People and Blogs: Daniel Miller

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

I am originally from Pennsylvania, went to school in Arizona, and ended up in Dallas, Texas by way of Florida, Washington DC, and Bosnia and Herzegovina. I studied Psychology and planned on pursuing graduate studies in organizational psychology, but ended up in software fairly quickly, within about a year of graduating. I was a developer for over a decade, and then a CTO for almost another decade. I'm currently looking for an opportunity where I can provide value to a business doing good in the world.

I used to make music but haven't done much of that for about 10 years. I ride my bicycle as often as possible, usually a few times a week. And I write on my blog!

What's the story behind your blog?

I've always been interested in the ideas around Personal Knowledge Management, so when I first saw Blogger and started blogging in 2001 I thought of it as a public notebook. It still serves that purpose. It was originally danielsjourney.com (still have the domain). I eventually changed to daniel.industries.

My peak readership was during the blogging boom of the 2000s, which coincided with my move to Bosnia, which people seemed to be interested in.

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

I use Notion for "capture" and have about 18 ideas in there. I have additional less-formed ideas tagged in my Logseq notes. I have 19 posts in a drafts folder with another 516 stashed in there from private writing websites I participated in years ago. In theory, I will someday get the good ones imported into the canonical notebook, but at this rate, it might never happen.

I try to write and publish in one sitting, otherwise the post might never get finished. I'm not afraid of editing a post after I've published it, though. It's my history, I can rewrite it if I want.

I also have writing (for stories and articles) and music sections on the site. I plan on adding a "projects" page as well.

The blog currently has 3417 posts. I posted much more early on (2001-2008), before Twitter and (some) maturity that came with age and experience...and I had a lot more time for it back then.

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

It's less about my physical environment and more about my mental and emotional environment. The other reason I've blogged less in the last 14 years is that my life allows for less quiet time for thinking. I will have good ideas and make interesting connections while riding my bike, or in the shower, or right before falling asleep, but as my life has become more full with family and responsibilities, I find not many of those ideas make it onto a page anywhere (yet alone become coherent enough to go on the website).

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

I use Jekyll with a Ruby Rakefile I brought with me from back when I used a gem called "Octopress" (which has been abandoned), which adds quality-of-life command line tools for managing posts, building, and publishing. I've also written a "backlink" plugin for Jekyll (see Really Basic Backlinks in Jekyll).

While I have used Jekyll for over 10 years, before that I used Blogger, Moveable Type, WordPress, LiveJournal, and multiple versions of my own PHP CMS system (see SWIM Stock-take Part 2). But I've been a static site generator person for a long time. I think 11ty is probably better at this point, but so far I haven't felt the need to move off Jekyll.

See To Find an Alternative to Wordpress, Just Go Back to the Beginning.

I've hosted on DreamHost since forever. I've had my domains with Hover for a long time.

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

Static site generators seem to be all the rage these days, for good reason. Having everything as a flat file you can manage via source control and easily move around, search, mass update from your text editor of choice...it's better than having everything locked into a database in the cloud (or even on your computer), even if the product allows for easy exports. See Web Artifact Permanence.

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 hosting is somewhere between $100-200 per year (I was kept at a lower price for a while, and I think that is over soon). I could host on GitHub or similar for free, but I have a handful of sites I host on DreamHost, so it is just easier to manage them all in one place.

I was bullish on tools that would allow individual artists to monetize their work without the need for middlemen, I even ran a nonprofit from 2003-2005 (see Goodbye Integration Research Dot Org) that was working on exactly that problem. I was excited when Jack Conte first talked about Patreon at XOXO (I was there in person--and it is still a good talk). Now we're there, and Patreon has to enshittify to appease investors, and Substack has to harbor fascists and pop modals in my face all the time, and I'm not so sure about the entire idea. I think it is better to just have something you can sell. It's hard. I think if you don't have to monetize your online work, that's better. There are too many pseudo-intellectual influencers out there, and too few Kottkes, Popovas, or Westenbergs.

Those of us just hanging out in our digital living rooms on the cozy web are doing ok without having to perform for our audience.

See On Blogging:

Keeping a personal blog in 2017 feels relatively futile. But while everyone else is ~~storing~~ throwing their stories, artifacts, thoughts, and meanings into the stream for others to consume on their phones while taking a dump or bored at lunch or while consuming some other media entirely, those of us who store our work on actual domains do it for ourselves--and our legacy. And while permalinks may--and do--rot faster than last week's bananas, the content is still here.

...or Rebels: Episode 2:

Creating content on the internet and actually owning all of that content and retaining complete control over that content is still one of the most culturally radical things one can do. Sure, the marketers of the world will tell you you’re wasting your time, but that is only if your horizon for meaningful impact in the world has shortened to the amount of time a news story remains in your social network feed.

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

• Naz Hamid is a web OG
• Ludicity is getting a lot of attention lately for their hot takes full of humanity, and for good reason
• Labnotes by Assaf Arkin is one of the best weekly link list blogs
• Indexed has been consistently posting witty drawings on index cards since 2006
• Jared Christensen for music and design thoughts since 2003

...rapid-fire style, for the sake of time: Tim Bray, Rands in Repose, Robin Rendle, Robin Sloan, Surfing Complexity, John Cutler, Uses This, Tom Critchlow, Ribbonfarm.

You should interview Maggie Appleton.

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

• Saner.ai is a writing/PKM-focused AI tool that actually works and is being actively developed.
• Omnivore is a free and OSS read later (and RSS reader) app.
• Huffduffer lets you create a custom podcast feed for yourself from any audio file on the internet.
• Mike Riddell was an author from New Zealand who passed two years ago. Seeing his play Jerusalem, Jerusalem performed live was one of the greatest artistic experiences of my life.
• Jeff Hull