Four full weeks of paying more attention to phone screen time are behind us, and it’s time for some closing thoughts on this experiment. But first, a quick recap of how the final week went.

The average was slightly higher than the previous 3 weeks, and that was mainly due to what happened on Tuesday and Friday, which, as you can see from the weekly recap, saw higher-than-usual phone usage.

On Tuesday, I passed 1 hour of screen time for the first time since the start of this experiment, and that was because of a…phone call? I’m not entirely sure why screen time registers a phone call as screen time, but that's why I passed the 1-hour mark on Tuesday. I had a 30-minute phone call for something work-related, and that apparently is picked up as screen time. Go figure. Aside from that, as you can see, usage was business as usual: about half an hour of messaging and a minute here and there for a few extra things.

Friday, I passed the 1-hour mark again, and this time it was actual usage, and it was just Telegram. As you can see from the time distribution, I spent almost 40 minutes chatting with a few people late in the day and aside from Telegram, I barely picked up my phone. The rest of the week was very uneventful.

Looking back at these past 4 weeks, I feel like, for me, the way my life is structured at this moment, 4 hours of weekly phone usage is the sweet spot, and I intend to keep it that way. I’m happy I managed not to consume content on my phone. Podcasts, music and RSS are gone from the site, and I feel like my relationship with this stupid object is in a much better place.

I have deeper thoughts I want to share, but those will get their own dedicated post, likely tomorrow.

How about the others, though? I started this thing to help Kevin get off his phone, and I succeeded so well that he jumped off iOS entirely and moved to Android. Not exactly the outcome we wanted, but hey, at least it's a change. He'll be back using his phone 5 hours a day now that nobody is paying attention. Kev instead is too busy vibe-coding blog platforms to pay attention to his phone, and he abandoned us after one week. As for John, Thomas, and Alex, they all did great, I'd say, and I love that Thomas tracked time spent in front of his computer and not just the phone.

• Read Kevin's week four recap
• Read Thomas' week four recap
• Read John's week four recap
• Read Alex's week three recaps

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It’s fine. Many people do it, and you decided to do the same. That’s ok. But don’t attempt to use some wishy-washy argument to justify your actions. You either believe in something and you’re willing to power through, or you don’t, and you do what everybody else is doing. It’s fine to pick option B, but at least have the courage to admit it and don't use some bullshit argument to justify your actions.

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This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Patrick Rhone, whose blog can be found at patrickrhone.net.

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

My name is Patrick Rhone. When I'm not trying to be the best husband and father I can be, I'm mostly known as a writer, blogger, technology consultant, speaker, mental health advocate, and general c-list internet personality.

I also restore old houses as a professional hobby. I do volunteer circus rigging at a performing youth circus school as a less professional one.

What's the story behind your blog?

The very first post on my blog, Rhoneisms, is dated November 7th, 2003. Of course, I had been blogging before that, and there used to be posts dated slightly earlier. But, my blog actually began as an internally hosted one at the college I used to work for and I lost those earlier posts when I moved to a different platform and brought it public… Gosh, that seems like it was just yesterday. Not 22 years ago. Such is life.

My main blog has had many different points of focus over the years. From geeky, mainly Apple, tech stuff to GTD-driven personal productivity stuff, to practical/actionable life advice stuff, to the anything I'm interested in sort of thing it is now. And, that’s exactly what a blog should be — a reflection of one's interest and attention over time. A reflection of who one is right now and where they've been. Blogs are living things that should grow at the same rate we do.

I say "main" blog above because I do have a couple of other topic specific blogs (one for my home restoration work and The Cramped which is not often updated these days).

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

I really just post anything I feel like. Links to things I find interesting. Essays of things that take me a bit longer to express. Short thought's I'm having. All sorts of things.

I’m 58 years old. The internet was not even anything regular people could use until I was in my early 20s. My first "online" writing was things I posted to dial up BBS systems/communities. In the old days of the internet, it was common to have a blog just links or thoughts much like mine is today. There was no such thing as content management systems (like Moveable Type or WordPress) or services. No such thing as blogging software. Things were hand coded HTML. There were no “rules” about what a post had to look like or be.

