People and Blogs: Denny Henke

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

My name is Denny. I was born in Missouri, not far from St. Louis and grew up in a family that, in retrospect, aligns very much with the Simpsons cartoon family. I went off to college in the late 1980s with an interest in photojournalism but really no clue. I was a poor student in terms of grades and sticking to any plan. My faculty advisor once called me something along the lines of "an absolute fuck-up". He was right. I was working on a BA in sociology and anthropology but I was not taking it seriously. I wasn't ready for it.

But I absolutely loved to learn and those years were a redefining time for me. My actual focus during the 5 years I was there was learning what it meant to be an "activist". I organized protests of the first Gulf War against Iraq and tried my hand at public speaking and organized a local collective simply called the Greens. It was all of this that led me publishing.

What's the story behind your blog?

My blog was a natural development from my self-identity as a community activist. In the first years of the 90s I was self-publishing little community newsletters and zines. The intent was to create a kind of collective, community-managed project that would, among other things, publish stories about the goings on of the neighborhood. By 1995 we'd established a kind of activist anarchist study group that set-up a group house where we published and set-up a micro-radio station. We wanted a website to accompany the radio station and various other projects we had going. I volunteered to learn how to set it up and I was hooked immediately.

My first site, Liberated Existence, was matched to the name of our activist resource center that we operated out the attic at a local coffee shop. It wasn't technically a blog as we now know them. To my knowledge there were no such systems developed yet and RSS wouldn't come along for another year or two. It was a hand-coded html site that quickly morphed into multiple sub-sites. But in practice it was a blog. The 3 column main page had a kind of news section that looked and functioned like a blog and was updated several times a week, often daily, with linked stories.

Sometime around 2002 I discovered Blosxom and some of my focus switched to this new, more obviously personal site. I named it Where We're Bound as we were working on a documentary of the same name at the time though the blog had nothing to do with the documentary. I liked the potential interpretations of the name:

• Where are we going?
• Where, how are we constrained; to what are we tied to?

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

There's no way I could not blog. My blogging has always been raw and off the cuff. It is rare that I work on a post for more than a day. I might have an idea fermenting in my head for a day or a week or a month. Sometimes I'll make a note, just a line of an idea and that goes at the top of my OBTF (One Big Text File).

I walk daily and every so often I'll start writing in my head and if it goes on enough that I think I'm on to something I want to capture I'll use the iPhone to open Apple Notes or the OBTF and dictate a stream of consciousness that I'll sit down to later. Maybe 80% of those turn into posts.

The source of my blogging is usually my passion of the moment. Probably half of my posts are grounded in my long-term interests in social and ecological justice. My focus within that will move around. 20 years ago I was focused on the Bush admin and the 2nd US war on Iraq. The past year it has been a focus on Gaza, Palestine and Israel. In the intervening years and almost always, the climate and biodiversity crises are on my mind and being written about.

The other half is a direct response to, or recording of my daily life in a tiny house in the woods. I post a lot of nature photos and often include details and context from sources like Wikipedia. My long-term use of Apple tech is also a constant subject.

As to the writing process, I start everyday with the One Big Text File. I run a Shortcut that gets the time and current weather and copies it along with the start of a Markdown list that I paste into the top of the OBTF just below my running list of post ideas. I look at the previous day's journal. I use a basic format, just a markdown list with each item a time-based entry of tasks, thoughts, observations, things done. I often forget to record during a day so the first task of the morning is to drink coffee and fill in the blanks from the previous day, things I did that I didn't record. It immediately forces me to spend time reflecting on daily life.

Then I turn my attention back to the present moment. I may look at the list of ideas or I may just start writing if something is already on my mind. Or I may spend a few minutes reading Mastodon, RSS or review open browser tabs from previous day. I usually spend 5 - 7am in this mode of reading and reflecting. This process will often prompt short link-blog posts of news items. Sometimes these include a paragraph or two response from me along with a quote and link. In that initial post it's not writing so much as responding. But the process often stirs ideas that turn into actual posts later in the morning or day.

When I write a longer post I just type. It usually pours out quickly. At least it seems that way. I suppose there are occasions that it takes longer but my sense of time is lost while I'm in it. After writing, usually in Textastic on the iPad, I'll give it a read through and edit. If I'm ready to publish I cut it from the top of my OBTF and paste it just below what will be my day's daily journal. I change the hashtag above it from Draft to Published. I then copy it to a new file in iA Writer. At this point I'll usually give it another read through and make additional edits. Sometimes this editing is quick, other times it results in some rewriting and reorganizing. If it is a tech related post I might need to get screenshots.

Once the post is ready I copy the markdown and run a Shortcut that converts it to html and inserts it into a template and saves it to my posts folder as an html file. It also populates the html line with date and link that I paste into the site home page and the posts.html. I upload to the server then open it in a browser for a read through. I inevitably find at least one typo that I need to fix.

