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

My name is Louie Mantia. I grew up in St. Louis Missouri, and have lived in California, North Carolina, and Oregon, before moving to Japan a couple years ago. I started using the Internet in the late nineties (when I was about 9 or 10 years old), chatting with AOL Instant Messenger and learning about what my computer can do. Stemming from a desire to customize the appearance of my PC—and later, my Mac—I frequented forums and communities like DeviantArt, AquaSoft, and MacThemes.

As a result of that interest and influence, I’m an artist and designer who primarily makes icons for software. For fun, I design fonts, create playing cards, and write for my blog.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I published my first website and blog on April 16, 2004. I was fifteen years old. I was proud to have it run “on PHP” though I barely knew what that meant. I kinda still don’t. But I could post somewhere that was entirely my own rather than just to forums.

At some point in 2005, I started using Wordpress (1.5). At this time, due to my age, the topics on my blog were fairly juvenile. But the more art I made, the more I shifted the focus of my website to be a more of a gallery and less of a blog.

However, in October 2008, I moved my website to mantia.me and began “seriously” blogging about icons, Apple, and early iPhone app design conundrums.

With new social media like Twitter taking attention away from blogs, I moved my artwork to a new website called Louieland in 2015, and hosted one-off blog posts seldomly, without an RSS feed. For entirely novel purposes, I changed the website again to LouieWorld in 2020, though it admittedly didn’t have a blog at all, because starting in 2016 I had been posting to Medium.

In late 2022, I had been frustrated with what the web had become. I lamented posting so much to websites I did not control like Twitter and Medium. In November that year, I made an RSS feed with a single HTML page (no CSS!) for the only post I wrote: The Teenage Web. There was no index page. It was all hosted on a domain I had owned for a very long time, as a personal short-URL, lmnt.me. I directed people to the feed, wrote a few more posts, and started creating index pages and CSS.

Since November 2022, I have written over 300 new blog posts on LMNT. I have also rescued most of my old blog posts from previous iterations of my blog, from Medium, and even salvaged some text from Twitter threads, integrating all of them into my blog.

I have made it somewhat of a personal mission to ensure everything I post publicly is done on my website first, and moving as much as I can from third-party sites to my own.

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

Rather embarrassingly, most of my blog posts start when I fire up Mastodon to type out a banger. When I manage to catch myself doing it, I cut the contents of the post and paste them into note file, and continue writing. If I don’t catch myself until I’ve written a thread, I might copy out all the posts into a note file and delete the posts, the continue writing if necessary. Old habits die hard.

Other times, I’m walking around and text myself a one-liner about something I know I want to write about. Or I record a quick voice memo. Sometimes those end up as long, thoughtful posts. They could end up as nothing.

I do have a little graveyard of posts that didn’t quite make it in my notes. Perhaps if one of those themes comes up again, I’ll have something to start with.

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

For blogging, the local café is my most productive environment. It doesn’t just provide the right mix of “café noise” that facilitates the writing, but it also directly inspires things I write about. It was also partially responsible in introducing a chat-format to some blog posts.

In my life, I’ve gone back and forth between being a one-computer and two-computer person. But now I’m living a laptop-only life, really embracing the portability, writing at the café. I’m doing it now!

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

I suspect this will either be the most- or least-satisfying answer, depending on the reader. I don’t use a CMS of any kind. I create new pages manually, update indexes manually, upload files via FTP …all manually. I edit the XML for my RSS feed manually. At times, it can be rather unforgiving. The downside is that I’m the only person to blame when something goes wrong. The upside is that my website is ultra portable.

These were all deliberate choices, to avoid dependence on any service. I don’t have to rely on much else besides the FTP connection to a server.

The site is made with only HTML and CSS that I write myself, so when I need to change something like the header or footer, I find-and-replace across hundreds of files. To me, this is much easier than wrangling with services and dependencies I do not control, which could be deprecated at any time, or could change direction, politics, or price.

When a new post reaches some undefined level of merit, I duplicate a template HTML file for the category it belongs in, move the text into that file, and finish writing and formatting the post in HTML, manually wrapping paragraphs and links.

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

The current version of my blog started in 2022, and my mindset hasn’t changed too much since then. I like the name. I like the structure. It’s proven to work beyond just LMNT too. The same structure and style is used on grafera.zone and my side-blog, nandakke.jp.

I made a couple painful changes early on that would’ve been nice to avoid. I changed the blog directory from /post/ to /blog/. I also changed the UIDs in the RSS feed from URLs to proper UID strings, realizing that while URLs can change, but UIDs should not.

Understanding everything about the scope of my blog today, I still don’t think I would use a CMS to manage it all. It might have to be self-built to meet the expectations I have, but I doubt I’d have the patience to do it.

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 $30 every month to host my blog. That includes hosting for all of my websites, including Parakeet, Junior, Crown, Kadomaru, Mantia.me, Nandakke, and Luka’s site, GraferaZone. Thirty dollars a month is such a reasonable price to pay for this kind of publishing power.

I don’t post to my blog for the purpose of generating income. I post because—innately—I have to. However, I do accept donations, which I interpret as appreciation for what I’ve posted as well as encouragement to continue posting. The donations I receive usually pay for the hosting cost. I don’t want to charge for things I’m able to provide at no cost, though I do sell playing cards, fonts, and t-shirts, due the costs to produce those things.

Forming a reliance on income from a blog could potentially alter the authenticity of it. At least, I fear it would for me. I’d be scared that the money would influence too much of what I post or how often I post. I can’t hold it against anyone who wants to try to make money where they can. But for me, it’s squarely a hobby.

Generally speaking, the blogs I follow are ones that aren’t trying to actively monetize, and might not even accept donations. They don’t have paywalls. If they make and sell something, I may buy those things. But the best blogs for me are the ones that do it for the love of it, not because it’s a way for them to make money.

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

Some of my favorite blogs are Deja View from Andreas Deja, Waxy from Andy Baio, and the Ohno Blog from James Edmonson and friends.

Andreas is a former Disney animator responsible for some top-tier characters: King Triton, Jafar, Scar, and Hercules. I don’t just admire his own work, but I love that he uses his blog primarily to gush about other artists.

Andy has been writing his blog since 2002. He’s one of the earliest linkbloggers, which is crazy to think about. He manages to discover the very best of the web before anyone else. He’s really attuned to what’s happening across the Internet.

James is an independent type designer who writes in-depth process posts about each of his foundry’s fonts, hosts a podcast with other type designers, and teaches us all how to draw each letter of the alphabet.

What I love about all three of these people is that they use their blogs to highlight other people doing cool things. Accomplished in their own right, they use their blogging time to appreciate the world around them and bring what they love to everyone else’s attention.

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

If there’s just one thing of my own to share, it’s Make a Damn Website. I believe anyone who doesn’t have a website should try making the simplest one they can. It’s not that tough.

Links to my own things:

• LMNT, my blog
• Nandakke, my “Japanese” blog
• Womprat, a 4000-character Star Wars font
• Junior Hanafuda, an interpretation of Japanese flower cards
• Parakeet, my design studio collaboration with Luka Grafera
• Me on Mastodon

A few links to other websites and tools I love:

• Guidebook, an incredible resource for historical UI design
• Tofu, a CJK character comparison tool
• kenichi27.com, an extremely fun website from my friend Kenichi
• Michael Tsai’s blog, with great industry commentary about Apple operating systems