/reader

I think all of this happened in the check-in part, so before I was actually inside the gates area. I get the impression that I was going to travel by myself for work reasons, and losing my flight meant I had to explain to my boss why, since the company had paid for it; though I wasn't really that worried about this as I was about not finding the ticket.

It's an interesting dream. Airplanes take you places, and I interpret them to be a symbol of growth. The check-in booth is important since it is a liminal area, representing the threshold between normal life and access to the mechanisms of change and travel.

My misplacing of the tickets is strange, since I'm usually quite well organized in these matters, not to mention that technology makes most of the work for us nowadays. This means that perhaps this is an important symbol here. The ticket is sort of my authorization to undergo the process of transformation. Maybe the fact that I thought I had it but can't find it suggests I'm not yet internally convinced that I'm actually ready to undergo this transformation, even though I desire it?

Another interesting symbol is the clerk. He stoutly keeps rejecting my attempts at authentication, over and over. Maybe he can be seen as a king of critic here? I wonder though if he's being a protector (protecting me from something I'm not ready to experience), or whether he's a negative influence (sabotaging my attempt at self-growth). Maybe he can actually be both at the same time? The strict, unfriendly attitude seems to suggest the latter, but the fact that I don't view him as the enemy (I'm my own enemy here) suggests it can also be a bit of the former. Though I think it's more negative than positive, as the attitude does seem to be saying You're probably not good enough.

A core conclusion that comes to mind here is that I might be stuck in some sort of loop. I know I have the tickets, but my standards for allowing myself to grow are impossibly high.

 

Win of the week: our new shades got installed — and right before our first 90 degree day! they seem to be making a difference 🦾

Looking forward to: I bought a giant flat of mixed berries on Wednesday and am trying to get through them all before they go bad! May involve baked goods 😋🍓🫐

Stuff I did:

• 4.75 hours consulting — sent off another deliverable — alas they required T&M so I’m shooting myself in the foot with efficiency 🤦‍♀️
• 4.5 hours writing — planning out new scenes to write, it’s been a while since I actually got to write new prose so I’m psyched 😄
• spent Sunday, Monday and Tuesday tidying up the house
• reorganized closet shelving I’d been using for long-term storage to store hand tools instead… now I need to figure out what to do with the other junk but I’m so happy there’s a home for tools and household backups like lightbulbs and spare filters
• sorted through the pile of stuff to donate, recycle, and store
• set up a shelving unit I bought a while back and organized stuff we’re keeping on it
• did new job admin / paperwork for husband’s new job — still need to choose health insurance
• attempted to calculate updated withholding numbers and the IRS calculator sucks, so I contacted my tax person… and I actually do owe a lot 😅 so I made a large makeup payment in hopes of avoiding penalties 🤞 (to be fair I was on track until getting the contract revision in June)
• don’t know how they got in but a ton of houseflies have materialized — husband is ushering out 5-10 every time he’s in the kitchen and somehow there are still more 🙃 also I found a missing wool laundry dryer ball under the sofa when we moved it for the shades installers that appeared to be a breeding ground for moths 😣
• dropped off a return of three of the five shirts I ordered a few weeks back 🤷‍♀️
• played Valheim with my husband
• baked sourdough cream scones
• walk with my friend when it was no longer an inferno outside

Dinners:

• farfalle + jarred marinara sauce with a splash of cream — boring but edible
• Thai takeout — coconut shrimp + peanut sauce and rice
• baked potato with cheddar, sour cream and peas + orange juice
• leftover Thai
• box mac and cheese with peas, garlic scapes, leeks, and smoked salmon + Coke
• pizza beans with leftover marinara (based on) + ciabatta bread + ginger beer (didn’t go 🤷‍♀️)
• Seattle dogs with caramelized onions + curly fries

Reading:

• Read Along Came Amor by Alexis Daria, My Demon Hunter by Aurora Ascher, The House of Green, and The Enchanted Greenhouse by Sarah Beth Durst
• Finished reading What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund 👍
• Started reading Rose in Chains by Julie Soto and Pirate Nemesis by Carysa Locke
• Received Ew, It’s Beautiful by Joshua Barkman

Words I looked up:

• skelf (splinter)

Pretty stuff I saw:

