2025-11-14 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nic Chan, whose blog can be found at nicchan.me.
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Hi, my name is Nic Chan! I'm a web developer and hobbyist artist who lives in Hong Kong. It's pretty funny, depending on who you ask, the audience is shocked to hear about my secret other life, since I typically keep these identities very separate. If I'm not tinkering with websites or frantically mixing paint, you might find me shitposting on Mastodon, sweating through the Hong Kong summers or volunteering at the cat shelter.
Despite growing up on the internet, I had never intended to be a web developer. I studied Fine Arts at a small liberal arts college in California, where I solidified a vaguely Californian accent that haunts me till this day. I entered the working world hoping to start a career that would somehow be arts related, but quickly decided that it wasn't for me. The art world, especially at higher levels, feels very inauthentic and performative in a way that left me constantly tired.
During that time, I managed to convince my employer that it would save them money if I also managed their website for them, and used that opportunity as a spring board to teach myself web development. Upon reflection, I have no idea how I managed to convince them that this was a good idea.
Though some engagements were longer than others, I've been a freelance web developer for around 10 years now! I'm a web generalist, but the thing I want to do more of is building sustainable and accessible websites with core web technologies. This really is the reason I continue to do what I do! I love the web as a medium, and I want to see it thrive.
The reason why I started posting on my blog was basically to prove to clients that I was a real, trustworthy person. Unfortunately, to have any sort of success as a freelancer, unless you are a literal savant, I think you need to do -some- kind of marketing, and blogging is the only method that I found acceptable to me personally. (LinkedIn was still a cesspit in 2015!)
In recent years, the blog has very much drifted away from that original purpose. I now mostly post very long-form thoughts on tech industry topics, whenever I feel the need to. For some odd reason, my instructional/informative writing is not as popular as my ranting, so I will leave tech education to other folks! As far as my blog goes now, I probably spend an equal amount of time tinkering on random code parts of the site as writing blog posts.
I want to explore more topics outside of web development and the tech industry in the future. My absolute favorite bloggers are the ones who 'bring their whole selves' to their blog, and post updates on their creative hobbies or whatever is on their mind at the moment. The thing I love about the IndieWeb is mostly the people behind it, so getting to bond over the little things like shared hobbies is one of the main draws for me. Fuck the technology, I'm here for the people.
My blogging process is pretty simple. I might have an idea for a topic, and I'll create a file in Obsidian with as much information as I care to note down, and when I get a moment I will come back and write out the post, usually in a very linear way, in as many sittings as it takes to finish the draft.
I switched to Obsidian sometime in 2025 and it really did help me get a lot more writing done than I did in years past — cloud-based SaaS solutions are fine, but apparently, if I have to log in to a website to start writing, that does pose a significant barrier to me actually getting any writing done. Having Obsidian just be there on my desktop removes that tiny bit of friction, and I had really underestimated how important that is to the creative process.
Once a draft is done, I like to let things sit and marinate for a while, until I can read it again with 'fresh eyes.' You'll never find a super timely take on current events on my blog, I take far too long for that! I don't typically write additional drafts — call it a character flaw, but I'm far more likely to scrap an idea completely than to rework it in a substantial way.
Shamefully, I have posts from over a year ago that are still about 90% complete. They will sit until I finally manage to push through whatever reservations I might have about posting and just hit the publish button.
If I'm writing something more technical or industry-related, I will try badger some folks to do a quick read-through. Special shoutout to my buddy EJ Mason for being the person who usually suffers through this task.
I have a pretty particular desk setup for ergonomic/health reasons. I am physically incapable of being a laptop in a coffee shop kind of person, my fingers will start to turn numb as I use the trackpad, and I've used a custom keyboard layout for so long I can't really get work done on a traditional keyboard layout!
If I'm writing at my computer, I need to be in my home office, at my PC, with my Ergodox EZ (a split ortholinear keyboard that has served me very well over the past few years), and a drawing tablet as a pointer device. I like it to be nice and quiet when I'm writing, if there's background noise, I can't hear my internal voice over the sound of other people speaking!