Here’s Kottke.org from 2001. No titles. No format. Just some thoughts and a bunch of links for the day. This is the feel I’m trying to recapture.

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

I generally do not have a specific creative environment. I believe the best inspiration can strike anywhere at anytime for the type of blogging I'm doing.

That said, for my longer form essays, in general my process is that I think about something for a very long time and then suddenly, out of nowhere at often at the most inconvenient time, what I call "writing brain" kicks in and I must find something — anything — to get it written down ASAP. It appears fully formed when that happens. So, no drafts.

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

My blog and domain registration is through Dreamhost who I've used for too long to remember (2012 maybe). It runs on WordPress. If I'm on iOS I use Drafts to post to it. On my Mac, I use MarsEdit. I very rarely use the Wordpress web interface for posting. Only if I need to jump in and edit the HTML of something complicated to format otherwise.

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

Nope. I'm very happy with where it is now and how it exists. Like I said, a blog should grow and change at the same rate I do so, who knows, that could change tomorrow and when/if it does, I'll change it accordingly.

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 monetizing personal blogs?

Back of the napkin calculation: My general unlimited hosting for all my domains (I have a lot), sites, etc. is $39.95 a month. It would be too difficult to break down how much it is just to host the one blog out of that.

It doesn't generate any direct revenue really and I don't do it for that reason. I suppose people who enjoy my work will buy one of my books or something but it is not for this that I do it.

I blog because it is the best way for me to catalog my interests and thinking over time.

If others want to monetize their work that's their choice and I have no real opinion on it. There are a few bloggers that I support with my dollars in different ways and I'm happy to do so.

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

I remain a fan of Nicholas Bate who currently blogs at Hunter Gatherer 21C. In general, I enjoy his thoughts and insights. I also like his style of blogging. In many ways similar to mine (and I'd be remiss if I did not admit that mine is somewhat inspired by his). I'd recommend him for sure.

But, there are too many people I absolutely adore and admire to list here. Some of which have already appeared in this series. Annie Muller, Rebecca Toh, Kurt Harden, my friend Jamie Thingelstad. Obviously also internet famous ones like Jason Kottke and John Gruber.

The wonderful thing about the internet and the resurgence of blogging is that there is an endless amount of great blogs and bloggers out there. There is something and someone for everyone. Google your interests and find your people.

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

Well, I'm writing this in the middle of a tumultuous time not just in my country but in my city and local community. It is the end of January in Minneapolis/Saint Paul and anyone reading this - even long after - need only google to know what is happening here. And, I can tell you anything you do see or read or hear about it is but one of hundreds or thousands of stories. In other words, my mind is a bit pre-occupied right now.

But what I do want people to know about that is that despite everything our own federal government is doing to our state, it is only making our local communes stronger. We are deepening our ties with our neighbors, developing mutual aid networks to ensure care for the most vulnerable, and building peaceful resistance rapid response groups on a hyper local level.

So this is what I want people to know: The worst of them is bringing out the best of us. The worst in them is bringing out the best in us.

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In my “closing thoughts” post about the phone usage experiment, I mentioned I had deeper thoughts I wanted to share. Here I am, sharing those thoughts. I ran various month-long life experiments over the years, many of which I chronicled here on this blog. For that reason, the outcome of this recent phone experiment wasn’t a surprise: if I make the conscious decision to pay attention to some specific aspect of my life, there’s a high likelihood I’ll manage to enact significant changes in that specific area. Or so I thought.

You see, I am a flawed human being, like many—most?—of the people out there. If I were in therapy, there would be a plethora of issues I’d be discussing with my therapist, but in therapy I am not, and so I thought it would be fun—for me at least, not sure about you—to tackle one of them here, since it’s strictly related to this recent phone experiment.

