I don’t think I realized that you didn’t need to be in the EU to distribute apps via AltStore PAL. If Apple relaxes their notarization review in the future, I might use this to ship early iOS builds to the EU.
There are many challenges for the web and web publishers as AI upends search, but the only way to believe that the open web itself will be destroyed is to no longer believe in web browsers. As big as AI is, it’s not as big as the web. We’ll navigate through this.
I’m currently reading Humanely Possible by Sarah Blakewell – I liked her previous two books so it wasn’t too difficult to pick this one up as well. She devoted quite a few pages about Petrarch. He liked collecting books, except that back then the printing press didn’t exist, so he has to manually copy every book:
While supposedly studying hard, in Montpellier and then in Bologna, he put much of his energy into collecting books instead. This was long before printing technology; the only way to get reading matter was to find manuscripts to buy, beg, borrow, or transcribe—all of which he did eagerly.
We’ve been so technologically abundant now that it is easy to forget that once upon a time there was no way to reproduce books easily. I can’t imagine having to copy every word of a book I want to read.
The following passage also jumped out at me:
Often, Petrarch did more than mechanical copying. Besides trying to remember what he read, he also applied his own growing scholarship to each new discovery. He pioneered the art of sensitive editing, using fresh manuscript finds to build up fuller versions of ancient texts that had previously existed only in fragments, doing his best to fit them together correctly. His most important production of this kind was an edition of Livy, a historian of Rome whose huge work survived only in parts. (It is still incomplete, but we have more of it now than in Petrarch’s time.) Having found several new sections in different manuscript forms, he assembled them in a volume together with his copies of other existing parts. The resulting book would belong to a great scholar of the next century, Lorenzo Valla (whom we will meet properly later on); Valla added more notes of his own, improving it further. This was exactly what generations of humanists would continue to love doing—enlarging knowledge, using the evidence to make texts richer and more accurate.
This is what human beings did: enlarging knowledge, by taking the effort to assemble the truth or learnings from different fragments, so that someone else can benefit from it. I relate to this as I am also personally attempting to piece together what I’ve learnt on my own journey and share them here.
Is this like the ancient substack/newsletter?
Finding the Cicero letters at a point when he had just turned forty and was ready for a midlife summation, he realized that he could do the same. He could retrieve and revisit his own letters, copy them, polish them, put them in a satisfying order, and then circulate them to anyone who cared to read them—which in turn would bring more correspondents and new friends to whom he could write even more letters.
…and like me and some others, Petrarch seems to like socialising with books too:
For Petrarch, books are sociable: “They speak with us, advise us and join us together with a certain living and penetrating intimacy.” The ancients make just as good companions as people who consider themselves alive because, as he writes, they can still see their breath in the frosty air
I’m still far from finishing the book, but thought I’ll note and share these highlights before I forget the impressions they had on me. History really puts a perspective on things, and I would like to be a person who will always remember the awe when I encounter books.
In a time when books did not really exist, Petrarch is just doing his own thing copying manuscripts for long periods, collating volumes of text from various sources, sending letters. Nobody asked him to, but he just did it because he wanted to. He did not do it for money or fame, as far as I know. I feel this way about this website. I do it because I want to, yet it is strange how it feels weird in this current society to do something simply because we want to. We can love acquiring and sharing knowledge just for the sake of it, like Petrarch. The act of enlarging knowledge, is truly an uniquely human endeavour and I would say, pleasure.
This is the 89th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Anh and her blog, anhvn.com
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Let's start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
I'm Anh, a designer and artist based in Canada. My hobbies include, predictably: making and looking at websites, drawing, playing video games, and collecting all of the above on my website.
By day—and also by night, because I maintain chaotic working hours—I design web things at a nice company.
What's the story behind your blog?
I've been Online™ for a long time, and I suppose I've always been "blogging" in some way for years—I'm much more comfortable with writing than speaking, and I'm a weird shy nerd, so I've always drifted towards oversharing on the internet.
anhvn.com started back in 2020 when I decided I would stop using a pseudonym and actually post stuff under my name that people would see. Before that, I had a blog that maybe three friends of mine knew about and looked at, which was freeing but also very lonely. I used to share more personal things then too, like what I did day-to-day or things I was struggling with, but now I'm more private about that. I appreciate vulnerability, but I'm more wary these days for privacy's sake.
anhvn.com is also more than just a blog—as a personal website, it's where I put other interests: unfinished notes and references ("the digital garden"); artwork I post on social media ("the sketchbook"); tracking the media I consume, like movies and books ("the media diary"). I like the freedom of being able to put whatever I want on it and designing how it's showcased.
“anhvn” stands for, of course, “anh visual novel.” (JK, this is just one of my former homepages.) I've used a lot of different names online over the years, and I've also grown out of a lot of them. I based this domain on my actual name because I know I won't be tired of it in a decade or two.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
I write "weeknotes" consistently, though not at an actual weekly cadence. To write them, I'm usually pulling from some archive rather than trying to remember what I did—I'll look at my watchlist to see what I last watched; I'll go through my bookmarks app to see what cool links I've saved; I'll scroll through my own social media to see what I've posted about. This all gets dumped into a Markdown document in VS Code, and I keep adding to it and writing until I think I've covered everything or I grow sick of it.
When I'm tired of my usual blogging ways, I'll switch up the format. I've recently started doing chat-style posts—i.e. posts that are formatted like text messages—which are more casual and freeing to write. Once in a while, I'll design a new blog post layout just for a single post, because I'm bored of my current site design and want to play with some different fonts or colours. Sometimes this starts in Figma, and sometimes I do it directly in the browser.
I never have anyone review my posts before I publish, but I'd probably introduce that step in the future if I ever write anything more ambitious—all of my blog posts are quite informal. I do the most minimal of proofreading myself.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
It depends on the creative activity. For computer stuff, I work best when I'm at home—I need the ergonomics of a full desk setup, otherwise I feel slowed down. When writing, I need to be alone (also, preferably, on my regular computer setup), otherwise I can't focus. In my ideal world, I'm designing and writing in the morning while drinking my first coffee of the day.
I like drawing just about anywhere though. Unlike designing or writing, which involve a lot of paring down nebulous ideas into something presentable, drawing feels more expansive and benefits from external stimuli.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
My site is built with Eleventy, a static site generator. It's perfect for me: relatively straight-forward to set up, flexible in how to structure my content, and has a large community. I have a lot of custom pages on my site because it's so easy to set up a new one. And of course, I've written a post about this.
I host all my code on GitHub, and deploy it through Netlify. My domain is registered on Namecheap. It works fine! I don't really know how it all works under the hood—I don't know what npm is, and it's fine—but setting it up was straight-forward enough, and it hasn't broken on me yet, which is a great relief.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
I would perhaps take tagging/categorizing more seriously—my blog archive has now grown to a point where it's unwieldy to peruse, and I'll need to go back and tag things for when I add post filtering. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied with where it's at.
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?
My domain costs $15.88/year (a steal, really, for a five-letter .com domain of my own incredibly common name). That's the only website cost; I don't pay anything for GitHub or Netlify, and my company pays for my Adobe account, which allows me to use their webfonts.
My website generates zero revenue, which I'm perfectly fine with. If I find myself in a situation where I need to generate income though, I'm sure that would change. I've entertained thoughts of monetising in some way for years—such as through selling digital goods, taking art commissions, or having a ko-fi donations account—but I don't need to right now and that's not a burden I want to take on without good reason. I enjoy having the freedom to do whatever I want online; if I turn it into a business, then that comes with its own set of responsibilities and expectations.
That door isn't closed, though. At the end of the day, we all need to pay rent, so I'm all for blog monetisation.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
wavebeem's blog — Sage writes about their various side projects, blog redesigns (frequent! love it), and interests.
A.C. Esguerra writes about journaling and art — exactly the kind of art blogging I want to read more of!
Reports from Unknown Places by Ninn Salaün—does this count as a blog? you can follow it on RSS!—is a wonderful art project with daily posts about the weather.
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
This was the 89th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Anh. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.
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I wrote recently that I’m tempted to “move the entire enterprise onto paper” and I’m more than half serious. Playing with text on the computer has become a way to never actually do anything useful. It’s fun and easy and gets me nowhere.
I fired up my Micro.blog subscription again yesterday. This was probably not the right move, but I’m experimenting with my social media “identity” and Micro.blog is one option.
A big update for Bookmarks in the latest release of WordLand.#
Upton Sinclair: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”#
We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.#
The great thing about sports is that a lowly software developer can be richer than a fantastically rich team owner, if the developer's team is the Knicks. #
Fight Club for Tech was a pet idea until I screwed something up and seemed to have lost control of it, but I just found it in the list of my WordPress sites, so I guess I can post to it again?#
I think the shape of the intellectual world will be vastly different after AI, and that its impact will overshadow the web as the web made card catalogs irrelevant. I'm pretty sure whatever comes next won't look very much like what we're using now, but it will probably evolve from what we have, although it's impossible to know.#
I have been writing the colorful saga of my sad depressed programmer friend on Facebook, and it was getting some interest from friends until I moved it into a group and now no one reads it, which makes me sad and depressed too because the story of my programmer friend took an interesting turn after he maxed out on space, got a call from the NBA commisioner asking if he would mind officiating the Knicks two playoff games in Boston this last week. My friend, was of course quite sad and depressed, but he was also exhausted and bored, so he said yes. Here he is before the first of two games, which partially thanks to his officiating were near-blowouts for the Celtics, and thus the Knicks are up 2-0 heading into tomorrow's game in New York.#
Friend sadly officiating at the TD Garden in Boston.#
I have to say the latest Baseline theme looks great!#
Here's a blog post I just wrote, in the WordLand editor, and the writing experience was excellent. It took a long time and a lot of work to get it there, but it is there now. #
But as the post says, it's not just a blog post, it's also a tweet. And it's not a miracle, it's just endless iteration over both sides, the reading and writing, until it felt right. So far all that's visible is the writing side. But I know something about reading too, having written a number of feed readers over the years, including the first one. 😄#
With Scott Hanson on one side of this effort and me on the other, him the developer, me the user (ie writer of blog posts and tweets) -- we wrestled with WordPress themes. I wanted a minimal design, a place to start -- which is why the theme is called Baseline. It's a Christmas Tree without any ornaments. None. A fresh start. #
There will be a release of this theme in a short while. I just wanted to boast a bit about what it can do.#
Screen shot of the post rendered in Baseline theme.#
We had the world conned into taking our “dollars” and giving us cars, food, nice vacations, drugs, a huge military, all kinds of manufactured stuff for nothing, and we thought they were ripping us off! So we blew it up. The would-be “Art Of The Con” mastermind undid the biggest con in history.#
