This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Jack Baty, whose blog can be found at baty.net.

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

Hello, I’m Jack. I was born, raised, and live in west Michigan, US. I live in a quiet (aka “boring”) suburb with my lovely wife, our dog, a few tropical fish, and a sea urchin named Lurch.

I was a paperboy, fast food worker, and ditch digger long before I started creating software for a living. My first programming project was a Laboratory Information Management System (L.I.M.S.) for a local environmental testing lab. This was in 1992. I was learning as I went, using a Macintosh RDBMS environment called 4th Dimension. I continued as a solo software developer for a couple of years.

In 1995, I cofounded the web design firm “Fusionary Media” with my two partners. Fusionary grew to a team of around 15 people. We built some very nice websites, software, and mobile apps for companies like MLB, GM, Steelcase, etc. This went on for 25 years, until we sold the company in 2020. I’ve been “retired” since then, but I miss working on things with people, so we’ll see.

These days I spend most of my time with photography, blogging, and reading.

I enjoy tinkering with tech of all kinds and exploring what different software tools can do. This often means completely upending my workflow in order to shoehorn some cool new toy into it. I call this a “hobby”.

What’s the story behind your blog?

Which one? 😂

In the late 1990s, when the internet was still new and exciting, I wanted to tell everyone about everything. I was learning to create websites, so starting a blog was a great opportunity to do both. I created a couple of proto-blogs in 1998 and 1999, but those have been lost to time. My current blog at baty.net began in August 2000, 25 years ago this month. Everything before 2021 is archived at archive.baty.net. I don’t delete old posts, although I probably should.

My early posts were mostly Gruber-style link posts. It’s sad that so many of those original links are dead now. Eventually I started sharing more details about what I was doing and thinking about, rather than just linking to other things. This continues today.

I sporadically maintain several other sites/blogs. Other than Baty.net, there’s also a “Daily Notes” blog at daily.baty.net, but lately I’ve just been rolling that into baty.net. I recently started a photo blog using Ghost at baty.photo. Ghost makes posting images easy, but I haven’t decided if I’ll continue.

I keep a wiki using TiddlyWiki (since 2018) (rudimentarylathe.org). I don’t even know what it’s for, honestly, but I keep putting stuff there when I don’t know where else it should go.

My dream is to have only One True Blog, but that’s been elusive.

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

Honestly, I don’t really have a creative process. Nothing deliberate, anyway. My posts are mostly journal entries about whatever’s on my mind. What usually happens is that I’ll read someone’s blog post or I’ll try some new tool, and share my thoughts on it.

I used to write (bad) poetry and would love to compose longer, thoughtful essays, but that never happens.

More often than not I publish things long before they’re ready. It’s as if I’d never heard of proofreading. I just fix things later. If I had to make everything perfect first, I’d never post anything.

I write my posts in whatever text editor I’m infatuated with at the moment. 90% of the time, that means Emacs, the nerdiest possible option.

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

I prefer a tidy, pleasant environment. Usually, though, I sit at my desktop computer (an M4 MacBook Air and Studio Display) in my messy basement office. I just start writing whenever I have something to say. My wife thinks I have some form of auditory processing disorder, so I rarely listen to music while writing. It only muddles my thoughts (even more than they already are).

I do find that things come easier for me when I’m surrounded by books. They inspire me.

Once in a while, I’ll draft posts longhand with a nice fountain pen or on a manual typewriter, but I’m lazy, so that’s pretty rare.

If I had my way, there’d be a giant window in my home office, maybe overlooking water. Currently I stare at a bare wall, which is probably not ideal for creative inspiration.

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

I change platforms so often that it’ll probably be different by the time anyone reads this, but I’m currently using Hugo to render a static website.

My static sites are hosted on a small VPS running FreeBSD with Caddy as the web server. I use Porkbun for domain registration and management.

For creating new posts in Hugo, I have Emacs configured to create properly formatted Markdown files in the correct location. I write the posts in Emacs. When finished, I run a little shell script that builds the site and uploads it to the server. I don’t use any fancy Github deployment actions or anything. I just render the site locally and use rsync to push changes.

I’ve used nearly every blogging platform ever created. I’ve even written several of my own. Each platform has something I love about it, and when I start to miss whatever that thing is, I’ll switch back to it. And so on. Sometimes moving to a new blogging platform gets the writing juices flowing. Sometimes it’s just something to do when I’m bored and don’t have anything to say.

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

I would love to be the type of person who started a WordPress (or whatever) blog in the noughts and never changed anything. So many of my posts have bad links or missing images due to moving from platform to platform. It’s frustrating for both me and my readers.

I suppose what I’d do differently is pick a process and stick with it. Maybe focus on writing instead of tinkering with themes and platforms and such. Blogs are simple things, really, and overthinking everything has caused me nothing but trouble.

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’m running my static sites on a small, $5/month (plus $1 for backups) VPS at Vultr, so it costs very little. I pay another $5/month for Tinylytics to watch traffic/views. So I’m in for around $11/month.

The Ghost blog costs $15/month at MagicPages.

One other cost is domain registrations, which adds up to maybe $50/year.

I have no interested in trying to make money from blogging, even if it were feasible.

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

I hesitate to recommend specific blogs, since that means leaving out so many others. I’ll just pick a few at random from my RSS reader. Most of the blogs I follow are by people writing about their lives and interests. I’m less inclined to follow Capital-B Bloggers or industry-specific blogs these days. I’m interested in people, not companies.

• boffosocko.com - Typewriters!
• 82mhz.net - Publishes lots of great links every week or so
• lmno.lol/puddingtime - Thinks like me, but is a much better writer
• johnpweiss.com - Meaningful essays and short stories
• joanwestenberg.com - Tangential to tech industry, on a tear, and nailing it
• winnielim.org - Great example of someone simply writing about life

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

May I just suggest to anyone reading this, if you’re even remotely interested in starting a blog, do it! 😁