«Wait a second, if that’s the case, then why aren’t you in therapy, Manu?» Good question, I’m glad you asked. There are two main reasons. The first, and less important reason, is that I am a stubborn motherfucker, and the idea of asking someone else to help me fix my inner issues is something that doesn’t sit right with me. The second, and more important reason, is that I have a fundamental distrust of psychologists. Not in psychology as a field, I have no issues with that. I even considered going into psychology back when I was about to finish high school and was thinking about possible career paths. I also read plenty of psychology books, and the book that had more impact on me growing up was a psychology book written by a psychologist.

The issue I have with psychologists is that all the ones I had the pleasure to meet in person were deeply flawed and fucked up individuals, and that left an impression on me. Now I carry this fundamental (and partly irrational) distrust in them, which is a bit problematic since it’s hard to go to therapy when you don’t trust the person on the other side. Maybe this will change at some point in the future, who knows. I'm open to that possibility.

Anyway, to get back on track, the issue I wanted to discuss is related to disappointment. Specifically, my issue with the concept of disappointing others. This is something I had to deal with since I was a kid, and I’m not sure why that is. I don’t know if it was triggered by something specific that happened or if it’s just part of my character, but disappointing others and especially the thought of seeing them disappointed because of something I did or didn’t do, is something I have always struggled with. To this day, I still do.

The reason why I think this is all related to my weird life experiments is that those experiments usually follow a pattern: I experiment with something, I blog about it, I get to enjoy the benefits of some positive change, the experiment ends, I stop blogging about it, and slowly but surely the old habits manage to creep back in. It happens every time, like clockwork. But this time around, I realised that the reason why it happens is that I, fundamentally, do not give much of a fuck about myself. That itself is a topic for another time, but in the context of this discussion, the thing that matters is that as long as I’m blogging and I’m sharing my experience, the irrational pressure of disappointing someone keeps me on track. At a rational level, I know that no one gives a fuck if I fail at these silly experiments, and yet, for some reason, that extra pressure is what keeps me in check.

Now, is this a healthy way to exist in this world? Probably not. Do I care? Definitely not. But, having realised this, I’m now wondering how I can exploit this to my advantage. Because there are things I’d love to change in my life, and I’m starting to think leveraging the disappointment-lever to my advantage could be the way to go.

My phone usage, for example, is still under control, and that’s because I know I’m gonna keep sharing those numbers. Not weekly, because that’s boring, but probably every couple of months. And this fact alone, the decision of doing this, is apparently enough to keep my brain on track.

Brains are weird, what can I say? I’m still figuring out which changes I want to put in place in my life. The tricky part is that they need to be trackable and shareable somehow; otherwise, this will not work, but I’m sure I’ll manage to come up with a solution.

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We’re all familiar with social media: the Facebooks, the Twitters, the TikToks of this silly digital world. They have invaded our lives and taken over our time and attention. We have spent the past decade posting, snapping, tweeting, reeling (?), tiktoking (??). We fall asleep youtubing, only to wake up with our “for you” page completely fucked up because the algorithm lives a life of its own and has decided to profile us as someone who loves sheep herding and carpet cleaning (and, you know, maybe it's right).

But imagine for a second if someone managed to reinvent social media. Imagine if there was a new product out there on the internet. A product so revolutionary, so original, so refreshingly different, that it will completely transform the way you feel and interact with other people online.

Can you feel the excitement building? Well, I’m sorry—not sorry—to disappoint you because that product is not here. What is here, though (blame Kevin), is a silly little experiment: the Dealgorithm IRC server. I was thinking about setting an IRC server up just for fun, and he took the idea, ran with it, and the server is now live.

Now, contrary to the fools at Digg, I know how the web works, and there’s no chance in hell I’d let this server open to the internet, so that every weirdo out there could join. Which is why, if you’re interested in joining, you need to apply by filling out this form. I’m not going to request a copy of your ID…for now.

The server is currently set up to retain up to 2000 messages per channel for up to 48 hours. We might play with these settings, but I don’t want this to be a place for content to stick around. The idea is to have a space where a bunch of people can hang out in a very casual way and talk about anything they find interesting.

We may or may not permanently ban you if you profess your love for AI. You’ve been warned.

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This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Melanie Richards, whose blog can be found at melanie-richards.com/blog.

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

I’m a Group Product Manager co-leading the core product at Webflow, i.e. helping teams visually design and build websites. My personal mission is to empower people to make inspiring, impactful, and inclusive things on the web. That’s been the through line of my career so far: I started out as a designer at a full-service agency called Fuzzco, moved to the web platform at Microsoft Edge, continued building for developers at Netlify, and am now aiming to make web creation even more democratic with the Webflow platform.

I transitioned from design to product management while at Microsoft Edge. I wanted to take part in steering the future of the web platform, instead of remaining downstream of those decisions. I feel so lucky to have worked on new features in HTML, ARIA, CSS, and JavaScript with other PMs and developers in the W3C and WHATWG.

I’m a builder at heart, so I love to work on webby side projects as well as a whole bevy of analog hobbies: knitting, sewing, weaving, sketchbooking, and journaling.

What's the story behind your blog?

I have a couple primary blogs right now:

• melanie-richards.com/blog, simply the blog that lives at my main website. I post here about the web, design, development, accessibility, product management, etc. One practice I’ve been keeping for a few years now is my monthly Learning Log. These posts are a compendium of what I’ve been shipping or making, what I’ve been learning, side quests, neat links around the internet, and articles I’ve been reading. When I’m in a particularly busy period (as was the case in 2025; my first child was born in September), this series is my most consistent blogging practice.
• making.melanie-richards.com: this is the blog where I post about my aforementioned analog projects. Quite a lot of sewing over the past year!

From 2013–2016 I also had a blog and directory called Badass Lady Creatives (wish I had spent more than five minutes on the name, haha). This featured women who were doing cool things in various “creative” industries. At the time it seemed like every panel, conference lineup, and group project featured all or mostly dudes. The blog was a way to push back on that a little bit and highlight people who were potentially overlooked. Since then gender representation (for one) seems to have gotten a bit better in these industries. But the work and joy of celebrating diverse, inspiring talent is never done!

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

Big “yeet to production” vibes for me! I use Obsidian to scribble down my thoughts and write an initial draft. Obsidian creates Markdown files, so I copy and paste those into Visual Studio Code (my code editor), add some images and make some tweaks, and then push to production. I really try not to overthink it too much. However, I will admit that I have a tons of drafts in Obsidian that never see the light of day. It can be cathartic enough just to scribble it down, even if I never publish the thought.

For my Learning Log posts, I use a Readwise => Obsidian workflow I describe in this blog post. Reader by Readwise is the app where I store and read all my RSS feeds and newsletter forwards.

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

“Parallel play” is the biggest, most joyful boon to my creativity. I love to be in the company of others as we independently work on our own projects side by side.

There’s a delicate balance when it comes to working on creative projects socially. For example, my mom, my aunt, and I often have Sew Day over FaceTime on Sundays. Everyone’s pretty committed to what they’re working on, so it’s easy to sew and talk and sing (badly 😂) at the same time. I also used to go to a local craft night that very sadly disbanded when the host shop changed hands.

For writing or coding, that takes a bit more mental focus for me. I started a Discord server with a few friends, which is dedicated to working on blog posts and side projects. We meet up once a month to talk about our projects (and shoot the breeze, usually about web accessibility and/or the goodness of dogs). Then we all log off the voice channel to go do the thing!

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

Both of these blogs use Eleventy and plain ol’ Markdown, and are hosted on Netlify. Some of my other side projects use a content management system (CMS) like Webflow’s CMS, or Contentful + Eleventy. Again, Webflow is my current employer.

I use a Netlify form for comments on my “Making” blog, and Webmentions for my main blog. I will probably pull out Webmentions from that code base: conceptually they’ve never really “landed” for me, and it would be nice to delete a ton of code.