Even with this particular setup, sitting at my desk does tire me out more than most people, so on very rare occasions I will draft a post with pen and paper. Unlike with computer writing, I'm completely agnostic as to what materials I actually write with, I've occasionally written post outlines on stray receipts or napkins.
I built my personal site with Astro and Svelte! I have a whole series on the topic of building my website if you want a peek behind the hood at how I did it. There's so much I want to do to extend the site, but I find the biggest obstacle remains creating the graphics. The funny thing is, I definitely feel a sense of dread when looking at a blank canvas, even when I know what the final product is going to look like. Maybe putting this out there in the world will be the kick in the butt I need to make progress!
Everything is managed in code and Markdown, without a CMS. Though it does have flaws and limitations when it comes to certain components, Markdown remains my favorite format for drafting pretty much anything.
My site is currently hosted on Cloudflare. I fully admit that it's not very IndieWeb of me, I do feel strongly about potentially moving off big tech infrastructure, but I'm not very good at managing servers on my own and I'm a bit scared to do so with the prevalence of bad-faith crawlers.
Yeah, I wouldn't write the components in Svelte. If you look back at my posts, I acknowledge that I would probably regret this decision and want to use web components later, but at the time I lacked the web components knowledge to execute the vision properly. No shade against Svelte, it's just that for something like my blog, I prefer to have to deal with less of a maintenance burden than I might willingly take on for a work project, since I'm only in the codebase for a couple of times a year. There are some features/syntax that I'm using that will likely be deprecated in future versions of Svelte, so that's a pain I will have to deal with eventually.
In my youth, I definitely had a bit of 'shiny new thing syndrome' when it came to web technologies. Nowadays, I prefer things that are more stable and slow. I've been burned just a few too many times for me to feel excited about proprietary technology!
I pay for $24 USD for a domain name. I swear it used to be cheaper in the past!
I also pay Plausible and Tinylytics as I believe in paying for privacy-respecting services. I started with Plausible, and at some point I became preoccupied with having a heart button for my posts, so I added Tinylytics. It's on my long list of todos to sort this out, I definitely don't need both. I mainly keep analytics to know where my posts are being linked from — doing this has helped me find some really awesome people and blogs (badum-tsh).
Other than that, keeping the site running is free. This might change in the future, I do want to do more fun things that might require more financial resources, but I don't have any intent to monetize it, it's just a little home on the internet that I'm happy throw cash at to keep the (metaphorical) lights on.
In no particularly order, here's a list of blogs I've been really enjoying. I think there will be some level of overlap with the People and Blogs folks, as I've been a long-time reader and found many folks worth following through this series, so thank you Manu!
After rambling on for far too long for most of this, I'm finally at a loss for words. I'd be much obliged if you visited my site but you can also follow me on Mastodon if you have a hankering for some shelter cat pics.
I have a submission coming out for the 'Free To Play' gaming-themed zine under Difference Engine, a Singaporean indie comics publisher. It's a collaboration with the narrative designer & writer Sarah Mak, I hope you'll check it out when the time comes!
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 115 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Erik Blankvoort and the other 125 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-11-14 17:40:00
Always nice to get emails from people sharing their thoughts on this topic. Looks like I’m not the only one feeling this way, and a few weeks back Jeremy wrote a post touching a very similar topic. It also made me smile seeing him mention Henry David Thoreau in his post because I just finished reading one of Thoreau’s books, I’m currently reading a second one, and there’s a third one waiting for me next to the bed.
In my post, I wrote that «the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume.» and that is exactly what I did yesterday morning. The total number of feeds on my RSS reader went down from hundreds to exactly seventeen. I stopped at nineteen initially, but later in the day, I decided to remove two more after realising I should follow two simple rules:
Time will tell if this setup works or not, but I think it’s a good starting point to reshape my digital diet. And speaking of ingesting digital content, I will not pass on this opportunity to mention that Jatan—also featured on P&B—has published a poetry book to celebrate his Moon Monday newsletter passing both 5 years of digital existence as well as 10000 subscribers. The book is available pretty much everywhere a book can exist, and in I think all possible formats, which is very impressive, I have to say.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-11-12 23:00:00
Two related pieces of writing are doing the loops in my head recently. The first is the editorial piece from Dense Discovery #361—thank you Mattia for sending it to me—where Kay wrote
We’ve normalised giving our attention almost exclusively to people who already have obscene amounts of influence. And we amplify them by watching. The power law in action: a few rise to the top, and we keep them there by never looking away. (...) Seeking out lesser-known voices isn’t just an act of cultural curation; it’s a philosophical stance, a refusal to let attention be the only metric that matters. Because the most interesting stuff usually happens on the margins.
