GB memory, 2 vCPUs, 60GB SSD) with CloudFront as a CDN. The domain names were registered with Google Domains, which have since been migrated to Squarespace.
For a couple years now I've been toying with the idea of converting one or both the sites to be static, served off S3 or similar. It would be a lot cheaper, faster, and more secure. The challenge is that I'm not starting from scratch; I have thousands of posts and pages that I've written over the years. I also really like being able to post from anywhere, including my phone. My husband Rodd was an SRE at Google and is a much better coder than me, so he's been working on a script that would allow us to run Wordpress from our home server and generate static HTML. We'll try it out with roalddahlfans.com and then decide where to go from there.
Haha, I'd definitely choose a different name! I realised pretty early on that if you typed my domain incorrectly, nearly every other permutation was adult content. Whoops.
I'd probably go with a static site today, just to keep things as simple as possible. I love the old school tiny websites that folks are building these days, and I'd go full IndieWeb - write on my site and syndicate everywhere else.
I would be a bit more... considerate with how I write. I realised this year as I've been tidying up the broken links in my archives that I wasn't always kind in how I wrote about some people or topics. The early 2000s were a much snarkier time, I guess. I've chosen to leave those posts up, but I've added a disclaimer that they don't necessarily reflect who I am today. (Similarly, I've been adding a disclaimer on all my posts about Harry Potter. Rowling sucks, and it makes me sad.)
I held off on monetising for many years, especially on roalddahlfans.com since most of the audience are kids. Eventually I added some hand-picked Google Ads to the site and to my blog archives, restricting the placement and ad categories. I also added Amazon affiliate links to the Dahl site, since I figured a lot of parents would be likely to buy the books. These more than covered the hosting costs over the years. (In fact, Rodd had to declare my websites when he joined Google in case there was a conflict of interest!)
When we were living in Munich a few years back, I discovered that Germany has stringent tax laws about website monetisation and would require me to register as a side business. It was all too complicated, so the easiest thing was to just remove the ads. I didn't bother putting them back when we got to Australia, so for several years now there's been no income. Hosting is generally $40-50 AUD a month (for both sites), with an additional $125 AUD per site annually for Jetpack (which gives me automated backups, comment spam protection, and some other security features). This is honestly way overkill, and I reckon I can reduce that a lot in the future (especially if I move to a static site).
I don't like the idea that everything on the web needs to be monetised or that everybody needs to have a side hustle. I love it when people share things online just because they want to. That's how both my sites started, and that's why I keep them going. That said, I financially support a couple bloggers and my Mastodon instance admin via Patreon, because I want them to continue. So many sites disappear, and it's just sad.
One of the people I think of when I think of blogging is Matt Haughey from A Whole Lotta Nothing: a.wholelottanothing.org. He was the founder of Metafilter.com, and I think I've been reading his site for literally decades now. He was there when blogging was invented. Definitely someone worth talking to!
Does a newsletter count as a blog these days? The person whose words have given me the most hope for humanity in 2025 is Mike Monteiro. Every time he writes it's just so, so good and I end up blogging it or sending it around to all my friends. (Archives are here.)
I've also been really enjoying the blog of Robb Knight: rknight.me. He built Echofeed, the service I use to syndicate my blog posts out to Mastodon and Bluesky. He's always building something nerdy, or geeking out over pens and stationery.
This is so absolutely dorky, but I am currently reading the Aubrey-Maturin "Master and Commander" books. I always figured they were quintessential "Dad books" (given they are historical fiction about naval voyages in the Napoleonic Wars) and therefore Not For Me, but this amazing essay convinced me to give them a shot. I've discovered that the books themselves are fantastic, and there's this whole fandom subculture I never knew about! They refer to reading the series as a "circumnavigation," and there are charming map websites and podcasts and subreddits with fans all talking (in character!) about the books. I'm loving it. It's been a welcome escape from the news over the past few months, and I can highly recommend the series.
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 108 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Jim Mitchell and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-09-25 21:40:00
I think I’m starting to feel what I can only describe as digital fatigue. I believe this is the result of a combination of two main factors:
The solution is going to be a fairly easy one: I think I’m going to stop consuming digital content for the rest of the year and focus more on reading books and creating content myself. I know I’m going to miss reading content from a bunch of people I really like, but right now, this seems to be the only reasonable solution to save myself and my mental sanity.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs
2025-09-19 19:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robert Birming, whose blog can be found at birming.com.
Tired of RSS? Read this in your browser or sign up for the newsletter.
The People and Blogs series is supported by Numeric Citizen and the other 120 members of my "One a Month" club.
If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one for as little as 1 dollar a month.
I’m from Stockholm, Sweden, and these days I make a living doing home inspections. It’s a job I really enjoy, mostly because it takes me to places I’d never otherwise see and lets me meet all kinds of people along the way.
Before this, I’ve tried quite a few different things: bricklayer (that’s what I actually went to school for), musician (yes, that’s me behind the drums), full-time blogger, digital marketing consultant, and janitor – just to name a few.
I ended up in my current line of work after realizing I wasn’t too keen on spending my life in front of a computer screen. So I took a year off and moved to Thailand. When I came back, it felt like the right time for a change.
Now I feel lucky to have a job that’s both satisfying and flexible enough to leave time for one of my greatest interests: blogging.
I started blogging around 2002 using Movable Type, which was pretty much the only tool available at the time. After about a year, I switched to WordPress.