• pink seaweed prints (via)

New music I listened to:

• Pasadena Garden by Kenny Ueda (via Greg Moore)
• Fine – Run 👍
• Girl With No Face by Allie X — favorite tracks were “Girl With No Face,” “Black Eye,” and “John and Jonathan”
• Santino Surfer – Mexican Blue 👍
• A/B by Kaleo

Website changes:

• Updated my PHP version because HostGator didn’t do it automatically for my main domain, just for everything else lol 🙄
• I installed a plugin to limit login attempts and apparently people are just pounding down the doors in here :/ I am eyeing Cloudflare…

Nature notes:

• hummingbird has been visiting the bee balm several times a day 🥰 I planted it for yooooou!
• think I saw a Swainson’s thrush on the edge of the yard

 

“It didn’t feel worth it anymore. It took up too much of my life.”

That’s what a customer recently told me during a house inspection, explaining why he’d just resigned from a well-paid, high-ranking position.

I congratulated him and praised his decision. I also shared that I’ve made similar choices in life — ones I’ve never regretted.

It’s so easy to get fixated on coveted roles and impressive salaries. But no amount of money in the world can replace the feeling of true contentment.

This idea applies to most things in life. If prestige is the main ingredient, the flavor will always be lacking. We might get fleeting moments of satisfaction, followed by a bitter aftertaste.

But if we choose the ingredients with heart, and do everything with love, even the simplest “dishes” can create flavors far richer than anything you’d find in a cookbook.

I did one final (really, the last one!) optimization to my network (luckily without new hardware). Instead of letting the new ASUS router do all the networking and QoS, I repurposed one of my GL.iNet Beryl AX routers with vanilla OpenWRT as the main router, doing SQM, DHCP, DNS proxying, and all the other stuff. Now the ASUS is running in Access Point Mode, handling just the mesh WiFi and partly acting as a LAN switch (because the Beryl AX has just one WAN and one LAN port). My bufferbloat is much better (or non-existent), and the Cloudflare Speedtest is showing me “Great” in all categories, even when connected with WiFi to the repeater.

I think I will stay without cake-autorate, but try to tweak the optimal SQM bandwidth limits a bit over the following days.

Interactions & Comments

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

I'm Alex, hi! I'm 31 years old and am from Grenoble, in the French Alps. I've lived in several places over the world and am happy to say that I came back home to my beloved city and mountains.

I work in a tiny tech startup where I manage content, a role that includes a bit of marketing and a lot of technical writing. I love writing and researching things, and the job requires a lot of daily learning.

This aligns perfectly with my favorite pastime: editing Wikipedia, or more accurately, Wikipédia, the French-language version of the website. I've been creating articles for the past eight or nine years, having a great time falling into research rabbit holes and sharing them with anyone who could be interested in them.

What's the story behind your blog?

I had my first blog in the early 2000s as any French pre-teen did. It had butterflies on its homepage and I shared copy-paste tweets and very cringe poems. It chronicled my daily life as I left home in 2009 and lived on my own for two years. Then, I stopped for a few months, and when I came back I was all grown-up and different.

When I came back, it was early 2012, I had just stopped my sports career and wasn't sure what to do with my life. My mental health had been in the dumps for nearly a year and I needed something to live for, I guess. And because in the meantime my brain had been polluted by « personal branding » and because I was terribly deprived of the feeling of success that had been part of my speed skating experience, I decided to become − although the word wasn't quite there yet − an influencer.

So I opened two blogs on wordpress: the first one would be my personal blog, under a fullname dot fr format. The second was called Réussir Mes Études (acing my studies), because I avidly read student hacks blogs in English and had noticed how little of those existed in French. I had stopped skating, I was going to be good at something, and it was going to be school. And everyone would benefit from my Wisdom in the process.

And somehow, that worked. Really well. On my personal blog, I only did translations; on Réussir Mes Études, I shared a mix of personal anecdotes as I was getting out of my slump and going through the highly-competitive process of entering a business school masters' degree in 2013, and of generic advice, racking up an impressive audience. Réussir Mes Études got me my first job, paid for my rent for most of my masters' degree, and made me realize how much I love writing and explaining things. The personal blog disappeared in the background.