The topic of who is getting my attention these days is something I’m spending a lot of time thinking about. Because time and attention are a precious resource, one we probably take for granted way too often. A resource that’s been abused by the modern economy to the point where people seem unable to focus anymore, with the sole goal of selling us crap we likely don’t need.
The other piece I’ve been thinking about is Ridgeline #217, where Craig wrote:
The modern smartphone, laden with the corporate ecosystem pulsing underneath its screen, robs us of this feeling, conspires to keep us from “true” fullness. The swiping, the news cycles, the screaming, the idiocy — if anything destroys a muse, it’s this. If anything keeps you locked into a fetid loop of looking, looking, and looking once more at the train wreck, it’s this. I find it impossible to feel fullness, even in the slightest, after having spent just a bit of a day in the thralls of the algorithms. The smartphone eradicates “space” in the mind. With that psychic loss of space, grace becomes impossible. You see the knock-on effects of this rippling out across the world politically.
I’m starting to believe that a phoneless life is, for me, the ultimate goal. How to get there, that I don’t know, but I feel like it’s a worthy goal to pursue. And I think this goal is gonna be part of a broader push towards really curating the inputs in my life. By inputs, I mean everything I consume. Because I realised my mental health is deeply affected by what I consume, day after day. The books I read, the posts and blogs I scroll through, the news I ingest, the music I listen to. Everything contributes to how I feel, and I think I’m only now realising how much more strict and diligent I should be with my input diet.
The other day, I reopened my RSS reader after my small break from media consumption, and I was both over- and underwhelmed. Overwhelmed because I follow quite a lot of blogs, and so there were thousands of posts waiting to be read in there. Underwhelmed because after a quick scroll through all those entries, I realised there wasn’t much I was genuinely excited to read. Which isn’t to say the content in there wasn’t interesting, quite the opposite. I follow a lot of people who write a lot of interesting content. But I realised it was not content that really resonates with me, at this point in my life. And I came to the realisation that the only reasonable thing to do is to start from scratch again. Remove everything and start adding back only the content I really want to consume. And in doing that, this time around, I should be a lot more deliberate, a lot more careful in what I add. Because now more than ever, in this age of infinite digital abundance, quality really is more important than quantity.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
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2025-11-07 20:00:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Robb Knight, whose blog can be found at rknight.me.
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The People and Blogs series is supported by Noahie Valk and the other 125 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 a developer and dad to two girls living in Portsmouth on the south coast of the UK. By day I work for a SaaS company and in my own time I work on my many side projects. In a previous life I worked at a certain clown's restaurant which is where I met my wife some 15 years ago.
Although developer is what I get paid to do I'm trying to move towards more making; websites, stickers, shirts, art, whatever. I have no idea what that looks like yet or how it's going to pay my bills. I have a whole host of side projects I've worked on over the years; they're not all winners but they all serve, or served, a purpose. If I get lucky, they resonate with other people which is always nice.
I've had a lot of blogs over the years, most of which would get a handful of posts before being abandoned. There was a version that ran on Tumblr which I did do for at least a year or two — any interesting posts from that have been saved. The current iteration is by far the longest serving and will be the final version. There's no chance of me wiping it all and starting again.
This current version is part of my main website which is where I put everything. My toots on Mastodon start life as a note post, I post interesting links I find, and I log all the media I watch/play/whatever (I don't want to say consume, that's gross) in Almanac, which itself is on the third or fourth iteration.
As I said above, I had done a few posts on the Tumblr-powered blog but if I look at my stats for posts, it was around 2022 when Twitter started to fall apart that I started to blog more. I was moving away from posting things directly onto social media sites and getting it onto my own site.
