Enjoyed listening to the copyright discussion on SharpTech this week. Copyright is not a universal truth. It’s effectively a limited monopoly given to creators. That’s helpful, but it must be balanced with the public good. Sometimes we go too far, like Mickey Mouse’s 95-year copyright.
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Experimenting with Gemini CLI to iterate on some web page changes. It’s free for basic usage. It does get confused sometimes, having to re-read files and apply changes multiple times, which makes it feel slow and a little wasteful.
P&B: David Wertheimer
This is the 96th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have David Wertheimer and his blog, Ideapad
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.
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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.
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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Photo challenge day 27: Collective — shot earlier this year when Kent, one of the biggest bands in Sweden, did a few reunion gigs. 📷🎵
My Morning Walk
My morning walk with the dogs is one of my favourite times of day. It’s so quiet where we live, and at this time of year, all the wildlife is out with plenty to see.
This particular route is around 3 miles (5 km) and takes me out of the village, up into the hills, and back down the other side. Going up the hills gets the heart pumping too, so it’s decent exercise. Anyway, here’s the route we took this morning…
First, we walk out of the village and head under this beautiful old bridge. This is where we start our ascent into the Welsh hills. On the way back down, we’ll go under a viaduct as we return to the village.
Apparently, this bridge and viaduct date back to Roman times (obviously they’ve been improved or rebuilt since then). A popular history show in the UK, Time Team, actually did an episode in our village:
Anyway, I digress. On with the walk…
We start heading up the hills. The dogs are starting to pant and I’m starting to sweat, but it’s worth it once you see the views.
On the way up, we see some of Carl’s sheep (he’s the local farmer). We always stop to say hello, but I was too busy scratching an itch between one of the ewe’s ears to take a photo – sorry!
As we head further over the hills, we notice that Carl has some of his calves out in the fields too. So we stop, and they wander over to see what we’re doing. Both dogs and calves have a good sniff of one another. I’m even subjected to a couple of sniffs myself.
All sniffed out, we continue onto a bridle path and start heading down the other side of the hill. We go past the wonky tree (that’s what our kids call it). Lots of horses use this path, but we didn’t pass any today unfortunately.
As we come out of the bridle path, we’re greeted with more lovely views of the Welsh hills, and Barnie, the local Shetland pony, comes to say hello.
We’re well on our way down from the hills now, moving onto a fire road that winds down through some woodland.
Halfway down there’s this lovely house with an old canal boat in the garden. I always gorp at this house as it’s so gorgeous. I didn’t take a photo of it though – that felt a bit rude. But trust me, it’s beautiful.
At the bottom of the fire road, we head under the viaduct and back into the village.
As we head back in, I hear one of Carl’s cows mooing in the distance – probably mum to one of the calves we saw earlier, and likely related to the cows he put on our land a couple of years ago.
That’s a lot to take in on a relatively short 3 mile (5 km) walk, which is part of why I love living here. It’s just so beautiful. Imagine how much we see when we do the much longer walks at the weekend!
Anyway, the dogs are tired, I’ve done some exercise, and it’s time to sign on for work as my first meeting starts soon.
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Scripting News: Friday, June 27, 2025
Glossary: Tiny Little Textbox. (An idea I might try, coupled with Daytona, I should be able to build a glossary of terms I want in my official vocabulary. Ideas that have stood the test of time, that mean something now, but eventually will be set aside and no one will know what a TLTB was.)#
The longest continuously updated RSS feed in the known universe. #
I'm working my way through The Bear, and it's great because you remember that you love all these characters and you can immediately start living the ongoing drama of their lives. I feel like a cat perched on a window watching everyone doing their daily stuff. Looking forward to going back to the beginning and starting over. #
BTW, I think the right way to read Scripting News is getting the nightly email. That's the pulse. I jot stuff down during the day, mostly in the morning, and later add links and finish stuff up. The scripting.com feed is updated in realtime. So you may get many versions of an item over the day, which might be a problem with feed readers that don't watch for changes. I noticed that my changes to a recent podcast shownotes page don't flow back out to my podcast client app on Android. FeedLand btw, records changes, and they flow through to the timeline. Coupled with rssCloud, which is supported in every WordPress site, makes the whole thing realtime. People assume that feeds have to perform like a feed reader. But if you have a component running on the open internet, hooked up via websockets to the client, you get the flow they get in twitter-like systems. And we didn't have to invent anything that didn't already exist in 2009. #
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My wife writes and posts plenty of pictures of our recent reboot of one of the bathrooms at our Summit Ave house.
She also provides an episode link to the DIY reality show we were on several years back.
Taking Blogging Seriously
It’s a warm summer night in NYC and I’m walking through central park with a friend, the fireflies blink around us like an external reflection of the neurons firing in our brains as the conversation sparks.
Mac Finder Redesign? Snooze
The Mac old timers have been up in arms about the beta one of macOS Tahoe switching up the colors of the “Finder” icon. Dark blue on the right side. In Beta 2, the dark blue side is on the right side of the “Finder” icon. Whew! Not that normals noticed.
This is a classic example of long-time Apple followers and their navel-gazing. It’s not even the first thing I notice about the new Tahoe OS—actually, I don’t notice it at all. Finder and its look is the least important thing for me. When I look at the betas, what stands out are the small but meaningful improvements in visionOS 26.
They make me confident that Apple’s AR glasses, when they arrive, will be more than competitive. Same goes for improvements in iPadOS. If there’s any valid criticism to make about Apple right now, it’s how poorly AI has been integrated. The new Shortcuts, in particular, still feel frustratingly outdated in the so-called AI age.
via @ 512 Pixels.
