People and Blogs: Benji

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

Hi, I'm Benji and I'm a software engineer from Ecuador. I currently live in Minneapolis with my wife, our two kids, and our cat.

I moved to the US for university to study Computer Science. Originally, I was thinking of continuing on to do research as I had great experiences with the professors and projects I worked in but life happened and I found myself looking for jobs. A lot of what I had learned in university that far was less practical for the jobs I found myself applying to. Luckily, I ended up finding a job with amazing coworkers who I got to learn a ton from.

Professionally, I do a little bit of everything and jump between working on mobile and web apps. I like this level of change as it allows me to continue learning and working with different platforms and projects everyday.

When I'm not working, I'm usually building some new Lego or MagnaTiles structure with my kids, playing video games, or watching movies.

What's the story behind your blog?

Over the years I started several one-off blogs which usually followed the development of whatever project I was working on at the time. These were all short lived and never really got updated once I stopped working on the projects.

The biggest thing keeping me from starting a blog was that I couldn't settle on a name. I didn't want to use my full name and nothing else really worked for me. At some point in 2015 I found out that the Top Level Domain (TLD) .dog was a thing so I thought it would be funny to get the name "benji.dog" as most of the time when I introduce myself to someone and they learn my name they say: "oh, like the dog?". Maybe its just funny to me 😄.

Originally this was just a pretty basic landing page which linked out to other places. Some time later I started a "making websites" group at work as several coworkers were interested in having a their own personal websites. This is when I got interested in the IndieWeb and I started adding things as I found features in the wiki that I liked.

Today, my site is my primary place for publishing things I do. If I watch a movie, read a book, bookmark an interesting post, post a photo, or just generally want to write about anything, it goes on my site.

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

Most of the posts on my site are either short notes or media tracking so I usually just write these on my phone and publish them immediately.

For the longer posts on my site, the process can vary wildly. I have written a whole post in an hour and published it right away and I have also published posts after having them in different stages of draft for years.

There are several posts in my drafts folder that I know I will never publish. I still find myself being highly critical of my writing and I find that writing a draft even if it will never be made public is good practice. I do revisit these drafts every so often in case any of the ideas there are good starting points for a new post.

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

I've been working from home for a long time and my desk is really the only place where I can sit down and write or code anymore. This has more to do with comfort than creativity though.

I don't really think I have an ideal creative environment. I usually have a notebook and pen with me everywhere I go and I find myself writing down anything that comes to mind whether its writing out ideas or drawing little characters.

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

The current iteration of my site is built with Eleventy and I've been using that since 2019. All of the code for it is on GitHub and whenever I make a change, the site gets rebuilt and deployed on Netlify.

The bit that brings it all together is a separate project I wrote. It doesn't really have a name but since it's implementing a serverless micropub endpoint I just named it micropub (I should change that). This is also deployed to Netlify and uses functions and GitHub's (or GitLab's) API to make commits and push new content to my site's repo. Since it's using micropub, I could then use any of the many different Micropub Clients to add, edit, or remove new posts to my site.

A little over a year ago I decided to build my own micropub client so that I could add movie watch posts to my site directly instead of using a different platform for keeping track of that. This project is called sparkles and if your site supports IndieAuth and Micropub, then you could also use this to write posts. It now supports most other type of posts so it's the only way I add things to my site now. Because I built it as a Progressive Web App (PWA), it's also on my phone's homescreen so I can easily create posts from anywhere.

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

I have often thought that maybe my domain name wasn't the best choice as it's expensive and sometimes confusing to say out loud. I have yet to think of anything I like more and it still makes me smile.

Because I've been so comfortable with my current setup for so long, I haven't had a chance to try out all the different options out there. I do still very much like static site generators so I would probably like to try out other options now to see if I would still end up in the same place. But realistically, Eleventy does everything that I need it to do so it would take some serious convincing to get me to change that.

However, since I have less free time now than I used to when starting out, I would probably start with a selfhosted blogging solution and for that I really like GoBlog.

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 pay about $60/year for the two domain names I use for my site, one being a short domain to make links easier to share. That's the only real cost for my site as I'm still on Netlify's free tier and haven't really had any issues there. My site doesn't generate any revenue and this is something that I'm ok with for me.

It's great that there are so many different ways for people to make money from their blogs and if you want to do it, you should.

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

I have a blogroll and I think all of those sites are amazing! I try to keep it updated as I discover new personal sites too.

As for who to interview next, I'd love to hear from:

• Jo
• Joe Crawford
• Loura
• Marisabel
• Nick Simson
• Alice @ The Wallflower Digest

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

The internet used to be fun is a collection of articles about the internet from the past and I find the articles in this list inspiring. They also serve as a reminder to continue building the web that I want to see.

There are several online IndieWeb Events which are a great way to chat with others who share a love for personal websites. Even if you haven't yet started your site, the community here has been really inspiring to me.

Lastly, here is Cabel Sasser's talk from XOXO 2024. Ever since I first watched this, I've been reminding myself to "send the nice email" when I see someone's website I like. There's so many amazing things that people are creating on their websites and I think it's a good thing when we take a moment to tell each other that.