This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with JTR, whose blog can be found at taonaw.com.

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

I go by JTR these days, which is based on an earlier pseudonym I picked up long ago. Sort of an alter ego I guess. I like how it rolls off the tongue, so I stuck with it. I was a writer (and a bit of a journalist) and a teacher before I found my way into IT. Today I’m a sort of manager who still writes plenty of technical documentation and attends a lot of meetings.

What's the story behind your blog?

I had a few blogs in the past, but when I started working for the medical center which I'm still working for today, 8 years ago, I decided to record my quest to learn technology in a blog. Soon after I started there, I was looking for an app to write checklists and bullet points, and I found Orgzly. It seemed minimal, and I liked that it just writes everything to text files. I had no idea what org-mode was (or Emacs for that matter), and after a few weeks with the app I was deep down in rabbit hole.

So the start of my current position, along with learning Emacs and org-mode gave me a boost to start blogging what I was learning. I think it was my boss back then or one of my co-workers who didn't understand why I couldn't just use one of the many note-taking apps that were already available to us. That question, along with my reputation of always asking many of my own whenever we had meetings, had me come up with the idea that I should just call my blog “The Art of Not Asking Why,” hinting at one of my favorite books, Zen And The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. It was just organic like that. “The Art of Not Asking Why” is kind of long, so I started to abbreviate it with “TAONAW” (I pronounce it "Tao-Now"), and I liked how it sounded... so here we are.” (the name of the book should be all caps…)

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

Today, my blog is a mix of quick thoughts and longer posts, both of which are handled well by design by Micro.blog, my blogging platform, which I’m very happy with. For short posts (300 characters or so, "tweets" and "toots" basically), I usually use my iPhone or Android.

Longer posts usually start in Emacs org-mode as a draft, and then are edited by hand before I pass them through Grammarly and/or AI for typos and various checks. AI is excellent to find broken links, technical terms that I might want to expand on ( and suggest links to those), and switching back to org-mode so that my draft ends up being updated with the same post, typo and error-free (or almost free) on my blog.

For screenshots, I use SnagIt, which is paid for by my job (I write plenty of technical documents). Snaggit is excellent, and I'd pay for it in a heartbeat myself if I had to. For photos, which I take with my Sony camera or iPhone, I use Apple Photos these days for light editing. I also have Darktable and Krita on my Linux desktop, both of which are free, excellent tools that are highly underrated in my opinion. They give me all the power Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom used to give me, without costing me a dime and just make me feel good to use.

My posts usually come from different experiences I go through, technical or otherwise. Sometimes I look in my journal and modify an entry from there to a post, at other times I go to my old blog and import a post from there and add it to my blog with the original timeline, yet other times I got over my images and pages on my blog - there’s always something to do, beyond just writing the posts. I think that’s part of the fun. A good blog grows with you, and you learn to tell more about yourself as you progress.

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

I used to work from coffee shops, but today I mostly blog from home. My apartment is quiet and less distracting, and the best time for me to write is in the morning (if I have enough time available), so this combination usually wins me over. I need to focus when I write, and I don’t like to get distracted, which is another reason why home is usually the best place. I absolutely love my noise-cancelling Sony WH-1000XM6 (and the WH-1000XM5 before those) headphones, which have been a life changer for me, a person who can get distracted when my neighbors from across the hall return home. My mechanical keyboard, a Kensis Freestyle Edge RGB, is about 7 years old now and I love the feel of the mechanical keys under my fingers. The ergonomic setup (it's a split keyboard) helps my wrists, and my standing desk helps my concentration further. When I write, I also listen to music: electronic or classical. Songs with lyrics usually distract me.

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

I have two computers. A MacBook Pro M2, and a System76 thelio mira, currently running Kubuntu, which is also my gaming computer. From these two, I lean slightly toward using the Mac for my writing because I take most of my photos with my iPhone and the Micro.blog desktop app that I use is for macOS.

My blog is hosted on Micro.blog, which is a hybrid of a social platform and a blogging platform in one. Micro.blog uses Hugo to build the blog and Micropub for the social network. It also syndicates to other social networks like Tumblr and Medium and plenty more that I don't use. It’s a rather unique place that follows the POSSE (Publish Own Site, Syndicate Elsewhere) principles. I like the fact that I can download all of my data, which includes my posts, my media and my CSS/HTML templates, any time I wish and take them elsewhere. That’s how the web should be. When I joined Micro.blog I had to register my own domain, which I did, but these days you can also get a domain through them, and I believe you can also get a certificate through Let’s Encrypt in one go. It's a bit confusing at the start since the concepts of a social network and a blog (=website) are different aspects in our minds, but they don't have to be that separate.

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

No. What I know today and the tools I use are the best ones for me at this point. If anything, I’d encourage myself to have learned to use Emacs much earlier and to have adhered to POSSE long ago; that would have saved me from losing work on Medium and Blogger, which are now long gone. I recommend micro.blog wholeheartedly.

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 plan on Micro.blog (hosting) costs $100 a year, which isn't horrible when you break it down to $8 and change per month. Micro.blog comes with many additional tools (such as hosting podcasts, encrypted notes, storing videos and more) which are worth it in my opinion. My domain costs about $30 a year.

I absolutely hate how ads work on the internet today, and I will never have ads on my blog, but I believe it's OK to ask for support or, as I like to think of it, "tips." If someone likes something I wrote, they are welcome to leave a tip. I don't need it however to keep the blog going, thankfully.

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

I don’t have a long list, and I think most of the folks I know were already covered in this series. I will highlight a few that are more active:

• Annie’s blog: she often writes essays about feelings and life experiences, about once a week or so.
• Sal: mostly tech, here and there some other life stuff
• The Wandering Lensman He's professional photographer, usually an image and a short text. I like what he says about taking photos.
• Pluralistic from Cory Doctorow does this guy really need an intro…? I love how well-linked and resourced the daily essays are. An (the?) online privacy activist.
• Jack Baty Daily I lose track if this is the “real” blog or not. The guy changes blogs and platforms like we change shirts. But that’s part of the fun.

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

I’d love, love to see more non-techie folks on POSE-style blogs. I’m not talking about Medium or Tumblr; these are Silos. Some exist, here and there. There used to a be a priod, back when people published on movable type and wordpress was still something new no one knew about, where I was following a diner waitress from Jersey, a fighter pilot who was a patriot in the good kind of way, and of course, there was the USS clueless (I think he’s still around, in retirement). Now, you have to be in the industry to do anything like that. I had a conversation with my partner the other day and he just shrugged. The term “silo” (he uses Tumblr) is so regular now that it’s like explaining water to a fish. And it’s a shame. Those that are different, micro.blog included, seems to require some knowledge of what, I guess, used to be common knowledge if you wanted to be online. I don’t know. Perhaps if I was still a teacher, I’d teach these internet “basics” to teens.

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