People and Blogs: Cory Dransfeldt

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

My name is Cory Dransfeldt and I'm located in Camarillo, California (a suburban town north of Los Angeles and where I grew up). I studied business in college and minored in economics. At the time I thought it was a practical choice and I was also terrified of the math involved in studying computer science. In hindsight, I wish I'd made a different choice, but don't necessarily regret the one I made at the time.

My first job out of college was working on the website of the local newspaper (I started as a freelance employee during college and became full-time after). This role was focused on updating the website with content the night before the print edition became available and was done in a utilitarian, but reliable Django-based CMS. I picked up some basic front end development knowledge working on multimedia projects and building my own tools to make the job easier.

I began to learn JavaScript by writing themes for Bowtie and Ecoute as part of the MacThemes forum community. I expanded my web development knowledge by volunteering to build websites for metal bands I remain a fan of and friends with like Cynic and Augury. I gained a lot of knowledge and ended up with merch, concert tickets and some really great experiences out if it all.

I've built a career out of being a self-taught frontend-focused developer and have worked at startups, nationally recognized retailers (I've worked on every eCommerce stack short of Shopify) and several different SaaS providers. The backend developer I worked with at my first startup told me to learn languages and pickup frameworks as needed — that advice continues to serve me well.

Unsurprisingly, programming and blogging remain my favorite hobbies, along with searching for and discovering new music (I enjoy everything from artists like Tom Waits to punk acts like NoMeansNo and myriad death metal artists like Carcass), Autopsy) and newer groups like Tomb Mold). If I'm not at the computer, I'm spending time with my lovely wife of 9 years, our two children and our 4 rescue dogs (all terrier/chihuahua mixes). I also mentor via Underdog Devs and help organize the Eleventy meetup. I've been getting tattooed more over the past few years and am in the process of completing a sleeve on my right arm but am not sure that qualifies as a hobby.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started blogging after I graduated from college in 2010 and have managed to recover posts dating back to 2013 that I've imported into the current iteration on my site. I was inspired by blogs like Daring Fireball and MacStories, though I don't follow them quite as closely as I once did. I viewed blogging as both a creative outlet and as a way to continue practicing web development by having my own project to experiment on and iterate with.

I started out on Tumblr, before moving to the first version of Kirby, then on to Statamic, Jekyll, Next.js, omg.lol's weblog service and now, finally (and quite happily) Eleventy. All of these presented me with an opportunity to learn new languages, frameworks, tools and development approaches. I love the simplicity and flexibility of Eleventy and adore the community around both it and omg.lol. I like the simplicity of blogging under my own name and settled on a domain name that reflects both that and the development/technology focus.

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

My creative process tends to be very informal — I read a lot of articles via the blogs I follow through RSS and enjoy both audio and written books. I'm interested in web development, the state of the industry and music, so my posts typically center around those topics (and, occasionally, how they connect or overlap). I'll often write a single draft, edit it for clarity, brevity and correctness before my confidence in the post wanes and publish it.

I want to grow into doing more research-focused writing to compliment these briefer pieces and am excited about that approach as an area where I can grow as a writer.

I write posts in markdown using Bear and then insert Eleventy frontmatter that I store as a snippet in Sublime Text.

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

I typically write in an office that I share with my wife — I work from home and have a corner desk with my personal machine (a typically docked M2 MacBook Air), work machine and a lightly-used TV in between. I struggle to concentrate in silence and will typically write and program with death or black metal playing. I find the music helps me focus and the lack of intelligible lyrics keeps it from distracting me.

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

My blog is hosted at Netlify and I pay for the pro plan while staying well under its limits, but this allows me the piece of mind to rebuild the site regularly to update my now page and other dynamically populated elements like my links page.

I moved my domains to DNSimple last year after Gandi was acquired.

The code for my site is versioned and available to view at GitHub. I use a GitHub action to trigger hourly rebuilds of my site, another to post content from a feed that combines my blog posts, shared links, read books and watched movies to Mastodon, another to add my blog posts to my README, another to test my site's performance using a Speedlify instance and yet another to retrieve and cache the chart data for music I've listened to over the last week from the charts I derive from Plex (this is then syndicated to Mastodon via the aforementioned feed and action).

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

If I were to start a blog today, I suppose I'd start from where I've arrived at now, but I don't think I could've arrived here without the experience and discovery I went through along the way. I'm not a particularly great designer, so I favor simplicity and performance in presentation and, from a technical perspective, 11ty really lends itself to that. I think I've found a set of tools and a community that I deeply enjoy engaging with.

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?

The expenses to run my site are fairly straightforward: hosting (Netlify), analytics (Clicky) and feed hosting/analytics (Feedpress). A quick estimate for a given year would be around $400 which I'm happy with for something I enjoy so much. There's also a tiny fee monthly for a Backblaze B2 bucket I use to cache JSON used to populate my links page (they're fetched from the Readwise Reader API which is paginated and rate-limited — this allows me to persist link data and puts less of a burden on their service).

I'm not opposed to bloggers monetizing their sites, but I appreciate when, say, content is clearly marked as sponsored. I have a Buy Me a Coffee link in my site's navigation, but nothing outside of that — if someone wants to send something along I appreciate it and, if not, that's totally fine too!

I support a few larger publications that started on and have since left Substack. Among my favorites are Paris Marx's Disconnect and Garbage Day.

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

I'll start off by saying I love the resurgence of blogs and personal sites we're seeing. I have a blogroll on my site with some of my favorites (they're also bundled into a .opml file that you can download). Robb Knight's blog remains one of my favorites — the design is stellar and he's constantly experimenting with and adding new features. I also thoroughly enjoy Adam Newbold's writing and seeing what he's working on for omg.lol. I could go on and on I love Keenan's writing, Mayank is a gifted developer and similarly talented writer, Sara Joy is exceedingly kind and has created awesome projects like RS.S JOY.lol dev. The internet's changing and seeing everyone writing and building makes me so happy.

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

If you want to mentor some great, deserving folks, check out Underdog Devs. If you're building with Eleventy we'd love to have you present at the meetup. The best book I've finished this year has been *NoMeansNo: From Obscurity to Oblivion* — they're my favorite band so, naturally, I'm biased, but it's a fun read and is built around interviews with the band, their friends, family and other popular musicians.

I don't have any active side projects at the moment (but I'm kicking around some ideas) — fitting everything in is tough! I'd love to build something that makes it easier for small bands to quickly build lightweight websites that they can host anywhere and really bring my journey full circle — a static site generator as a service with portable code and easy CMS integration? More robust than LinkTree, with less overhead than Squarespace and more open than both. I'm more interested in supporting musicians than I am in monetizing anything I suppose.

I'm also excited to see what Robb Knight is cooking up with EchoFeed.

Thanks for reading! I post a lot on my site and on Mastodon so come say hi!