My first blog was called Smidigt (Swedish for “easy/handy”). It didn’t have a particular focus at first, but over time it evolved into a blog about geeky tech stuff: cool USB sticks (yes, that was a thing back then), Star Wars-inspired computer accessories, toys, and other fun finds.
Eventually, major tech sites like Engadget and Gizmodo started linking to the blog, even though it was in Swedish, whenever I posted something interesting that hadn’t been picked up elsewhere yet. That exposure led me to start an English version of the blog called GeekAlerts.
After a few years as a full-time blogger, I hit the (in)famous wall and quit. But the interest never really left. A couple of years ago, I felt it was time to return, so I started fresh with a new English blog. This time hosted on Bear, one of the cool indie platforms that had appeared during my absence.
Since then, I’ve tried a few other platforms. There are so many wonderful options available today, and I love experimenting. But I’ve also realized that I can’t hop around forever, so for now I’m sticking with what I currently use: Micro.blog
Most of my writing comes from personal experiences: people I meet, places I visit, or situations that made me stop and reflect. That’s usually where the inspiration begins.
Since I write about recent events, I rarely keep drafts. I just sit down and pour it all out. After that, I run the text through ChatGPT with a strict prompt to only “fix any grammar and spelling mistakes” and still leave room for my Swenglish style (I recently blogged about how I use AI and added a dedicated /ai page).
Once I’ve double-checked that no sneaky AI rewrites slipped in, I hit publish.
On days when I have the freedom to choose, I prefer sitting in a café with my laptop. I like the atmosphere and the change of scenery.
Sometimes I listen to music, sometimes I don’t. Sometimes I prefer silence, other times it feels inspiring to be surrounded by the everyday noise and commotion.
At the end of the day, it doesn’t really matter where I blog. I just adapt to the situation I’m in. With my long blogging experience, I’ve even mastered the skill of blogging while taking a... what’s the word again... bath.
All my posts are written in iA Writer and published straight from the editor to Micro.blog. And that’s all there is to it. No Shoobaboo or Snarfus involved. I prefer to keep things simple.
Honestly, I still have no idea what the hell I’m doing. And maybe that’s the point. Blogging has always felt more like an ongoing, joyful experiment than a plan. And I like it that way.
I pay $5/month for Micro.blog. I started on the very affordable $1/month Micro.one plan, which would still cover my needs, but I like the idea of contributing a little extra to support the ongoing development of this great platform Manton is building.
My domain name is registered with a Swedish company for about $15/year.
I don’t make any money from blogging and I don’t have any “buy me a coffee” buttons, but if you’re ever in Sweden and feel like treating me to a real cup of coffee, I’ll gladly accept your “Swedish fika” invitation any day of the week.
That said, I don’t mind at all when other creators encourage support. They bring personality and beauty into the world, so why not let people show their appreciation? For some makers, it can even be a way to motivate themselves to keep showing up and creating.
I also like supporting other creators when our paths cross. A fresh example is Jim Mitchell, the creator of the theme I’m using. When he puts out a new version, I usually buy him a coffee or two. Sometimes those updates even include requests from me, so it almost feels like I’m paying myself. A true win-win.
I love where personal blogging is today. There’s such a wide variety of voices, and I keep discovering fantastic writers every week.
Here are a few I’d love to see in a future People & Blogs edition:
I always have a lot of ideas, but these days (given my past experience) I try to let them sit a bit before acting on them. There’s no rush, and I already feel my creative urge is fulfilled with what I have.
Instead, I’d like to share someone else’s fresh project: Crucial Tracks. It’s a place to ”share the important songs in your life”, and I’ve been hooked ever since I found it. I even got the T-shirt. For real.
Thank you so much for inviting me as a guest for People & Blogs. I’ve been a reader for a long time and have discovered plenty of marvelous makers through it.
“Tack och hej, leverpastej!” That’s the Swedish equivalent of “See you later, alligator!” The problem is that ours translates to “Thanks and bye, liver paste.” Not quite as cool. And I don’t even like liver paste.
PS. Some might find my Blogging Tips & Tools page useful.
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 108 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Mattia Compagnucci and the other 120 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-09-17 01:30:00
As you probably know by now, thanks to the infinite supply of news on the subject, today new OS versions came out for Apple gadgets. Yes, it’s the one with that idiot Liquid Glass. Yes, I hate it. No, I don’t hate it because it’s different from what I was used to before. And you know why? Because I was hating the previous one as well. «Why are you still using it then?» I hear you say. Because I have no good alternatives. Most of the tools I use are developed exclusively for this ecosystem, and those are tools I love to use. Plus, Windows is not any better, and I don’t have time to deal with anything Linux. So yeah, it is what it is. I’ll get used to all this nonsense on MacOS, from the insanely big rounded corners to the awful design choices.
Something I won’t get used to, though, is the home screen on my phone. For the past couple of years, I was running with a setup that looked like this:
This empty screen was achieved with a workaround, using a combination of a purposely designed wallpaper and a few accessibility settings. And I loved it. The fact that my home screen was empty was making me so happy. The only way I was interacting with my phone was by swiping down and using Spotlight.
But now, in their infinite wisdom, the fine folks at Apple have decided that everything on this stupid device needs to show fake reflections, which means the empty dock is now back because fuck me for using the phone in a weird way, I guess.
Thank you, Tim Apple.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs