/reader

The blogroll

Blogroll.org is slowly but steadily growing, currently sitting at 820 websites listed and it will likely hit 1000 by the end of the year. I pushed an update to the site a few weeks ago, tweaked a few colours here and there, added a number of new pages, and removed a few modals. Nothing massive but it’s fun work and I enjoy doing it. I also implemented a “Recently Added” category to make it easier for recurring visitors to get the new content. If you have a blog don’t be shy, submit it to the blogroll!

Newsletters

You might be surprised to know I have three newsletters. One is technically not really a newsletter but rather my blog delivered to you via email. I know some people love to consume content that way which is why I started this one years ago. Be warned though: right now it is done manually and I sometimes forget to send posts via mail. I do plan to automate it though, so things should be improving on that front at some point.

The second newsletter is From the Summit. This is something I started back in 2019 and so far I have sent 17 missives, the most recent one in November 2023. It’s a very random newsletter and I only send one if I find myself on top of a mountain. I type it on my phone, the subject is thought about during the ascent and I try to also send it from the top of the mountain—sometimes there’s no phone signal though.

The final one is People and Blogs which was technically conceived as a newsletter but is now a series delivered via mail, web, and RSS. And speaking of P&B…

People and Blogs

This is the other side project I have going, currently sailing towards the 100th edition—on July 25th—and the end of year 2—on August 29th. Back when I announced the series I wrote

The goal for this project is to keep up the pace for at least a year. 52 weeks, 52 people, 52 blogs. Should be doable but only time will tell.

I say we stick to the theme of keeping expectations low and I’ll commit to at least one more year. And that is not because I don’t enjoy doing this, I still love reading the interviews, but because doing something week after week, year after year, can be mentally tiring at times. So who knows, maybe after year three I’ll take a break.

FormFeelingFunction

FFF is a quirky experimental lab that Carl and I run. It’s something we turned our attention to after we archived Minimalissimo and the most recent random thing we released is an audio guestbook.

You’ll find it right there on the homepage and it works like this: you click the button, you record a short audio message, Carl and I get to listen to it. That’s it. Very complicated, I know. Why an audio guestbook? Because why the heck not?

Books

I’m quite pleased with the fact that I managed to read 14 books so far this year. I think 20 to 30 books a year is my sweet spot but if you’re someone like Tracy you might be smiling since that’s probably what you read in a month.

I have a Literal profile I try to keep up to date but if you want to know what I read so far in 2025 here’s the complete list:

• Carrying the Fire by Michael Collins
• Become what You are by Alan Watts
• Il Dono del Silenzio by Thich Nhat Hanh
• The Way of Zen by Alan Watts
• Days at the Morisaki Bookshop by Satoshi Yagisawa
• La saggezza dei lupi by Elli H. Radinger
• Il cosmo in brevi lezioni by Amedeo Balbi
• Cronache di un gatto viaggiatore by Hiro Arikawa
• Un'estate con la strega dell'Ovest by Kaho Nashiki
• The Burnout Society by Byung-Chul Han
• Welcome to the Hyunam-dong Bookshop by Hwang Bo-reum
• La cura by Hermann Hesse
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• Tales from the cafe by Toshikazu Kawaguchi

Some I read in Italian, others in English. The rule for what gets read in which language is fairly simple: if something was originally written in either English or Italian, I read the original version. If it was originally written in something other than English or Italian, if an Italian translation is available I read it in Italian, if not I get the English version. That’s usually how it goes. There are books I read in both languages for some odd reason. Don’t ask me why.

The July experiment

In June I experimented a bit with my life and as I wrote before, the goal for July is to break the muscle memory attached to phone usage. What that means is that my phone will stay in my bedroom, on the floor, most of the time. I don’t want it with me, I don’t want it near me. I do plan to completely obliterate that stupid automatic behaviour of picking up the phone for no reason other than boredom. I’m also going to reduce phone screen time to fewer than 60 minutes a day. I do plan to write regular updates about this experiment, it's gonna be fun.

A new portfolio

I have a new portfolio. The other night I had this random idea of coding myself a portfolio and so I did it. I had the .dev domain name sitting there doing nothing and so I thought it was a good idea to create something for the professional side of my life. After all, I am technically a full-time freelancer and so I should have a portfolio, right?

And this should be pretty much it I think. I hope you’re having a great summer. I also hope you’re having a great winter if you’re on the other side of the globe. As always if there’s anything you want to share with me you can get in touch via email and you can also use that same email address to ping me on Apple Messages if you prefer. And if you enjoy what I’m doing here on the blog and the various side projects you can join the other supporters and become part of the 1/mo club.

Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome.

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There are two quotes that come to mind that are somewhat related to this. One is from Jobs' famous 2005 Stanford speech:

You can't connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something - your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever.

And the other is from Watts:

Let's suppose that you were able every night to dream any dream that you wanted to dream. And that you could, for example, have the power within one night to dream 75 years of time. Or any length of time you wanted to have. And you would, naturally as you began on this adventure of dreams, you would fulfil all your wishes. You would have every kind of pleasure you could conceive. And after several nights of 75 years of total pleasure each, you would say "Well, that was pretty great." But now let's have a surprise. Let's have a dream which isn't under control. Where something is gonna happen to me that I don't know what it's going to be. And you would dig that and come out of that and say "Wow, that was a close shave, wasn't it?" And then you would get more and more adventurous, and you would make further and further out gambles as to what you would dream. And finally, you would dream ... where you are now. You would dream the dream of living the life that you are actually living today.”

Looking backwards, wishing things were different, seems like a wasted opportunity to me. Because life’s unfolding right in front of you at this very moment and opportunities to do things differently are waiting ahead.

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Back in May I decided to try mess with my life in two ways: I turned the digital consumption knob down to as close as possible to zero and I also brought back meditation into my life. The reason for this experiment is simple: I wasn’t happy with where my mind was and I felt I had to do something so the combination of detaching from digital consumption and the refocusing of my attention on creative output, meditation and book reading seemed like a reasonable choice.

I dragged Kevin into this and Luke joined as well. They had slightly different rules set for themselves so I encourage you to keep reading what they went through on their respective blogs.

To keep track of how the experiment was going we all posted weekly updates and I’m gonna leave links here for your convenience if you want to go back and read those:

• My week one, two, and three
• Kevin’s week one, two, and three
• Luke’s week one, two, and three

Since this is week four I think it’s time to draw some conclusions. The first thing I’m gonna say is that I’m incredibly happy I decided to go through this experiment. I think messing with my life is something I should do more often because it’s incredibly easy for my brain to slip into stupid routines and then accept those new routines as the way things should be. I can give you one concrete example: for the longest time I was unable to go to sleep by myself without something playing in the background. And for my brain that was totally fine. But now, four weeks later, I’m the exact opposite. I’m now so terribly distracted by anything playing in the background while I try to sleep and I want my silence.

Over the past four weeks, I also managed to do some 4+ hours road trips without listening to anything. No podcasts, no music. And it was an enjoyable experience. If you told me that back in May I’d have thought you were insane.

My self-imposed rules were to keep the digital consumption as close as possible to zero and I did manage to get fairly close to that goal. Over the past 28 days I:

• Consumed zero news
• I pressed play on zero podcasts. I did listen to maybe 10 minutes of a few episodes simply because other people were listening to them nearby and I can’t impose my weird rules on their lives
• Watched 2 videos on YouTube, roughly 10 minutes total, and on both occasions I was talking in person with someone and as part of a discussion I had to show them something
• Watched zero tv
• Watched zero movies
• I played with my switch for the first couple of days of June but then decided it was stupid and it has been sitting there on the dock since
• Read zero items on my RSS reader
• Read I think 5 articles that people sent me directly as part of various conversations

The goal was to redirect my focus towards reading books, creative output, and meditation. In terms of reading, I did finish three books in June and I’m currently reading two more. I also hit my—very low I have to admit—target goal of 12 books read in 2025. That brings me joy.

Creative output wasn’t terribly high but that’s partly because I spent a lot of time finishing client projects and after months of being swamped with stuff to do I’m now free-ish. I have one project going at the moment that is in its final stages and that’s it. That also brings me joy. Not having client projects will also bring anxiety in like a week but that is a problem for future me to deal with.

The meditation part of the experiment was a massive success. Why did I stop meditating? I’m such a fucking idiot at times. I started the month doing the daily meditation—roughly 10 minutes—once a day. A few days in I decided to start the introductory course from scratch on the Waking Up app (if you want to give it a try you can use my 30-Day Guest Pass). It’s a 28-day course and by Friday 6th I was already doing two days at once, one in the morning, one in the evening. Sunday 8th I logged 30 minutes of meditation, Monday 9th 41 minutes. The entire second week I meditated twice a day every day, spending between 21 to 26 minutes on the cushion. The third week—even though I got sick—I meditated twice on Monday, Tuesday, Thursday and Friday, the other days I did one session. By the end of the week I was done with the introductory course and I was back on the daily meditations. On Sunday 22nd I changed the default length of the sessions to 15 minutes, on the 26th I pushed it up to 16 minutes. The plan is to slowly keep pushing it up until I get to 20 minutes and then stay there for a while. I’d love to get to 1 hour of daily meditation by the end of the summer and I think it’s easily doable.

I’m using the How We Feel app to track moods and I can see how the combination of meditation and lower digital consumption has impacted my mental health. I’m logging fewer high-intensity negative emotions and overall I feel a lot better.

The other thing I paid attention to was my phone usage and screen time. In my week three update I mentioned how my mind tends to seek distractions when I feel sick which was an interesting thing to observe. Another interesting observation is that my phone usage is all over the place in terms of screen time. But this morning I realized something while looking at the information available on the screen time page: the first app used after pick up is 95% of the time a communication app, either telegram, messages, or mail. But once the phone is in my hand, the muscle memory kicks in and I start doing other things on my phone even though the reason why I picked it up in the first place was for communication. And so that tells me that the reason why screen time is high is simply because of that stupid muscle memory loop. Also means I have my target for the next life experiment, more on that later.

So, with the experiment coming to an end, there are a few changes I’m gonna implement in my life based on the findings of the past four weeks. I’ll bring reading blogs back because I miss reading what all the other wonderful people out there are publishing but I am not going to reinstall Reeder on my phone. Content consumption will only happen when I’m sitting here at my desk.

I am also not going to bring back the podcast app on my phone. I decided I’m gonna leave those mostly out of my life. That said, if there’s something I want to listen to, I can do it but only if I’m also doing something useful for myself in the meantime which means either training or doing stretching. That’s gonna be my new rule going forward when it comes to podcasts.

Youtube, who gives a shit. I should probably open that site once every 6 months and see if those 3 channels I care about have posted something and then forget about it for another 6 months.

News, I don’t want them back. I know this might be considered a privileged position—and I do have a blog post coming about that—but I honestly feel a lot better without them.

As for movies, TV series, and gaming, those were already so low that it’s not even worth paying attention to them. I watch maybe two movies a year, I don’t even remember the last TV series I watched and gaming is basically non-existent at this point in my life so I don’t think there’s anything worth changing on that front.

I’ll keep meditating two to three times a day for the foreseeable future. I’m absolutely loving the practice and I really feel stupid for having stopped at some point. What was I thinking...

With June almost over it’s time to think about what to do in July—other than celebrating my birthday—and I decided that with my next experiment, I’ll try break the muscle memory related to my phone usage. When I’m at home, my phone is not gonna leave my bedroom in July. Why my bedroom? Because that’s where I meditate so it will stay there, in the corner of the room, on the floor. I’ll only take it out of the room if I’m leaving the house. If everything goes according to plan, July’s screen time should be, on average < 1 hour a day. That’s the goal at least, we’ll see how it goes.

And that's it for the June experiment. This was a lot of fun, so glad I decided to do it. Life experiments are always incredibly interesting to me, and definitely something I should do more of moving forward.

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Pick the classic example: traffic. Traffic is annoying, isn’t it? You’re sitting there, wasting time, dealing with people doing wacky shit. And yet traffic has no intrinsic quality. Traffic is just traffic, that’s all there is to it.

But what if I told you that tomorrow you’ll get paid 10000 bucks for every minute you spend in traffic? I bet you’d have a very different experience dealing with said traffic. You’d likely not be annoyed by it—why would you, you’re getting paid handsomely to be there—and you’d probably spend most of your time thinking about what you’d do with all the money that is about to come your way.

And yet the traffic is still the same. Your time spent with it is still the same and the people doing wacky shit are still doing that. The only thing that has changed is how you perceive that experience.

This is true not just for traffic but for the vast majority of the things that are annoying and frustrating out there. Things and people are not frustrating: we are frustrated by them. The feeling and the sensations are coming from us, not from them.

Now, I’m saying all this but I’m also someone who enjoys ranting about all kinds of things. But I find ranting enjoyable for two reasons.

The first one is that I’m doing it in good spirit. Sometimes I like to be a bit silly and go on a tirade against webfont licenses, browser companies, AI, or any other topic that comes to mind. But I’m doing it for fun, I’m honestly not bothered all that much by those things.

And the second reason is that I find venting in an overly dramatic way—and you should see me in person yelling at my screen—to be a fun therapeutic exercise. It’s almost like a piece of acting and it’s genuinely fun, at least for me. But it doesn’t consume me. It’s not something I carry with me.

But some people out there are consumed by their constant complaining. And it’s infectious. The more you complain the more you find and see things worth complaining about. And that’s not healthy. It’s not healthy for them, it’s not healthy for the people around them.

I can’t pay you for every minute you have to face something that annoys you—I’m really sorry—but that doesn’t mean you can still pretend I do and see what happens to your mind. You might be surprised.

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I love to have people who started blogging in the 90s as guests because I can only assume there are probably not many of them still out there. A lot of things can change in 25+ years and maintaining a constant online presence for more than a quarter of a century is no small feat if you think about it.

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.

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

Hi! I'm David Wertheimer. I live in New York City with my wife, two teenage children and our dog. I am a fan of the New York Yankees, minor chords and chocolate mint.

Digitally, I've been online since 1987, when I got a 300/1200 baud modem, and began calling local BBSes and chat systems as a high school freshman. After college I had just started a job in book production when I got a call to work as an online editorial assistant instead. My online hobby became a career--this was October 1995; my first professional software suite included Netscape 1.1N--and I never looked back.

What's the story behind your blog?

I first put up a personal web page in 1996. Websites then were for all manner of creative expression, from writing to visual, textural experiences. Sites like 0sil8, Superbad and the Fray were inventing new paradigms monthly. I tried this with my own site, with middling results.

By 1998, weblogs had become a thing, and inspired by a number of early bloggers (like Jason Kottke, who had begun writing alongside his 0sil8) I put up my own and called it the Idea Pad. From there, I just kept going.

Back then, I often published multiple times a day, everything from long expositions to quick-hit notes, one-liner jokes, and broad commentary on everything from industry news to my love life. I'm still a generalist in that way. My recent posts are largely personal, but I could put out a thousand words on user experience next week if the mood strikes.

My blog proudly hit 25 years last fall, and while my pace has shifted dramatically over the years, I see no end in sight.

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

When I have something I want to put out into the world, whether to share an idea with an audience, exercise my writing muscles, or just get something off my chest, I'll pop open a blank page and start writing.

Sometimes I bang out an essay in one shot, which is satisfying. Other times, I'll work on a draft for awhile, with unlimited rounds of revision and reconsideration. I have dozens of unpublished posts in my CMS. A little ways back, I actually spent some time revisiting and cleaning up some drafts to share belatedly. That was entertaining, although many of those drafts are unpublished for a reason.

Which brings me to a fun, shameful fact: much of the time, I write straight in WordPress. I don't even like the editor that much, I just appreciate the immediacy. Since my blog is so personal, and I'm not garnering thousands of views at any given moment, I even tweak posts on the fly right after I first hit Publish. Awful best practices! But it makes me happy.

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

If I'm doing serious writing and editing, put me in a setting with steady background noise and nothing else to do. But after 25 years, writing for myself is innate. When I get inspired, I'll just pop open a Notes file or an email draft and capture an idea.

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

At inception, I was hand-coding posts in HTML in BBEdit and uploading them with Fetch. Then I had a home-rolled PHP publishing system, built by a friend who kept the duct tape from falling off the pipes for a long while. I eventually moved to WordPress and stayed. Plenty of pages on my site are still hand-crafted from back when I knew something about front-end code.

I've been using the same web host (and its registrar) for probably 20 years now and generally leave it alone.

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

One of my few memorable regrets was that I didn't register ideapad.com, and a couple of years after I started writing that became the name of a line of laptops. (I also regret my choice of domain name, but I'm stuck with it.)

One thing I'd definitely not do differently is maintain my archive. Linkrot is a terrible outgrowth of digital longevity. I promised myself early on that I'd try to avoid it, and now my kids can read my old posts, as can you, or my coworkers, or my friends from grade school who I name-checked that one time. You can find your way to things I made when I was 24. You can search Google for "furnident" and land on my post from 2002.

That relative permanence is meaningful to me. I'm not exactly proud of all my old work, but I am proud that each item is right where it was the day it got posted.

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?

The hosting costs are the only real expense. The only money I've directly made off my website was when a little side project went viral and I slapped an ad banner on it.

I have indirectly monetized my blog in many ways, from networking to consulting to speaking engagements to book deals, and with the people I've met and interacted with along the way.

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

I spent some time reading other surveys and realized there's not much I could recommend that hasn't been mentioned by someone else. But here are half a dozen that aren't obvious picks and that make me go "ooh" when I see new posts appear in my Feedly:

• Curious about Everything (linkblog)
• Halfman (generalist blog)
• Ironic Sans (creative nonfiction)
• Joe's Notebook (sports)
• Receipt from the Bookshop (personal journal)
• The Sword and the Sandwich (sandwiches!)

Two-thirds of those links actually point to newsletters. One nice thing about reading in RSS is that I blur the lines between points of origin. They may be emailed, but they look like blogs to me.

Also, I still read most of the old-timers from my era that are still publishing, all of whom are still a delight: Kottke, Sippey, Storey, Gruber, Dash, Garrity, Webb, Knauss, the list goes on.

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

My favorite side project of recent vintage has been retired but is still great: I spent a decade-plus tweeting when either of my kids said something funny, poignant or memorable. They've outgrown it now (and we've largely outgrown Twitter) but their feeds are special.

Meet Nathan and Eli.

The best stuff is back a couple of years, when they were younger and goofier.

Thanks again for having me!

This was the 96th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Dave. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.

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