People and Blogs: Anh

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

I'm Anh, a designer and artist based in Canada. My hobbies include, predictably: making and looking at websites, drawing, playing video games, and collecting all of the above on my website.

By day—and also by night, because I maintain chaotic working hours—I design web things at a nice company.

What's the story behind your blog?

I've been Online™ for a long time, and I suppose I've always been "blogging" in some way for years—I'm much more comfortable with writing than speaking, and I'm a weird shy nerd, so I've always drifted towards oversharing on the internet.

anhvn.com started back in 2020 when I decided I would stop using a pseudonym and actually post stuff under my name that people would see. Before that, I had a blog that maybe three friends of mine knew about and looked at, which was freeing but also very lonely. I used to share more personal things then too, like what I did day-to-day or things I was struggling with, but now I'm more private about that. I appreciate vulnerability, but I'm more wary these days for privacy's sake.

anhvn.com is also more than just a blog—as a personal website, it's where I put other interests: unfinished notes and references ("the digital garden"); artwork I post on social media ("the sketchbook"); tracking the media I consume, like movies and books ("the media diary"). I like the freedom of being able to put whatever I want on it and designing how it's showcased.

“anhvn” stands for, of course, “anh visual novel.” (JK, this is just one of my former homepages.) I've used a lot of different names online over the years, and I've also grown out of a lot of them. I based this domain on my actual name because I know I won't be tired of it in a decade or two.

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

I write "weeknotes" consistently, though not at an actual weekly cadence. To write them, I'm usually pulling from some archive rather than trying to remember what I did—I'll look at my watchlist to see what I last watched; I'll go through my bookmarks app to see what cool links I've saved; I'll scroll through my own social media to see what I've posted about. This all gets dumped into a Markdown document in VS Code, and I keep adding to it and writing until I think I've covered everything or I grow sick of it.

When I'm tired of my usual blogging ways, I'll switch up the format. I've recently started doing chat-style posts—i.e. posts that are formatted like text messages—which are more casual and freeing to write. Once in a while, I'll design a new blog post layout just for a single post, because I'm bored of my current site design and want to play with some different fonts or colours. Sometimes this starts in Figma, and sometimes I do it directly in the browser.

I never have anyone review my posts before I publish, but I'd probably introduce that step in the future if I ever write anything more ambitious—all of my blog posts are quite informal. I do the most minimal of proofreading myself.

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

It depends on the creative activity. For computer stuff, I work best when I'm at home—I need the ergonomics of a full desk setup, otherwise I feel slowed down. When writing, I need to be alone (also, preferably, on my regular computer setup), otherwise I can't focus. In my ideal world, I'm designing and writing in the morning while drinking my first coffee of the day.

I like drawing just about anywhere though. Unlike designing or writing, which involve a lot of paring down nebulous ideas into something presentable, drawing feels more expansive and benefits from external stimuli.

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

My site is built with Eleventy, a static site generator. It's perfect for me: relatively straight-forward to set up, flexible in how to structure my content, and has a large community. I have a lot of custom pages on my site because it's so easy to set up a new one. And of course, I've written a post about this.

I host all my code on GitHub, and deploy it through Netlify. My domain is registered on Namecheap. It works fine! I don't really know how it all works under the hood—I don't know what npm is, and it's fine—but setting it up was straight-forward enough, and it hasn't broken on me yet, which is a great relief.

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

I would perhaps take tagging/categorizing more seriously—my blog archive has now grown to a point where it's unwieldy to peruse, and I'll need to go back and tag things for when I add post filtering. Otherwise, I'm quite satisfied with where it's at.

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 domain costs $15.88/year (a steal, really, for a five-letter .com domain of my own incredibly common name). That's the only website cost; I don't pay anything for GitHub or Netlify, and my company pays for my Adobe account, which allows me to use their webfonts.

My website generates zero revenue, which I'm perfectly fine with. If I find myself in a situation where I need to generate income though, I'm sure that would change. I've entertained thoughts of monetising in some way for years—such as through selling digital goods, taking art commissions, or having a ko-fi donations account—but I don't need to right now and that's not a burden I want to take on without good reason. I enjoy having the freedom to do whatever I want online; if I turn it into a business, then that comes with its own set of responsibilities and expectations.

That door isn't closed, though. At the end of the day, we all need to pay rent, so I'm all for blog monetisation.

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

• wavebeem's blog — Sage writes about their various side projects, blog redesigns (frequent! love it), and interests.
• A.C. Esguerra writes about journaling and art — exactly the kind of art blogging I want to read more of!
• Melanie Richards' fiber crafts blog is the kind of hobby blogging I want to do more of.
• Reports from Unknown Places by Ninn Salaün—does this count as a blog? you can follow it on RSS!—is a wonderful art project with daily posts about the weather.

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

Floating around in the back of my mind, always, are comics—two very cool things you should check out are the Comics Devices Library and Standards, Semantics, & Sequential Art. And then I humbly offer you my budding thoughts on webcomics, from my digital garden.