I started writing more posts that just had a short idea or helpful tip because I realised not every post has to be some incredible think piece. My analytics show that these posts also tend to be the most popular which probably says more about the state of large, ad-riddled websites than it does about my writing. For example this post about disconnecting Facebook from Spotify is consistently in the top five posts on my site but you're never going to read that post unless you specifically need it. It's not a "good" post, it just exists.
To call what I have a process would be a very liberal use of the word "process". If I have nothing to write about I just won't write anything, I have no desire to keep to a schedule and write just for the sake of it. Usually, I'll get prompted by something someone asks like "How did you do X on your website?" or I feel like I have something to say that would be interesting other people.
I write my posts in Obsidian, then when they're ready to go I'll add them to my site. If I'm on my proper computer laptop I use my CLI tool to add a new post. If I'm on mobile, I use the very haphazard CMS I built.
I'll proof read most things myself before posting and I rarely ask for anyone else's input but if I do want a second opinion it's going to be previous P&B interviewee, Keenan. Usually I'm able to get out what I want to say fairly succinctly without too much editing.
A proper keyboard and ideally a desk to sit at is what I prefer when I'm writing (or coding) but I can live with just the keyboard. My desk setup makes some people's skin crawl because there's so much going on but I like having all the trinkets and knick knacks around me.
I deeply dislike using my phone for most things outside of scrolling lists, like social media so I rarely write long posts on it. The small form factor just doesn't work for me at all but I also kind of need it to exist in the world.
All my domains are registered with Porkbun and I manage the DNS with DNSControl - my main domain, rknight.me, has nearly 50 records for subdomains so managing those without DNSControl would not be a fun activity. Speaking of DNS I use Bunny for my DNS management and also use their CDN for images and other files I need to host.
The website itself is, as are many of my side projects, built with Eleventy. Eleventy gives me the flexibility to do some interesting things with the posts and other content on my site which would be much harder with some other systems.
The site gets built on Forge to a Hetzner server whenever I push an update to GitHub either via command line, or through the aforementioned CMS, and is also triggered at various points in the day to pull in my Mastodon posts.
Assuming I actually had to the time to do it, I think I would start with the CMS first, before building anything of the actual site. It is a pain to update things when I'm not at my laptop but jamming features into my CMS is equally frustrating.
If I wanted something off the shelf and easier to maintain I suspect I would choose Ghost or Pika.
Many of these costs are part of my freelancing so are bundled with other sites I run and somewhat hidden but I'll do my best to outline what I do use.
I have a single server on Hetzner that serves my main site as well as another 30 or so side projects so the cost is negligible per-site but it costs about $5 a month. Forge costs $12 a month to deploy my site along with other sites. The domain is $20 a year I think but that's it.
I have a One a Month Club here and I have a handful of people supporting that way. I also use affiliate links for services I use and like which occasionally pays me a little bit.
I think monetising blogs is fine, if it's done in a tasteful way. Dumping Google ads all over your site is terrible for everyone but hand-picked sponsors or referrals is a good way to find new services. Just keep it classy.
I want to read sites that are about the person writing them. Photos of things people have done, blog posts about notebooks, wallpaper, food, everything. Things people enjoy.
This is the second time I'm going to mention Keenan here because they write so wonderfully. They also have a podcast with Halsted called Friendship Material which is all kinds of lovely and joyful and everyone should listen.
Alex writes some really interesting computing-related posts, like this one about using static websites as tiny archives.
Annie is so smart and honest in her writing it brings me joy every time I see a new post from her. This post is a masterpiece.
I'd be a terrible business boy if I didn't at least mention EchoFeed, an RSS cross posting service I run.
I also have a podcast that used to be about tech but is now about snacks.
Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.
If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 115 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to SekhmetDesign and the other 125 supporters for making this series possible.
2025-11-05 00:05:00
If you’re subscribed to my From the Summit newsletter, you might recognise this church. It’s the same one I wrote about in the most recent missive, only this time there was a lovely sunny day and the whole place was not engulfed in the fog.
Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.
Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to People and Blogs
2025-10-31 19:05:00
This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Frank Chimero, whose blog can be found at frankchimero.com.
