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

Sure! I’m Blake. I live in a small city near Jackson, Mississippi, USA. I work for MRI Technologies as a frontend engineer, building bespoke web apps for NASA. Previously I worked at an ad agency as an interactive designer.

I have a neuromuscular condition called spinal muscular atrophy (SMA). It’s a progressive condition that causes my muscles to become weaker over time. Because of that, I use a power wheelchair and a whole host of assistive technologies big and small. I rely on caregivers for most daily activities like taking a shower, getting dressed, and eating—just to name a few.

I am able to use a computer on my own. I knew from almost the first time I used one that it was going to be important in my life.

I studied Business Information Systems in college as a way to take computer-related courses without all the math of computer science (which scared me at the time). When I graduated, I had a tough time finding a job making websites. I did a bit of freelance work and volunteer work to build up a portfolio, but was otherwise unemployed for several years. I finally got my foot in the door and I recently celebrated a milestone of being employed for a decade.

When I’m not working, I’m probably tinkering on side projects. I’m somewhat of a side project and home-cooked app enthusiast. I just really enjoy making and using my own tools. Over the last 10 years, I’ve gotten into playing Dungeons and Dragons and a lot of my side projects have been related to D&D.

I enjoy design, typography, strategy games, storytelling, writing, programming, gamedev, and music.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I got hooked on making websites in high school and college in the early 2000s. A friend of mine in high school had a sports news website. I want to say it was made with the Homestead site builder or something similar. I started writing for it and helping with it. I couldn’t get enough so I started making my own websites using WYSIWYG page builders. But I became increasingly frustrated with the limitations of page builders. Designing sites felt clunky and I couldn’t get elements to do exactly what I wanted them to do.

I had a few blogs on other services over the years. Xanga was maybe the first one. Then I had one on Blogger for a while.

In 2005, I took a course called Advanced Languages 1. It turned out to be JavaScript. Learning JavaScript necessitated learning HTML. Throughout the course I became obsessed with learning HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Eventually, in August of 2005—twenty years ago—I purchased the domain blakewatson.com.

I iterated on it multiple times a year at first. It morphed from quirky design to quirkier design as I learned more CSS. It was a personal homepage, but I blogged at other services. Thanks to RSS, I could list my recent blog posts on my website.

When I graduated from college, my personal website became more of a web designer’s portfolio, a professional site that I would use to attract clients and describe my services. But around that time I was learning how to use WordPress and I started a self-hosted WordPress blog called I hate stairs. It was an extremely personal disability-related and life journaling type of blog that I ran for several years. When I got my first full-time position and didn’t need to freelance any longer, I converted blakewatson.com back into a personal website. But this time, primarily a blog. I discontinued I hate stairs (though I maintain an archive and all the original URLs work).

I had always looked up to various web designers in the 2000s who had web development related blogs. People like Jeffery Zeldman, Andy Clarke, Jason Santa Maria, and Tina Roth Eisenberg.

For the past decade, I’ve blogged about web design, disability, and assistive tech—with the odd random topic here or there.

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

I used to blog only when inspiration struck me hard enough to jolt my lazy ass out of whatever else I was doing. That strategy left me writing three or four articles a year (I don’t know why, but I think of my blog posts as articles in a minor publication, and this hasn’t helped me do anything but self-edit—I need to snap out of it and just post). In March 2023, however, I noticed that I had written an article every month so far that year. I decided to keep up the streak. And ever since then, I’ve posted at least one article a month on my blog. I realize that isn’t very frequent for some people, but I enjoy that pacing, although I wouldn’t mind producing a handful more per year.

Since I’m purposefully posting more, I’ve started keeping a list of ideas in my notes just so I have something to look through when it’s time to write. I use Obsidian mostly for that kind of thing.

The writing itself almost always happens in iA Writer. This app is critical to my process because I am someone who likes to tinker with settings and fonts and pretty much anything I can configure. If I want to get actual writing done, I need constraints. iA Writer is perfect because it looks and works great by default and has very few formatting options. I think I paid $10 for this app one time ten or more years ago. That has to be the best deal I’ve ever gotten on anything.

I usually draft in Writer and then preview it on my site locally to proofread. I have to proofread on the website, in the design where it will live. If I proofread in the editor I will miss all kinds of typos. So I pop back and forth between the browser and the editor fixing things as I go.

I can no longer type on a physical keyboard. I use a mix of onscreen keyboard and dictation when writing prose. Typing is a chore and part of the reason I don’t blog more often. It usually takes me several hours to draft, proofread, and publish a post.

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

I mostly need to be at my desk because I have my necessary assistive tech equipment set up there. I romanticize the idea of writing in a comfy nook or at a cozy coffee shop. I’ve tried packing up my setup and taking it to a coffee shop, but in practice I get precious little writing done that way.

What I usually do to get into a good flow state is put on my AirPods Pro, turn on noise cancellation, maybe have some ambient background noise or music, and just write. Preferably while sipping coffee or soda.

But if I could have any environment I wanted, I would be sitting in a small room by a window a few stories up in a quaint little building from the game Townscaper, clacking away on an old typewriter or scribbling in a journal with a Parker Jotter.

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

I’ve bounced around a bit in terms of tech stack, but in 2024, I migrated from a self-hosted WordPress site to a generated static site with Eleventy. My site is hosted on NearlyFreeSpeech.NET (NFSN)—a shared hosting service I love for its simplistic homemade admin system, and powerful VPS-like capabilities. My domain is registered with them as well, although I’m letting Cloudflare handle my DNS for now.

