People and Blogs: David Wertheimer

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

Hi! I'm David Wertheimer. I live in New York City with my wife, two teenage children and our dog. I am a fan of the New York Yankees, minor chords and chocolate mint.

Digitally, I've been online since 1987, when I got a 300/1200 baud modem, and began calling local BBSes and chat systems as a high school freshman. After college I had just started a job in book production when I got a call to work as an online editorial assistant instead. My online hobby became a career--this was October 1995; my first professional software suite included Netscape 1.1N--and I never looked back.

What's the story behind your blog?

I first put up a personal web page in 1996. Websites then were for all manner of creative expression, from writing to visual, textural experiences. Sites like 0sil8, Superbad and the Fray were inventing new paradigms monthly. I tried this with my own site, with middling results.

By 1998, weblogs had become a thing, and inspired by a number of early bloggers (like Jason Kottke, who had begun writing alongside his 0sil8) I put up my own and called it the Idea Pad. From there, I just kept going.

Back then, I often published multiple times a day, everything from long expositions to quick-hit notes, one-liner jokes, and broad commentary on everything from industry news to my love life. I'm still a generalist in that way. My recent posts are largely personal, but I could put out a thousand words on user experience next week if the mood strikes.

My blog proudly hit 25 years last fall, and while my pace has shifted dramatically over the years, I see no end in sight.

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

When I have something I want to put out into the world, whether to share an idea with an audience, exercise my writing muscles, or just get something off my chest, I'll pop open a blank page and start writing.

Sometimes I bang out an essay in one shot, which is satisfying. Other times, I'll work on a draft for awhile, with unlimited rounds of revision and reconsideration. I have dozens of unpublished posts in my CMS. A little ways back, I actually spent some time revisiting and cleaning up some drafts to share belatedly. That was entertaining, although many of those drafts are unpublished for a reason.

Which brings me to a fun, shameful fact: much of the time, I write straight in WordPress. I don't even like the editor that much, I just appreciate the immediacy. Since my blog is so personal, and I'm not garnering thousands of views at any given moment, I even tweak posts on the fly right after I first hit Publish. Awful best practices! But it makes me happy.

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

If I'm doing serious writing and editing, put me in a setting with steady background noise and nothing else to do. But after 25 years, writing for myself is innate. When I get inspired, I'll just pop open a Notes file or an email draft and capture an idea.

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

At inception, I was hand-coding posts in HTML in BBEdit and uploading them with Fetch. Then I had a home-rolled PHP publishing system, built by a friend who kept the duct tape from falling off the pipes for a long while. I eventually moved to WordPress and stayed. Plenty of pages on my site are still hand-crafted from back when I knew something about front-end code.

I've been using the same web host (and its registrar) for probably 20 years now and generally leave it alone.

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

One of my few memorable regrets was that I didn't register ideapad.com, and a couple of years after I started writing that became the name of a line of laptops. (I also regret my choice of domain name, but I'm stuck with it.)

One thing I'd definitely not do differently is maintain my archive. Linkrot is a terrible outgrowth of digital longevity. I promised myself early on that I'd try to avoid it, and now my kids can read my old posts, as can you, or my coworkers, or my friends from grade school who I name-checked that one time. You can find your way to things I made when I was 24. You can search Google for "furnident" and land on my post from 2002.

That relative permanence is meaningful to me. I'm not exactly proud of all my old work, but I am proud that each item is right where it was the day it got posted.

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 costs are the only real expense. The only money I've directly made off my website was when a little side project went viral and I slapped an ad banner on it.

I have indirectly monetized my blog in many ways, from networking to consulting to speaking engagements to book deals, and with the people I've met and interacted with along the way.

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

I spent some time reading other surveys and realized there's not much I could recommend that hasn't been mentioned by someone else. But here are half a dozen that aren't obvious picks and that make me go "ooh" when I see new posts appear in my Feedly:

• Curious about Everything (linkblog)
• Halfman (generalist blog)
• Ironic Sans (creative nonfiction)
• Joe's Notebook (sports)
• Receipt from the Bookshop (personal journal)
• The Sword and the Sandwich (sandwiches!)

Two-thirds of those links actually point to newsletters. One nice thing about reading in RSS is that I blur the lines between points of origin. They may be emailed, but they look like blogs to me.

Also, I still read most of the old-timers from my era that are still publishing, all of whom are still a delight: Kottke, Sippey, Storey, Gruber, Dash, Garrity, Webb, Knauss, the list goes on.

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

My favorite side project of recent vintage has been retired but is still great: I spent a decade-plus tweeting when either of my kids said something funny, poignant or memorable. They've outgrown it now (and we've largely outgrown Twitter) but their feeds are special.

Meet Nathan and Eli.

The best stuff is back a couple of years, when they were younger and goofier.

Thanks again for having me!