People and Blogs: Alison Wilder

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

I grew up on a ranch in West Texas. Horses, rodeo, and roping were my life. I was going to be a horse trainer. Then, when my life took a left turn in high school, I got much more serious about music, started writing songs, and ended up pursuing a music degree at the University of North Texas.

After college, I had a 3-year stint in Portland, Oregon, where I started the band Voodoo Economics. My bandmates and I moved to Philly in 2004-ish, where I wrote for, played in, and produced for Voodoo while completing a Master's in music theory at Temple University. After a few years of adjunct teaching, I decided a PhD in music theory & cognition at McGill University in Montreal was the right move, so I went off to do that. The timing was epically bad -- this was the beginning of the end of the humanities in North American universities, after all -- and I realized after about a year that it would be nearly impossible to get a job in a place where I actually wanted to live. So I packed up the piano yet again and headed back to Philadelphia.

Back in Philly, I co-founded a music tech company with a super-cool and interesting composer/pianist/technologist named Greg Wilder. After a whirlwind couple of years in the depths of the music industry, we decided to move away from daily ops with that company, and I was very much at loose ends. I had never had any real marketable skills (don't try to tell me songwriting and music theory are marketable!), and I had no idea what to do. So I asked Greg, "What should I do?"

"Learn Linux," he said.

So I wiped my laptop, installed Debian, and was off to the races. Then I said, "but what should I do with Linux?"

"Maybe WordPress?" he said.

It was 2011, and the timing couldn't have been better. I learned WordPress, started faffing about in PHP, Javascript, and all the rest, and somehow people started writing checks. Over the last 13 years, Greg and I have turned my faffing about into a couple of real businesses (Punkt Digital and Wicked Good Web). At some point during all of that, we got married, moved to New Hampshire, divorced, and stayed best friends.

Though I stopped music completely for about 7 years after the start-up (relationship status: it's complicated), I've spent the last 6 years or so building my studio back up and pouring myself into songwriting and producing again (Blix Byrd and Doctor Body with Greg). Which brings us to today. Phew!

What's the story behind your blog?

I've always loved writing. Some days, I harbor secret aspirations to be a real writer. (Uh-oh, secret's out...) So blogging just comes naturally. I don't think of my blog as part of a business, or as a way to promote myself exactly. It's more of a place that gives me an outlet to organize my thoughts publicly.

I generally find myself writing about a combination of daily life, music, my own creative process, and things I'm doing or making. I haven't used social media much (although I've been enjoying Mastodon for the last year or two!), so I sometimes use my blog as my own personal Insta-book feed. It's fun to make a quick post of something I like and/or find amusing, and I enjoy perusing my old posts occasionally. My memory isn't the greatest, so in the case of daily life posts, I often wouldn't remember the thing at all if I didn't blog about it!

Because blogging is purely for my own fun and enjoyment, I don't force myself to keep any kind of posting schedule. I just post when I feel like it. I go through phases where that's weekly, monthly, or even less. So if you're looking for a consistent presence in your RSS feed, my blog is probably not for you.

I don't have any blog posts from prior to my current website, although I did have other blogs on Tumblr and early Squarespace over the years. It looks like I started blogging on my own site in about 2014. See, told you my memory was bad...I had to sign in to find out when my earliest posts were!

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

My blogging process probably doesn't qualify as a process. More like, "I just blog when I feel like it and say whatever I want to." That said, I do also write quite a bit privately, so maybe it would be interesting to explore the difference between my public and private writing?

I'm generally an open book -- the kind of person who will tell strangers whatever they want to know about me. That said, I do write differently on my blog than in my personal journals. Obviously, I edit a lot more on the blog. I also tend to post the kinds of things that I think others might find interesting, which means I don't often post about my own internal thoughts and feelings.

That said, I enjoy reading blogs where people get personal, so now I'm wondering why I don't do that! Perhaps a topic for a future blog post?

And to the second question: the above paragraphs illustrate how I get my inspiration -- navel gazing and over-thinking. ;)

For quick posts, I write directly in WordPress. For longer bits or things that come out of my private journaling, I write in Markdown in Obsidian. (Yes, I'm one of those obsessive Obsidian people.)

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

I'm a very aesthetically-minded person who is most satisfied when I feel like I'm immersed in beautiful and creative objects. I've tried to craft my home environment so that I feel inspired in every seat in the house. Right now, I'm sitting on my back porch looking my gardens and typing on my laptop. It's May in New Hampshire, and you can almost hear the plants growing.

I tend to write short bits on my laptop wherever I want to be sitting, because my office/studio is a place I work seriously. That said, my studio is beautiful, ergonomic, and has a powerful computer, so anything that takes awhile or requires lots of research/editing/photo work, I'll tend to do there.

I don't typically listen to music while I work, because my brain won't agree to keep it in the background. And if music can be in the background, I probably don't want to hear it at all. (Not a judgment about wallpaper music, that's just how it is for me.) So there's lots of silence at my house.

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

Greg and I operate our own managed WordPress hosting platform (Digital Ocean + Serverpilot) for our clients, so we also host all of our own personal websites there. How convenient!

Sometimes I think about switching to a static site generator, and have certainly enjoyed playing around with them and occasionally using them for client projects, but since I know so much about WordPress, it's kinda my default.

We register all our domains at Namecheap, which has been rock solid over the years.

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

I don't think so. If I weren't a WordPress person for work, I would probably use a static site generator and really enjoy that experience. I could easily see using an Obsidian vault at my CMS, and in face, I maintain a public-not-public recipe site where I do exactly that, using Obsidian to write, and Jekyll to website.

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?

That's a tough question since we run our own Digital Ocean servers. If I were a client of ours, I would pay $486/year for our managed hosting plan. But since I'm not, I don't.

My blog generates absolutely no revenue. I haven't tried, and I doubt I will, because I prefer keeping my creative life separate from my financial life. (Now that's a blog post topic! I'm surprised I haven't written about that before. Who knows, maybe I have.)

That said, I don't see anything wrong with other people monetizing their blog. More power to 'em! I don't regularly financially support any bloggers, although I do tend to throw folks the occasional bone when I enjoy their work for awhile.

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

Here's a link to all the personal blogs I subscribe to in my RSS reader:

A few quick blog recs:

• Gotta plug Greg Wilder's blog, which is an awesome and regularly-updated account of being a composer/pianist/synthesizer wizard/mountain man.
• Peter Rukavina is a writer, printer and developer on Prince Edward Island. I don't know him, but I so enjoy his description of his life on his blog. He seems like a wonderful person!
• Ruben Schade is an prolific blogger/developer who I also don't know, but whose writing style and perspective I totally enjoy.

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

I've been obsessed with Peter Strickland)'s films over the last few years. Berberian Sound Studio and its soundtrack (by the super-cool band Broadcast) are AMAZING. Check them out if your taste tends toward the weird and wild.

More in weird electronic music: don't sleep on Mort Garson. He may be dead, but he's still on Bandcamp!

If you like hearing over-educated musicians who used to be married blathering about music, check out Greg's and my podcast, Too Much Music.