I used Eleventy for the first time in 2020 and became a huge fan. I was stoked to migrate blakewatson.com. The source code is in a private repo on GitHub. Whenever I push to the main branch, DeployHQ picks it up and deploys it to my server.

I also have a somewhat convoluted setup that checks for social media posts and displays them on my website by rebuilding and deploying automatically whenever I post. It’s more just a way for me to have an archive of my posts on Mastodon than anything.

Because my website is so old, I have some files not in my repo that live on my server. It is somewhat of a sprawling living organism at this point, with various small apps and tools (and even games!) deployed to sub-directories.

I have a weekly scheduled task that runs and saves the entire site to Backblaze B2.

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

You know, I’m happy to say that I’d mostly do the same thing. I think everyone should have their own website. I would still choose to blog at my own domain name. Probably still a static website. I might structure things a bit differently. If I were designing it now, I might make more allowances for title-less, short posts (technically I can do this now, but they get lumped into my social feed, which I’m calling my Microblog, and kind of get lost). I might design it to be a little weirder rather than buttoned up as it is now. And hey, it’s my website. I still might do that.

Tinkering with your personal website is one of life’s great joys. If you can’t think of anything to do with your website, here are a hundred ideas for you.

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 don’t make money from my website directly, but having a website was critical in getting my first job and getting clients before that. So, in a way, all the money I’ve made working could be attributed to having a personal website.

I have a lot of websites and a lot of domains, so it’s a little hard to figure out exactly what blakewatson.com itself costs. NFSN is a pay-as-you-go service. I’m currently hosting 13 websites of varying sizes and complexity, and my monthly cost aside from domains is about $23.49. $5 of that is an optional support membership. I could probably get the cost down further by putting the smaller sites together on a single shared server.

I pay about $14 per year for the domain these days.

I pay $10.50 per month for DeployHQ, but I use it for multiple sites including a for-profit side project, so it doesn’t really cost anything to use it for my blog (this is the type of mental gymnastics I like to do).

I pay $15 per month for Fathom Analytics. In my mind, this is also subsidized by my for-profit side project.

I mentioned that I backup my website to Backblaze B2. It’s extremely affordable, and I think I’m paying below 50 cents per month currently for the amount of storage I’m using (and that also includes several websites).

If you also throw in the cost of tools like Tower and Sketch, then there’s another $200 worth of costs per year. But I use those programs for many things other than my blog.

When you get down to it, blogs are fairly inexpensive to run when they are small and personal like mine. I could probably get the price down to free, save for the domain name, if I wanted to use something like Cloudflare Pages to host it—or maybe a free blogging service.

I don’t mind people monetizing their blogs at all. I mean if it’s obnoxious then I’m probably not going to stay on your website very long. But if it’s done tastefully with respect to the readers then good for you. I also don’t mind paying to support bloggers in some cases. I have a number of subscriptions for various people to support their writing or other creative output.

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

Here are some blogs I’m impressed with in no particular order. Many of these people have been featured in this series before.

• Chris Coyier. “Mediocre ideas, showing up, and persistence.” <3
• Jim Nielsen. Continually produces smart content. Don’t know how he does it.
• Nicole Kinzel. She has posted nearly daily for over two years capturing human struggles and life with SMA through free verse poetry.
• Dave Rupert. I enjoy the balance of tech and personal stuff and the honesty of the writing.
• Tyler Sticka. His blog is so clean you could eat off of it. A good mix of tech and personal topics. Delightful animations.
• Maciej Cegłowski. Infrequent and longform. Usually interesting regardless of whether I agree or disagree.
• Brianna Albers. I’m cheating because this is a column and not a blog per se. But her writing reads like a blog—it’s personal, contemplative, and compelling. There are so very few representations of life with SMA online that I’d be remiss not to mention her.
• Daring Fireball. A classic blog I’ve read for years. Good for Apple news but also interesting finds in typography and design.
• Robb Knight. To me, Robb’s website is the epitome of the modern indieweb homepage. It’s quirky, fun, and full of content of all kinds. And that font. :chefskiss:
• Katherine Yang. A relatively new blog. Beautiful site design. Katherine’s site feels fresh and experimental and exudes humanity. I’d like to take this opportunity to mention Anne Sturdivant. She was interviewed here on People & Blogs. When I first discovered this series, I put her blog in the suggestion box. I was impressed with her personal website empire and the amount of content she produced. Sadly, Anne passed away earlier this year. We were internet buddies and I miss her. 💜

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

I’d like to share a handful of my side projects for anyone who might be interested.

• HTML for People. I wrote this web book for anyone who is interested in learning HTML to make websites. I wrote this to be radically beginner-friendly. The focus is on what you can accomplish with HTML rather than dwelling on a lot of technical information.
• A Fine Start. This is the for-profit side project I mentioned. It is a new tab page replacement for your web browser. I originally made it for myself because I wanted all of my favorite links to be easily clickable from every new tab. I decided to turn it into a product. The vast majority of the features are free. You only pay if you want to automatically sync your links with other browsers and devices.
• Minimal Character Sheet. I mentioned enjoying Dungeons and Dragons. This is a web app for managing a D&D 5th edition character. I made it to be a freeform digital character sheet. It’s similar to using a form fillable PDF, except that you have a lot more room to write. It doesn’t force many particular limitations on your character since you can write whatever you want. Totally free.