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

I generally like my setup, though sometimes I think about migrating my “Making” blog onto a CMS. As far as CMSes go, I quite like Webflow’s: it’s straightforward and has that Goldilocks level of functionality for me. Some other CMSes I’ve tried have felt bloated yet seemed to miss obvious functionality out of the box.

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?**

I have a Bookshop.org affiliate link and it took me several years to meet the $20 minimum payout so…yeah I’ve never truly monetized my blogging! I find there’s freedom in giving away your thoughts for free.

As far as costs go, I have pretty low overhead: just paying for the domain name.

I’m fine with other folks monetizing personal blogs, though of course there’s a classy and not-classy way to do so. If monetizing is what keeps bloggers’ work on the open web, on sites they own and control, I prefer that over monetizing through walled gardens. Related: Substack makes it easy to monetize but there are some very compelling reasons to consider alternatives.

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

• Mandy Brown, Oliver Burkeman (technically a newsletter with a “view on web” equivalent), and Ethan Marcotte’s writing have been helping to fill my spiritual cup over the last couple years.
• Anh and Katherine Yang are doing neat things on their sites
• What Claudia Wore for a nostalgic pick; I’d love to recreate some of these outfits sometime. Thank you Kim for keeping the blog up!
• Sarah Higley would be a great next interview. She blogs less frequently, but always at great depth and thoughtfulness on web accessibility. Web developers can learn quite a lot on more involved controls and interactions from Sarah.

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

This is highly topical: I’m currently scheming about a directory site listing “maker” blogs! So many communities in the visual arts and crafts are stuck on social media platforms they don’t even enjoy, beholden to the whims of an algorithm. I’d like to connect makers in a more organic way. If you’re a crafter who would like to be part of this, feel free to fill out this Google form!

Keep exploring

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Following the 7-step approach and the 1-step approach, and also channelling the spirit of the longstanding tradition of learning how to draw owls on the internet:

1. Think about a subject and then start typing
2. Type the rest of the fucking post and then hit publish

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Every time I stumble on articles or posts discussing tech products, I’m perplexed when someone uses the word “successful” to describe a product with a lot of users. There’s a better word for products like that, and that’s “popular”. Maybe I’m the odd one here, but I don’t think the popularity of a product is what we should use to evaluate if it’s also a successful one.

If I were given 50 billion to spend, and I used it to open a restaurant where everyone could come and eat for free, every day, no strings attached, I am confident my restaurant would become instantly very popular, and it would be fully booked, all the time. Would you consider that a successful restaurant? I’d say no because, unless someone keeps giving me money to burn, at some point, I’d have to shut everything down or I’d have to completely change my business model and stop giving away meals for free, which is what made my restaurant popular in the first place.

Now, if I were to run a tech strategy on my restaurant, I’d keep burning enough money until all the other restaurants in my area are out of business because the obviously can’t compete against free, and once that happens I’d start charging people money since now they have no choice but to come to my restaurant if they want to eat out.

Or, option B, I’d start doing something insanely shady, like sprinkling crack cocaine on my dishes to make people addicted to my restaurant. Both options are atrocious, and if you disagree, well, fuck you.

A product being popular is an indication of a lot of people using it. Doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is good. Doesn’t necessarily mean it’s successful. And if you want proof of that, just browse the Google graveyard. Or pay attention to whatever the fuck Open AI is doing or not doing these days, since it seems to me that they’re killing products left and right.

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This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Nikhil Anand, whose blog can be found at nikhil.io.

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

Hi I'm Nikhil! I grew up the UAE and came to the United States for college and graduated with a degree in biomedical engineering. I worked in academia and industry for about 15 years before deciding to turn my attention and energies towards problems in healthcare. I'm now a graduate student at Columbia University's Medical Center and am studying clinical informatics and loving the magnificent beehive that is New York City. With the time I have, I love going to art museums, practicing calligraphy, reading short stories and graphic novels, and watching every suspense/mystery show or movie I can (huge fan of the genre; for example I've watched all of Columbo at least three times). I'm also trying to learn CAD and have 3D printed several small abominations.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started blogging around 2003 after discovering blogs like Kottke.org, Jeffrey Zeldman's blog, Greg Storey's Airbag.ca, and Todd Dominey's WhatDoIKnow.org. My first blog was at freeorange.net which I now use as a placeholder for my tiny LLC's future site.

I used to live in Ames, Iowa at the time and decided to and blog what I knew, about stuff going on in the town: gossip, lectures and shows I'd attended, photos of random scenes and events, and so on. That last part proved to be great: I'd hear from a quite a few alumni or former residents who'd have photo requests for nostalgia and I'd gladly oblige, especially since I was super excited to use my first digital camera, a whopping 5 megapixel Sony DSC-F717 😊

I then stopped blogging for about 10 or so years and resumed in 2018. My current blog is essentially a freeform dump: just this mélange of stuff I find interesting and/or may want to reference later. There's really no audience in mind. I use a lot of tags on my posts and am often delighted by exploring them a while later. I moved all my bookmarks over from PinBoard (an excellent service) and am trying to get off Instagram. I'm also trying to be better about making and sharing things (photos, calligraphy, art) no matter how terrible they are and not just consuming them.

As for the name, I really wanted a domain hack, www.nikh.il, but this sadly required permission from the Israeli government I was pretty sure I wouldn't get 😅 So I went with the shortest and 'coolest' TLD I could find and ended up with nikhil.io. I also have nikhil.fish as an alias for no reason.

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

I think half my site's half a a tumblelog. As for the other half, I have a Markdown file called log.md in my iCloud Drive that I dump inchoate thoughts into (it's at about half a meg right now). I also use the excellent Things app on my phone to save blog posts, names, recommendations, articles, and media of interest to peruse later. When I have time, I look at these two sources to post and comment on something I think is beautiful, interesting, or funny.

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

All professional creatives I know personally have a space that they attend to do their work and they have told me that this matters immensely to them. In my case, I have a setup I've used reliably over many years and love it. I especially love my sit-to-stand desk (on wheels), giant display, and clickity-clack keyboard. I always listen to ambient music or white noise while working on anything (Loscil's works are a favorite).

I've found that I just cannot focus in coffeehouses or libraries. And I absolutely cannot work or think in harsh "cool white" lighting (3000K or lower; if you need me to divulge secrets, just put me in a room with two tubelights for thirty seconds). I know a lot of people (like my wife, a writer) who can work anywhere and may be a bit envious. I am also in the habit of pacing around and muttering things to myself while working and these are not nice things to do at coffeehouses or libraries.

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

I write all my posts in Markdown and use an old and heavily modded version of 11ty.js with several Markdown-it plugins and supported by quite a few bash and Node scripts to generate the HTML pages. Images are processed with Sharp. The blog theme is a mess of TSX and SASS files. All posts and code are in git and Github. I build everything on my laptop and sync all the files to an S3 bucket that serves my blog through CloudFront.

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

Not really. I've spent enough time monkeying with the design/structure and code where my setup fits my needs like a bespoke suit. You can always nerd out over tooling, and it's a lot of fun, but I've suspended that in favor of using the tools. For the time being at least 😅

Now if my wife or a friend were starting a blog, I would absolutely recommend a platform like Bear. Anything simple, hosted, not creepy, and not run by greedy and/or awful people.

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?

It costs ~$5 a month. A giant part of that cost is the domain name. Zero revenue. No plans on 'growing' it or whatever; it's just my little garden on the internet.

I have no problem with people monetising their blogs as long as the strategy they employ is respectful to visitors' privacy and unobtrusive to their experience. Patronage/memberships aside, The Deck comes to mind as an ad platform that achieved both these things very well.

I do have my problems with platforms like Substack and might write a blog post about this later.

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

Please interview Chris Glass! His lovely and popular blog is a huge inspiration for mine, layout and content, and he's been at it since at least 2003 IIRC. Another old favorite is Witold Riedel's log. I'm also really digging this blog I discovered recently.