In 2016, I got my first digital marketing job and decided to revive the personal blog to « showcase my expertise », because lack of self-confidence has never been what stops me, I guess. I had lost access to the original URL so I created fullname.com, and I started a digital marketing newsletter and consulting blog posts.

I stopped again.

In 2020 or 2021, I was tired of the Internet. Truly exhausted and disgusted, and I was working at a giant online conglomerate and it was destroying my soul. And then I signed up to Mastodon, and COVID hit, and I was really bored and reading all that I could find and I stumbled upon Tracy Durnell's blog. Through her, I found the IndieWeb, met some wonderful people like Sara, and decided once again to get a blog. In the meantime, I had changed my first name, so I created a new blog at fullname.com (never gets old). It's at alexsirac.com and it's still running, with the same CMS as 13 years ago when I started Réussir Mes Études, even though I dabbled with a few others in the past (Django and Pico most of all).

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

I generally have an interesting conversation and get deeply carried away and decide that everyone needs to benefit from my Wisdom, of course!

More seriously − my brain is polluted by years and years of daily Twitter usage. I've stopped a few years ago, but I've been sharing my thoughts online since I was ten years old and I can't really explain where my inspiration comes from because it's just as natural to me as making dinner − probably more, since I've never been very good at feeding myself!

Nowadays, I generally write on my computer, on Obsidian. You can really see at what times I'm busy at work: those are the times when I don't turn my personal computer on over the weekends so that I won't have a ten-day streak of staring at a screen all day, and suddenly I've written nothing for a month.

Every month, I post my monthly recap, and it's the one habit I've managed to keep. I sometimes get really motivated by book reviews, do a whole batch, and then get lazy for another six months.

I do some research, but tend to share opinions more than anything else: if I want to share researched facts, then that goes on Wikipedia, not on my blog. I usually only have one draft, and I'm a relatively quick writer, but I only write when inspiration hits, which is not so often. When it does hit, I'll write pages and pages, that's just fine, but I've never managed to stick to a consistent routine.

I don't get my blog posts proofread unless they might bring me lots of angry comments (like my takes on activism) or they're a translation (I think I'm a decent translator, but I also know after 6 years as a translation editor that even decent translators do absolutely disgusting mistakes sometimes). For that, I'll generally rely on a friend or on my partner, although I sometimes post a call for proofreaders on Mastodon, usually to no avail.

(I also need to note that in my current job, there is a lot of writing involved, and these days not getting reviews on my blog is pretty important, because I need the freedom that I don't necessarily get at work.)

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

I do not have an ideal creative environment. I largely prefer writing on my computer than on my phone, but that's about it. I do find myself writing on trains pretty often, and I don't know if it's the environment so much as having nothing else to do!

When I travel and know I'm going to have to write a lot, such as during my European train trip, I sometimes bring a Bluetooth keyboard for my phone as I find the typing comfort much higher than on the phone's virtual keyboard.

A fun fact, which might be TMI and so be it, is that I've noticed that my writing output strongly correlates with some specific times of my hormonal cycle.

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

My hosting and domain name are done through OVH, a French provider. I like that they're French and I love that they have a one-click install for Wordpress. My CMS is WordPress and it's been, with some exceptions, since 2012.

I use Ghost at work and really like it. I might possibly consider moving to Ghost someday, but my server is old and I'm not super tech-savvy and Wordpress won't let me export my whole database because the plugin isn't compatible with my version of PHP. Oops.

Here's a more or less complete list of my WordPress plugins (not super up to date, I should get to that).

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

As said above, I wouldn't be against trying a more streamlined platform like Ghost, but I do like the flexibility of WordPress as someone who's not a dev and still wants some customization.

I sometimes toy wiht the idea of a static site. Love the idea, hate the execution of moving 500 blog posts to markdown files.

And as for my identity… I often wish I was more anonymous online. But I fail again and again to keep myself anonymous, and I like having my full name there as a reminder that you're never fully safe. I find it almost easier to deal with than being pseudonymous and too easily forgetting that people will still be able to find me with a bit of effort.

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?

