/reader

This site doesn’t have comments, and the only way to interact with me is to either send me an email (I love those) or to ping me on iMessage if you’re on the Apple ecosystem. But I wanted to give people a way to leave a mark of their passage, which is why I implemented a guestbook. I think guestbooks in general are awesome, and some are so much fun to browse. I mean, just look how fun Eva’s guestbook is.

Anyway, I mentioned I had a guestbook, and a link to it has been sitting at the bottom of every post ever since. It’s also linked at the bottom of every post if you read this site using RSS. And I mentioned it in passing every once in a while inside my posts. And yet, I still often get messages from people telling me they didn’t know this site has a guestbook. Which is totally fine, don’t get me wrong. I don’t expect people to spend their days on my site, but it makes me wonder how many other things I assume are obvious to everyone who visits this site but actually aren’t.

For example, do you know I have a weekly series called People and Blogs and every Friday for the past 2+ years, I have published an interview featuring an amazing person and their personal site? It’s mentioned everywhere on this site, all the 100+ interviews are in the archive down below, but maybe some people don’t actually know that?

Do I have to mention that in addition to this site, I also maintain blogroll.org? And that if you have a personal site, you can submit it to it?

And do I also have to mention that everything I do is very generously supported by some super kind and awesome people who have signed up for my One a month Club? An idea that has its own dedicated website, thanks to Jarrod.

Every time I mentioned these things, a part of me cringes and feels bad because it sounds so self-promoty, but then I get those emails and I’m reminded that the only way for people to know the things you do exist is if you remind them that they do, in fact, exist.

And if you already knew about all these things, I’m sorry.

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

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

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

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

To follow this series subscribe to the newsletter. A new interview will land in your inbox every Friday. Not a fan of newsletters? No problem! You can read the interviews here on the blog or you can subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're enjoying the People and Blogs series and you want to see it grow, consider supporting on Ko-Fi.

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

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.

What's the story behind your blog?

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.)

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

This was the 109th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Kris. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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

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.

What's the story behind your blog?

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.

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

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.

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

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).

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

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.

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

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.)

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 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.

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

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.

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

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.

Keep exploring

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