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The People and Blogs series is supported by Hrvoje Šimić and the other 125 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 Frank Chimero, I design and write from my little apartment in New York City. I’ve been doing this for a long time, mostly for technology and media companies. Other than work, I’m interested in the same things many other people are: my partner, my dog, visiting museums, movies, paintings, reading, cooking, stimulating conversation, and long walks. A lot of those have a tendency to go together, especially here in New York, which is nice.
I started teaching design shortly after finishing undergrad and had a great time with it. My students and I had so many stimulating conversations in the classroom, and their questions really forced me to think about my presumptions and beliefs about design in a way I wouldn't have without the prompting. So, after class, I'd type them up and was eager to share, and thus my blog was born.
Writing is generally a way to scratch an itch in my brain. Sometimes it is an annoyance or disagreement with something else I read, or responding to an idea I came across in my reading that captivated me in some way, and trying to figure out why it grabbed me. Most first drafts are brain dumps in front of the keyboard or going for a walk and using speech to text on my phone. These things are incredibly rough, and take a bit of polishing until they end up on the site, but I enjoy that process too. It’s nice to nudge, tweak, and expand on parts and feel things get stronger or more clear. I try to have some interesting reference or idea at the heart of each post I make, because it’s what I want to read. The web I am interested in is the insights and ideas of individuals.
Some people will think I’m a barbarian, but I don’t think tools matter that much. I write in TextEdit. If it’s by hand, it is typically on loose copier paper and a pen I stole from a hotel. I’m sensitive to spaces and love a beautiful room and good lighting, but I think it is more worthwhile to learn how to write well in spite of the environment rather than because of it. At least, that’s what I tell myself. The trick, for me, is to seek out those beautiful places and experiences and try to hold on to the internal environment they create in me, then find ways to get it down onto the page later. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn’t.
A few years ago I wrote a book called The Shape of Design. I’d book trains from New York City up to Albany to enjoy the views of the Hudson Valley from the train window. The trip was about 8 hours there and back home. I got so many words down, something about the momentum of the view creating a velocity in the writing. But you know what? Once I stacked that writing up next to all the other writing I did in libraries, at the kitchen table, or coffee shops, I never could pinpoint where what was written.
This is going to be underwhelming. I have an off-the-rack Macbook Pro M4. There is pretty much nothing installed on it except Figma, my fonts, and just enough of a local dev environment to make my rickety Jekyll deployments. If you were to close your eyes and imagine the first five sites you’d need for work, I have those, too. I have last year’s iPhone with YouTube and NTS Radio on it. I’ve stripped most everything out. It makes no difference. I just type and typeset.
I’m not certain. I have no clue how one would grow an audience in 2025 without betraying some of my values about respecting people’s attention. My current mindset is to enjoy my audience, respect them, and make no presumptions about it growing.
The site either costs $60 or $0, depending on how you look at it. It’s served via Github Pages, which requires a subscription, but it also pays for other things like private repos, etc. I’ve never tried to make money with the writing on my site. Even the book I wrote is available in full online for free. This isn’t necessarily a moral stance, it is simply that the economics of it wouldn’t pay enough to justify the headspace it’d occupy. If others want to do something different, I say go for it.
I focus most of my reading time on books, and most of my digital reading is happening through newsletters these days. On the blog side of things, I mostly check up on friends’ writing by manually going to their site. “I wonder what Naz is up to?” and that kind of thing. I know there is RSS, but seeing the site is half the point. You’ve already interviewed a lot of them, but I think you would get a kick going through Rob Weychert’s obsessively maximalist life-documentation-as-blog. It is exactly the opposite of my own tendencies (“anything you don’t remember must not be that important”), and I have a lot of admiration, confusion, and respect for what he’s done.
I want to take a moment to give a shout out to libraries. Librarians are god’s people. I think there is a strong ideological kinship between digital personal publishing (blogs) and libraries (self-expression, availability of information, capitalistic counterpoint, community and connection, and the overall “this is for everyone” vibe the web was born from). So, go check out your local library. Get a card, check out a book, enjoy the space, and maybe ask about what other services they have to offer besides media. Good communities come from good people and good spaces. Supporting your local library may be a way to nudge the world toward your vision of how it should be. Or it could just be a nice way to spend an afternoon.
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 115 interviews.
Make sure to also say thank you to Sebastián Monía and the other 125 supporters for making this series possible.