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

I just put up a small project I've wanted to do for a while, my own little curated digital gallery of art I've loved over the years. It was mostly a design exercise but I thought I might use some LLM to discover some themes in why I love these works (or maybe you just love looking at things and don't really need to understand why).

Other than that, I am so happy with what feels to me like a resurgence in personal blogging (here's a recent index of personal blogs from readers of HackerNews). Thank you for having me in your beautiful space and featuring several other lovely and interesting people! This is a fantastic project Manu 🤗

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I’ve seen /ai pages popping up here and there on other people’s blogs. The idea for these pages is, and I quote, «promote trust and transparency». Trust, in the context of 2026 internet—and society in general—is quite the complex topic. Dishing out trust willy-nilly is no longer a reasonable thing to do, and I also think we’re getting to the point where the “benefit of the doubt” is no longer worth considering.

If I were to write on this /ai page that I don’t let these tools touch anything I post on this blog, would you trust me? Would that change the perception you have of me? And if you did trust me, why are you doing it? After all, you have no way to actually know for sure. But that is precisely what trust is, isn’t it? Trust is not based on knowledge, but on instinct, on intuitions, on feelings, and on prior experience.

Personally, I couldn’t care less what you write on your /ai page. The same way I couldn’t care less if you use em-dashed. Words are cheap, easy to write, and they mean less and less. But your history, all the baggage you carry with you, all you have written and said, that is harder to fake, building it is time-consuming, but destroying it takes a second. If you start posting AI slop, my trust in you is gone in an instant, and no matter how you’ll try to justify it, that trust will not come back.

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This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Anthony Nelzin-Santos, whose blog can be found at z1nz0l1n.com.

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

Bonjour ! I’m a militant wayfarer, budding typographer, pathological reader, slow cyclist, obsessive tinkerer, dangerous cook, amateur bookbinder, homicidal gardener, mediocre sewist, and fanatical melomaniac living in Lyon (France). I was a technology journalist and journalism teacher for sixteen years, but i now work in instructional design.

In my spare time, i take photos of old storefronts to preserve a rapidly fading typographical tradition. One of these days, i’ll finally finish the typefaces i’ve been working on forever. And my novel. And the painting of the bathroom. (My wife is a saint.)

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was born a few years before the web was invented and grew up at this fascinating time when everybody wanted to do something with it, but nobody knew quite what yet. We were still supposed to learn Logo and Pascal in technology class, but most of the teachers understood the importance of the web and taught us the basics of HTML and CSS. I built my first website in 2000… as a school assignment!

By 2007, i was one of those insufferable tech bloggers who made enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a graphic designer.) When more established outlets came knocking at my door, i shut down my blog and became one of those insufferable tech journalists who make enough money to feel entitled, but not enough to feel safe. (I moonlighted as a journalism teacher.)

I kept a personal blog under the “zinzolin” moniker. This shade of purple is my favourite colour, partly because it sounds a bit like my name. Over the years, it became more and more difficult to find the energy to write recreationally after having spent the day writing professionally. In 2025, feeling more than a little burnt out, i rebooted my blog and switched from French to English. Fortunately, the name is equally weird in both languages.

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

I don’t have a process so much as a way of managing the incessant chatter in my head. I write to give myself the permission to forget, and i publish to gift myself the ability to remember. You’ll never catch me without some way to capture those little “brain itches” — a notebook, the Bloom app, a digital recorder, the back of my hand… (I wrote part of this interview as a long series of text messages to myself!)

In the middle of the week, i start reviewing my notes to find a common theme or extract the strongest idea. When an incomplete thought keeps coming back, i don’t try to force it by staring at a blinking cursor. I take a long walk, and usually, i have to stop part way to write. Most of the actual blogging is done long before i sit down to properly draft my weekly note.

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

I have this romantic notion that the more comfortable i am, the more i can edit, the worse my writing tends to get. If i could, i’d write everything longhand in a rickety train, stream-of-consciousness style, and publish the raw scans of my notebooks. You wouldn’t be able to read half of it, but i can assure you the illegible half would be Nobel-prize worthy.