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

There's no doubt my physical space influences my creativity and what I end up writing about. I live and work from a tiny house cabin at the edge of a large forest. It is a true, one room tiny house: 192 sq feet not counting a covered porch where I spend a lot of time in the fall and spring. I've lived here for 14 of the past 16 years. For me it is an ideal environment. I have no children, no spouse or partner. I have a dog Cosmo and Rosie the feline for company.

All this to say that when I'm between client jobs and household chores I am in a quiet, still environment that I control. It's easy to focus in a space like this.

But, perhaps more than that, there's nothing conventional or normal about where I live or my life here. When I take my dog out before bed it's nearly pitch black except for the string lights on my porch or moonlight. When I look up in the summertime I see the milky band of stars that comprises the central disk of our galaxy. From 2012 to 2018 I took advantage of the dark skies here and spent many nights outside at a telescope looking at galaxies 12 million light years away. Sometimes these sessions would start after sunset and last until sunrise, sometimes in the winter at 15° F. The point of the experience of those nights was to search for and grasp at the meaning of what it is to be a human living on Earth. It was and is a search for perspective.

And being on the edge of a forest means I can step out of my cabin and turn left to a trail that takes me into a woodland ecosystem, or I can turn right and walk around a large pond that is its own ecosystem with a very different mix of species. So while my living space is tiny, my home is expansive and it is simultaneously quiet but also vibrating with life and rich experiences daily or nightly.

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

Some of my tech stack is mentioned earlier. I write and publish everything from an iPad Pro using a mix of Textastic, iA Writer and a handful of Shortcuts. In just the past few weeks I've been moving my blog. I try not to move too often as I'd rather focus on writing but it happens on occasion. As mentioned before, my first blog was html and then Blosxom, followed by TypePad and a couple years later, Blogspot where I stayed until moving to my own domain and WordPress in 2017. In 2022 I grew frustrated with WordPress and tried out Blot before settling in at Micro.blog. My imported archive there dates back to 2003 containing almost everything originally posted on the first blog and since.

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

I'm happy with my domain and name of my blog. It fits.

As to the platform and structure, yes, I would do things differently and am currently in the process of addressing it with what I expect to be a slow and thoroughly enjoyable move.

My current host, micro.blog is excellent. But I have concerns about sole proprietor blog services (I think a lot of users and operators are not really considering this). That, combined with feeling a bit locked into Micro.blog's Hugo base, has prompted another move. Blogspot, Wordpress, Micro.blog/Hugo, all of these CMS systems designed to make blogging easy leave me feeling confined to an overly complex templating system and/or complicated applications designed to build blogs.

But I know and love html. So, I'm back to my original web host, MacHighway, where I've hosted my sites and clients' websites for the past 18 years.

It's probably ridiculous but I'm going to take my time over the next year to curate and rebuild my website with html and css. I absolutely love working in the mix of html and Markdown. I've been enjoying coming up with a new process for easy creating and publishing of new posts using Shortcuts. Along with that I've been creating and tweaking a process for moving posts from micro.blog into html on the new site.

It's still slow, and much of it is manual. It requires my attention, and that's the point. I love building and updating. I am relishing my time revisiting my posts from 20 years ago. What was I doing 15 years ago? 10 years ago? Over the coming months, I'll take a bit of time each day appreciating and/or being embarrassed by the things I've published.

The website is easy to update and is currently six html files on the top level with a folder for images and a folder for css. These are the six pages in the navigation bar. Then a single folder of posts, each an html file named and sortable by date. In that posts folder a folder of images. Then a single folder for linked posts, again, each an html file named and sortable by date. That's it. That's the site.

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?

Cost: $5/month currently to Micro.blog. I'll stay there through 2025 and assuming I've got everything migrated over I'll cancel my paid account there at the end of the year. Remaining cost is $22ish for the domain and I'm in a shared hosting pool so hosting cost is near zero.

No interest in monetizing. Blogging is a labor of love for me. My income is well below the poverty line so I'm not able to financially support other bloggers though I do occasionally donate small amounts to web resources like Wikipedia and the Internet Archive as well as professional independent media like Democracy Now!, Truthout and the Intercept. It's not much but as I've been reading and using those sites daily for years I try to pitch in.

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

Here are some of my current favorites:

• Dave Rogers at nice-marmot.net
• Jessica Smith at jayeless.net
• Lou Plummer at amerpie.lol
• Warner Crocker at warnercrocker.com
• Rui Carmo at taoofmac.com
• Alexandra at library.xandra.cc
• Matthew Graybosch at starbreaker.org (Read Matthew's Interview)
• JCProbably at notes.jeddacp.com

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

Nothing of my own to mention beyond my site. Perhaps an idea though for folks. We're living through some interesting times. I know in the US a lot of people have been really stressed with politics and a range of related difficulties. The idea or suggestion I would offer up is that often times the solution to our stress is being involved in our communities in some way. A lot of the folks building the web have great technical skills. Those that don't are likely good writers or are creative in some way. Consider putting your skills to use in your community if you have the time. Make the time if you can.

A great way to get started is your local library. Some communities more than others might really need help at the library. And it's often a fantastic way to jump into your community. Put yourself out there if you're able. It's something I've been doing for several years and it's been deeply rewarding.