People and Blogs: Chris O'Donnell

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

I'm Chris O'Donnell, a sales executive / sales engineer in the web design and development world. I grew up as a US Air Force brat, moving frequently as the USAF moved my father around to different locations. I spent 18 months in Germany and 4 years in Spain as a kid (I was a toddler for Germany so I remember none of it), and I also lived in every region of the US except the West Coast growing up. I graduated from high school on an Army base in the South Pacific - Kwajalein Island. I attended Purdue University for college and met the love of my life there on a blind date. We are still together 37 years after that date, and we have two adult kids. We started adulting post-college in Atlanta then moved to the Virginia suburbs of Washington DC about 26 years ago. We bugged out of the DC burbs and moved to Richmond VA in 2017. When not working you'll find us out birding, or attending some of the numerous local events in Richmond. On weekends in spring, summer, or fall, we often go camping in our teardrop style camper. Shenandoah National Park is one of our favorite places, and a convenient two hour drive from home.

What's the story behind your blog?

The story of my blog and the story of my career are intractably intertwined. On 12/31/1995 (New Year's Eve) I was home with one 22 month old child in bed, and my wife very pregnant with our second child. We obviously were not out ringing in the new year, and my wife went to bed early, leaving me up alone. I had worked in printing sales for my 5 post-college years at that point. I decided I wanted to learn HTML and launch a web page before the end of the year. I had about 3-4 hours left in the year. I used the View Source feature in Netscape to look at the code for IBM.com and several other sites, and quickly understood how the basic HTML tags worked. CSS didn't exist yet. I did successfully ftp the site to the hosting space provided by my ISP just before midnight. It was a couple of hours later before I figured out the chmod unix command and made the site readable by anybody in the world. But technically, it was on line before midnight! That led to me consistently tinkering with web design and development, and 3 months later in March of 1996, I got a job in sales with one of the first web design firms in Atlanta. I have worked in web design and development, or something very closely related, such as web hosting, for most of the years since. I did take a detour in the first decade of this century and sell accounting software for about 5 years. However it was browser based software, so maybe it was not that much of the detour. I also maintained a side gig building WordPress sites for many years. I shut that down in 2018.

I was posting weekly essays on the site in 1996 and 1997. The term blog had not yet been invented, and the site did not have categories, archives, or any of the those standard features we expect in blogs today. The earliest version of the site in Archive.org is 1999. The content from the 96/97 version of the site, before I bought the domain name, is not archived anywhere that I know of, and I'm pretty happy about that. Nobody needs to read my defense of the Bob Dole for President campaign in 1996. I've evolved quite a bit since then :) I am not a digital pack rat. I don't have a folder of screen shots from previous versions of the site. I'd have to depend on the Wayback Machine if I needed to dig those up.

By luck of being early, ODonnellWeb enjoyed ridiculous "Google Juice" in the early days of the WWW. The site peaked at around 50,000 visitors per month during peak-blog time, even though it was never anything more than my personal blog. There was never a real editorial focus. Adwords and Blogs Ads on the site did make it a nice part-time job level cash producer for a couple of years though. The tag line "Disappointing people searching for Chris O'Donnell naked" is a reference to the fact that from the earliest time I could track stats on the site, "Chris O'Donnell naked" was always the #1 search referrer from Google. The Chris O'Donnell being searched was not me, of course, but the actor with the same name. In 2003/4 I wrote a blog post about Britney Spears. The word naked was in my tag line. I was #1 on Google for a couple of days for "Britney Spears naked." I also ranked ahead of the actor's domain site on Google until about 2010, when a Google algorithm update knocked me from #1 for my name to not existing in the top 50 results. The site still ranks highly for some unrelated terms that show up in my stats every month; hurricane recipe, ocular intercourse, and grilled cheese without grilling are several that are there every month. I haven't had Google Analytics on the site in years, I use tinylytics.app for very limited stats these days.

The site today is mostly a travel blog, as I write a post and share photos from every camping trip we take. I also maintain a list of books that I have read, along with a rating and short review for each book. When I migrated to Pelican I got obsessed with the idea of a flat file website. There is no dB at all on the site. The photo library is produced by the GThumb web gallery feature, or by fgallery, a Perl script. Both produce photo galleries just using javascript, css, and html. I jump back and forth between the two. The books lists and reviews are simple HTML pages produced in Pelican, and the domain index page at ODonnellWeb.com is a text only page I did last year as a homage to the first home pages in 1995 and earlier that would have looked similar. Other subjects likely to be the focus of blog posts are digital culture, music, and books (I sometimes expand the short reviews on the book page into full posts). Traffic is down 99% from the glory days of peak-blog in the mid-oughts', and I'm OK with that.

Looking forward, I don't anticipate any significant changes to the site. I'm comfortable with how the site is hosted and run, and since I'm writing primarily for myself with no revenue expectations, I'm under no pressure to produce content. I may post 3 times in a week, then it may be a month before I post again. Over the last few years I've averaged about a post a week.

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

My workflow purposely introduces friction into the process so that I don't use my website as a dumping ground for one liners, the way I used Twitter. I used the site that way 20 years ago, before Twitter existed. In hindsight, I probably should have invented Twitter before Jack and Evan! So the site is generally built on longer form writing. I usually write at my desk in my home office. I tend to have an idea then write the post immediately. I do have a folder of blog posts ideas but I rarely refer to it. I tend to execute the post idea immediately, or it never gets written.

I will occasionally ask my wife to proofread something, but more often I just publish and fix the inevitable overlooked typo later when I notice it. Or not. