Sitting here, doing nothing. Dog’s panting, but he’s enjoying the freshness of the forest. Birds are chirping, as they should.
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This is the 48th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Daniel Miller and his blog, daniel.industries
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I am originally from Pennsylvania, went to school in Arizona, and ended up in Dallas, Texas by way of Florida, Washington DC, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I studied Psychology and planned on pursuing graduate studies in organizational psychology, but ended up in software fairly quickly, within about a year of graduating. I was a developer for over a decade, and then a CTO for almost another decade. I'm currently looking for an opportunity where I can provide value to a business doing good in the world.
I used to make music but haven't done much of that for about 10 years. I ride my bicycle as often as possible, usually a few times a week. And I write on my blog!
I've always been interested in the ideas around Personal Knowledge Management, so when I first saw Blogger and started blogging in 2001 I thought of it as a public notebook. It still serves that purpose. It was originally danielsjourney.com (still have the domain). I eventually changed to daniel.industries.
My peak readership was during the blogging boom of the 2000s, which coincided with my move to Bosnia, which people seemed to be interested in.
I use Notion for "capture" and have about 18 ideas in there. I have additional less-formed ideas tagged in my Logseq notes. I have 19 posts in a drafts folder with another 516 stashed in there from private writing websites I participated in years ago. In theory, I will someday get the good ones imported into the canonical notebook, but at this rate, it might never happen.
I try to write and publish in one sitting, otherwise the post might never get finished. I'm not afraid of editing a post after I've published it, though. It's my history, I can rewrite it if I want.
I also have writing (for stories and articles) and music sections on the site. I plan on adding a "projects" page as well.
The blog currently has 3417 posts. I posted much more early on (2001-2008), before Twitter and (some) maturity that came with age and experience...and I had a lot more time for it back then.
It's less about my physical environment and more about my mental and emotional environment. The other reason I've blogged less in the last 14 years is that my life allows for less quiet time for thinking. I will have good ideas and make interesting connections while riding my bike, or in the shower, or right before falling asleep, but as my life has become more full with family and responsibilities, I find not many of those ideas make it onto a page anywhere (yet alone become coherent enough to go on the website).
I use Jekyll with a Ruby Rakefile I brought with me from back when I used a gem called "Octopress" (which has been abandoned), which adds quality-of-life command line tools for managing posts, building, and publishing. I've also written a "backlink" plugin for Jekyll (see Really Basic Backlinks in Jekyll).
While I have used Jekyll for over 10 years, before that I used Blogger, Moveable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and multiple versions of my own PHP CMS system (see SWIM Stock-take Part 2). But I've been a static site generator person for a long time. I think 11ty is probably better at this point, but so far I haven't felt the need to move off Jekyll.
See To Find an Alternative to Wordpress, Just Go Back to the Beginning.
I've hosted on DreamHost since forever. I've had my domains with Hover for a long time.
Static site generators seem to be all the rage these days, for good reason. Having everything as a flat file you can manage via source control and easily move around, search, mass update from your text editor of choice...it's better than having everything locked into a database in the cloud (or even on your computer), even if the product allows for easy exports. See Web Artifact Permanence.
The hosting is somewhere between $100-200 per year (I was kept at a lower price for a while, and I think that is over soon). I could host on GitHub or similar for free, but I have a handful of sites I host on DreamHost, so it is just easier to manage them all in one place.
I was bullish on tools that would allow individual artists to monetize their work without the need for middlemen, I even ran a nonprofit from 2003-2005 (see Goodbye Integration Research Dot Org) that was working on exactly that problem. I was excited when Jack Conte first talked about Patreon at XOXO (I was there in person--and it is still a good talk). Now we're there, and Patreon has to enshittify to appease investors, and Substack has to harbor fascists and pop modals in my face all the time, and I'm not so sure about the entire idea. I think it is better to just have something you can sell. It's hard. I think if you don't have to monetize your online work, that's better. There are too many pseudo-intellectual influencers out there, and too few Kottkes, Popovas, or Westenbergs.
Those of us just hanging out in our digital living rooms on the cozy web are doing ok without having to perform for our audience.
See On Blogging:
Keeping a personal blog in 2017 feels relatively futile. But while everyone else is
storingthrowing their stories, artifacts, thoughts, and meanings into the stream for others to consume on their phones while taking a dump or bored at lunch or while consuming some other media entirely, those of us who store our work on actual domains do it for ourselves--and our legacy. And while permalinks may--and do--rot faster than last week's bananas, the content is still here.
...or Rebels: Episode 2:
Creating content on the internet and actually owning all of that content and retaining complete control over that content is still one of the most culturally radical things one can do. Sure, the marketers of the world will tell you you’re wasting your time, but that is only if your horizon for meaningful impact in the world has shortened to the amount of time a news story remains in your social network feed.
...rapid-fire style, for the sake of time: Tim Bray, Rands in Repose, Robin Rendle, Robin Sloan, Surfing Complexity, John Cutler, Uses This, Tom Critchlow, Ribbonfarm.
You should interview Maggie Appleton.
This was the 48th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Daniel. Make sure to follow his blog (RSS) and get in touch with him if you have any questions.
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I’m currently a “Certified Kirby Partner”. Fancy title, I know. What that means is that I paid some money, last summer, to be listed on a website. This upcoming August, I will no longer be a “Certified Kirby Partner” because I am not going to pay money—again—to be listed on a website. But my certified status is not what I want to write about. It’s just an excuse to talk about the role money plays in achieving goals in the context of online projects.
Most online projects exist to fulfil a goal. Sometimes that goal is stated, sometimes it’s implied. And money may or may not be an aid in achieving said goal. I was chatting about online communities with Kev the other day and we both reached the same conclusion that in order to create something meaningful in that space it has to be a paid product. Not because you need that to make it sustainable financially but because a monetary commitment—even a small one—is a helpful tool to find people who are genuinely interested in what you’re creating. You’re not likely to spend money on something you don’t care about. So in that context, money is a helpful tool to achieve the goal of creating a small community of people who care about the shared space.
That same way of reasoning wouldn’t make sense for something like my People and Blogs series. My goal with that project is to help as many people as possible rediscover the beauty of having a personal blog and owning your corner of the web, and to encourage a healthier way to live online. Making it a paid series wouldn’t help me reach that goal. It would probably be an obstacle. This is why I started the series knowing it was going to be a cost for me both in terms of time and in terms of actual money but it was one I was willing to sustain because I believe it’s important.
It’s easy for me to commit to paying money when stated goals and monetisation schemes are aligned. To bring it back to Kirby, I absolutely love it both as a tool and as a project. It’s been run fantastically for more than a decade by a great group of people and I have nothing but positive things to say about it. I plan to keep using it and buying licenses for as long as they stay in business. But it’s also why I won’t pay again to be a “Certified Kirby Partner”. Because there the stated goals and the monetisation scheme are not aligned. As they say, money talks.
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My current life situation is not great. For a variety of reasons that aren't worth listing here. It's not like everything's bad. Some aspects of my life are great. But overall, I'd not say I'm in a happy place. Which is fine, or at least it would be fine if the root cause of the problem was known. Because when you know the cause of a problem you can work towards a solution. But up until the other day, I didn't know why I was feeling this way. And when you're in that situation, you feel hopeless and you can see things slowly spiralling out of control. But the other day, I had a realisation: a mismatch. That's why I feel this way. I realised that there's a mismatch between the way I see myself, the way I perceive myself as a person, and who I actually am. And that mismatch is driving me insane. There are things I know about myself, or at least I think I know about myself, that are important to me. And those things should play a role in the way I live my life. And yet because of this stupid mismatch, those things weren't playing a role and were superseded by other things I absolutely despise. And this mismatch manifests in subtle ways.
I am a morning person. I know it. I experimented with it and I know for a fact that I'm happier, more productive and live a better life when I wake up early. Not once, when up early, I thought "Why am I already awake? Shouldn't I be sleeping?". That's just not a thought I have because I know how much more I enjoy life when I'm up early. But late at night? That's a constant thought. I'm sitting there, reading something online and I constantly think "Why am I here reading this? I should be sleeping". And in doing that, in staying up late, the mismatch gathers strength. It's a vicious cycle.
That's one example but I'm realising that this is the source of all my struggles. And it's not much the fact that I am not the person I'd love to be—or that I think I am—but the fact that I don't do the things that I should be doing in order to become that person. And it fucking sucks. It sucks because I know that's going to be incredibly hard to correct that but at the same time I'm glad that at least now I know where the problem is and I can work towards a solution.
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I had some interesting exchanges recently with Kev, Peter, and René, all touching on the topic of communities, both on and offline. Communities, especially here in the digital space, are something I’m very interested in. It’s something I find myself thinking about often and I constantly have ideas for things I should try. But let me ask you a more fundamental question: what even is a community? Always useful to grab a definition as a starting point:
A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with a shared socially significant characteristic, such as place, set of norms, culture, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighborhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.
I think this is a good definition. We begin by making it clear that we need “living things” to have a community and considering the weird AI phase we’re going through that’s probably worth stating. So bots are out, humans are in.
We then move on to what makes a community a community: the sharing of some “socially significant characteristic”. In the context of online communities, I like to refer to that as the “what are we here for” characteristic. At a fundamental level, members of a community have to share the same motivations to be there in the first place. If those motivations start to diverge then things quickly fall apart.
It’s like politics. You can have different ideas on how things should be done—and we can debate those forever—but we have to agree that, at a fundamental level, we do want to move in the same general direction: make the place better. The devil’s in the details and we can discuss what better means but there has to be at least some common ground in the overall direction. Without that, things will fall apart. And things might fall apart even with a common ground!
Back to online communities. I have my place here on the web. I’m happy with my site, I’m happy with my projects. But I keep thinking that maybe there’s something else that can be done, that I should be doing. I keep bouncing around various digital places—mostly forums—and I have yet to find one that truly feels like the place where I want to be. Some move too fast, some don’t move at all. Some are narrowly focused on one thing, others are not focused at all and it’s pure chaos. And I don’t blame those places or the people who tried to create them. Creating a community is hard. Figuring out the right mixture of people is complicated. Figuring out the right amount of people is complicated. Group dynamics are never easy to navigate.
I’d love to know what you think about all this. Are there online places where you feel at home? Is there something you’re missing? Do you even care about all this? Let me know!
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