But then, some things only happen after a few hours of diligent editing. If i give myself enough time, i can stop transcribing my notes and start conversing with them. There’s always something worth exploring in the gap between our past and present selves – even if the past was two days ago – but that delicate work requires a conducive environment.

Judging by my recent output, it looks like this environment comprises a good chair, a MacBook Air on one of those ugly lap desks, my custom international QWERTY layout, iA Writer for writing and Antidote for proofreading, cosy lighting, just the right amount of background noise, and most important of all, a pot of delicious coffee.

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

I’ve tried pretty much every CMS and SSG under the sun, but i’ve always come back to WordPress, until Matt Mullenweg reminded us that a benevolent dictator still is a dictator. Z1NZ0L1N is now built on Ghost and hosted by Magic Pages.

I used to use Tinylytics and Buttondown, but i’m now using Ghost’s integrated analytics and newsletter features. My other websites are hosted on a VPS with Infomaniak, which is also where i get my domain names, e-mail, and assorted cloud services.

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

That’s a question i had to ask myself when i rebooted Z1NZ0L1N last year. I switched to English in a bid to better separate my professional output from my recreational output. I jettisoned most of my audience, but i found a new community around the IndieWeb Carnival and quickly rebuilt a readership on my own merits. I get excited each time i get an e-mail from someone i don’t know from a country on the other side of the globe.

I wanted to find a way to publish regularly without turning Z1NZ0L1N into the umpteenth link blog. After a few experiments, i’ve settled on a weekly note that’s part “what i’m doing”, part “what the rest of the world is doing”. This is old-school blogging meets recommendation algorithms — and i love it.

Some things haven’t changed, though, and will never change. I use an open-source CMS that i could host myself, not a proprietary platform that i can’t control. I designed my theme myself. I don’t play the SEO/GEO game.

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?

I pay a little less than €10/month for Magic Pages’ starter plan with the custom themes add-on. Considering that it saves me €15/month in third-party services, i’d say it’s a fair price. I pay €12/year for the z1nz0l1n.com domain, but i also registered a few variations, including zinzolin.fr, which was first registered in 1999! Blogging is my least expensive hobby — by far.

As someone who’s worked a lot on the economics of independent publishing, i’m happily subscribed to a few news outlets and magazines. I like the idea of $1/month memberships for blogs, but in practice, i find it hard to track multiple micro-subscriptions on top of my existing (and frankly far too numerous) digital subscriptions.

I wonder if we should create blogging collectives, almost like unions and coops, to collect and redistribute a single subscription in between members. In the meantime, i’ll continue not talking about my Ko-Fi page.

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

The Forest and Ye Olde Blogroll are fantastic discovery tools. A lot of my favourite bloggers have already been featured in People and blogs: VH Belvadi, BSAG, Frank Chimero, Keenan, Piper Haywood, Nick Heer, Tom McWright, Riccardo Mori, Jim Nielsen, Kev Quirk, Arun Venkatesan, Zinzy… I’d love to see how Rob Weychert, Chris Glass, Josh Ginter or Melanie Richards would answer. Their approach to blogging couldn’t be more different, but they each informed mine in their own way.

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

Since 2008, i’ve taken thousands of photos of old storefronts. It began as a way to inform my typographical practice, but it rapidly became an excuse to go out and pay attention – really pay attention – to the world around me. You wouldn’t believe the things i’ve discovered in side streets, the number of conversations i’ve struck after taking a picture of a once-beloved shop, and how my way of looking at the evolution of cities has entirely changed.

If you’re up for a little challenge, find your own collection. It might be cool doors, weird postboxes, triangular things, every bookshop in Nova Scotia, sewer manholes, purple things, number signs… It’ll give you another perspective not only when travelling in foreign places, but also on your (not so) familiar surroundings. It doesn’t cost a penny, but it’ll pay off immensely.

Keep exploring

Now that you're done reading the interview, go check the blog and subscribe to the RSS feed.

If you're looking for more content, go read one of the previous 135 interviews.

People and Blogs is possible because kind people support it.