As far as I can think of, I only have two costs:

• The hosting, ~10€/month (it includes my blog as well as other websites, like the Réussir Mes Études archive, and some storage)
• The domain name, ~50€/year

I don't monetize my personal blog, and I respect people who do, because I've needed to do it on Réussir Mes Études many times. I used to sell coaching services (nice and predictable) and sponsored articles (I hated those, but was also keenly aware that when I got lucky and snagged one my rent would be covered for the month). I am fascinated by monetization issues and unfortunately have no « perfect way » of solving them.

I like to donate or subscribe to other people when they allow me to, especially if they have a one-time or annual donation solution. I hate monthly donations because they stack up and I drown in them too easily.

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

Aaaah that's an excellent question! I feel like you've already interviewed pretty much all of the English speakers I follow, heh.

Today I think I'd recommend you interview Elizabeth Tai and the wonderful Elle.

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

Yes, a bunch!

• Contribute to Wikipedia if you like writing and/or researching. Contribute to Wikimedia Commons if you like taking pictures. Contribute to the Wiktionary if you enjoy words. Contribute to OpenStreetMaps if you like walking around (I recommend StreetComplete for a chill beginner experience).
• If you speak French, come check out blogroll.fr
• Find a niche sport and get really into watching or practicing it. I do roller derby, which is really amazing, and I also watch ice hockey − for our North American readers, I need to state that ice hockey is a niche sport here in France. Finally, I am passionate about short-track speed skating. It's fun. Find yours!

This was the 99th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Alex. Make sure to follow their blog (RSS) and get in touch with them if you have any questions.

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Another option would be to use the built-in hugo commands, but for some reason I never think of that. Probably because it requires that I cd to the right place and tell it what to name the file.

Mike Hall recently published an update to the Ruby script he uses. It’s called hpost.

I used hpost to create this post. Worked fine, but made me think about how I might do it, given some private time with Claude.

• I wouldn’t use Ruby. It’s a nice language, but dependencies and version management confound me. Same with Python. I bet it could be done using bash. Or maybe Go, which would be Hugo-appropriate.
• New posts would go in dated folders (e.g. /posts/2025/07/my-new-post.md)
• I’d offer a choice to use a Hugo bundle (/my-post/index.md vs my-post.md) to make it easier to include images.
• Including a slug: entry in the front matter would be nice for maintaining URL consistency in case of title changes.
• Daily Notes would have to conform to my own conventions (/journal/2025/07-july/20250718/index.md)

What I’ll likely do in real life is to continue using Emacs for creating posts. I’ve got Dired bookmarks for getting to previous posts, dwim commands for building/deploying, etc. hpost (or equivalent) is still nice for days like today when I’m off Emacs.

1. Rare, but it happens. ↩︎

 This week, digital agency Humidity Studios launched PleaseFixThisSite.com, a website with a deliberately awful design aesthetic.

Inspired by XKCD 3113 “Fix This Sign”, the site features marquee animations, poor font choices, wonky rotation and alignment, and more.

Like the comic, it aims to “extort” people offended by the design choices by allowing them to pay to fix them. Once fixed, a change is fixed for everybody… at least, until somebody pays to “reset” the site back to its catastrophic mode.

That’s cute and all, but the difference between a billboard and a web page is, of course, that a web page is under the viewer’s control. Once it’s left the server and reached your computer, there’s nothing the designer can to do stop you editing a page in any way you like. That’s just how the Web works!

A great way to do this is with userscripts: Javascript content that is injected into pages by your browser when you visit particular pages. Mostly by way of demonstration, I gave it a go. And now you can, too! All you need is a userscript manager plugin in your browser (my favourite is Violentmonkey!) and to install my (open source) script.

I enjoyed the art of the joke that is PleaseFixThisSite.com. But probably more than that, I enjoyed the excuse to remind you that by the time you’re viewing a Web page, it’s running on your computer, and you can change it any way you damn well please.

Don’t like the latest design of your favourite social network? Want to reinstate a feature of a popular video playing site? Need a dark mode to spare your eyes on a particular news publication? Annoyed by artificial wait times before you’re “allowed” to click a download button? There’s probably a userscript for all of those. And if there isn’t, you can have a go at writing one. Userscripts are great, and you should be using them.

📰 Using a feed reader is the best way to read my blog posts. How clever you are to know that! 🚀