It seems like the misguided perception of needing to use complex tools and frameworks to build a website comes from a thinking that web browsers are inherently limited. When, in fact, browsers have evolved to a tremendous degree
Let’s go back to a website!
In which I answer questions about blogging.
I’ve put a copy of this on my own site too.
An interview about my blog, originally published on the website People and Blogs in April 2025.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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:
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
Welcome back, Jason!
- Support open source software
- Support open web platform technology
- Distribution on the web should never be throttled
- External links should be encouraged, not de-emphasized
I see the personal website as being an antidote to the corporate, centralised web. Yeah, sure, it’s probably hosted on someone else’s computer – but it’s a piece of the web that belongs to you. If your host goes down, you can just move it somewhere else, because it’s just HTML.
Sure, it’s not going to fix democracy, or topple the online pillars of capitalism; but it’s making a political statement nonetheless. It says “I want to carve my own space on the web, away from the corporations”. I think this is a radical act. It was when I originally said this in 2022, and I mean it even more today.
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.
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.
Now, more than ever, it’s critical to own your data. Really own it. Like, on your hard drive and hosted on your website.
Is taking control of your content less convenient? Yeah–of course. That’s how we got in this mess to begin with. It can be a downright pain in the ass. But it’s your pain in the ass. And that’s the point.
In which Rich nails Clearleft’s superpower:
“Clearleft is a relatively small team, but we can achieve big results because we are nimble and extremely experienced. As strategic design partners, we have a privileged position where we can work around a large company’s politics,” Rutter said. “We need to understand those politics — and help the client staff navigate them — but we don’t need to be bound by them. We bring a thoroughly user-centered approach to our design partnership, and that can be something novel to companies. By showing them what good design looks like (not so much the interface, as the actual process of getting to really well-designed products and services), we can be disruptive within the organization and leave them in a much better place.”
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:
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.
This is a great idea that I’m going to file away for later:
I like the idea of redirecting
/nowto the latest post tagged asnowso one could see the latest version of what I’m doing now.
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:
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.
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.
Last year I described how I syndicate my posts to different social networks.
Back then my approach to syndicating to Bluesky was to piggy-back off my micro.blog account (which is really just the RSS feed of my notes):
Micro.blog can also cross-post to other services. One of those services is Bluesky. I gave permission to micro.blog to syndicate to Bluesky so now my notes show up there too.
It worked well enough, but it wasn’t real-time and I didn’t have much control over the formatting. As Bluesky is having quite a moment right now, I decided to upgrade my syndication strategy and use the Bluesky API.
Here’s how it works…
First you need to generate an app password. You’ll need this so that you can generate a token. You need the token so you can generate …just kidding; the chain of generated gobbledegook stops there.
Here’s the PHP I’m using to generate a token. You’ll need your Bluesky handle and the app password you generated.
Now that I’ve got a token, I can send a post. Here’s the PHP I’m using.
There’s something extra code in there to spot URLs and turn them into links. Bluesky has a very weird way of doing this.
It didn’t take too long to get posting working. After some more tinkering I got images working too. Now I can post straight from my website to my Bluesky profile. The Bluesky API returns an ID for the post that I’ve created there so I can link to it from the canonical post here on my website.
I’ve updated my posting interface to add a toggle for Bluesky right alongside the toggle for Mastodon. There used to be a toggle for Twitter. That’s long gone.
Now when I post a note to my website, I can choose if I want to send a copy to Mastodon or Bluesky or both.
One day Bluesky will go away. It won’t matter much to me. My website will still be here.
The slides from a lovely talk by Ana with an important message:
By having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets. That’s right. Whether you participate in the IndieWeb community or not: by having your own personal website you are as indie web as it gets.
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.
I described using my feed reader like this:
I would hate if catching up on RSS feeds felt like catching up on email.
Instead it’s like this:
When I open my RSS reader to catch up on the feeds I’m subscribed to, it doesn’t feel like opening my email client. It feels more like opening a book.
It also feels different to social media. Like Lucy Bellwood says:
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.
There’s also the blessed lack of any algorithm:
Because blogs are much quieter than social media, there’s also the ability to switch off that awareness that Someone Is Always Watching.
Cory Doctorow has been praising the merits of RSS:
This conduit is anti-lock-in, it works for nearly the whole internet. It is surveillance-resistant, far more accessible than the web or any mobile app interface.
Like Lucy, he emphasises the lack of algorithm:
By default, you’ll get everything as it appears, in reverse-chronological order.
Does that remind you of anything? Right: this is how social media used to work, before it was enshittified. You can single-handedly disenshittify your experience of virtually the entire web, just by switching to RSS, traveling back in time to the days when Facebook and Twitter were more interested in showing you the things you asked to see, rather than the ads and boosted content someone else would pay to cram into your eyeballs.
The only algorithm at work in my feed reader—or on Mastodon—is good old-fashioned serendipity, when posts just happened to rhyme or resonate. Like this morning, when I read this from Alice:
There is no better feeling than walking along, lost in my own thoughts, and feeling a small hand slip into mine. There you are. Here I am. I love you, you silly goose.
And then I read this from Denise
I pass a mother and daughter, holding hands. The little girl is wearing a sequinned covered jacket. She looks up at her mother who says “…And the sun’s going to come out and you’re just going to shine and shine and shine.”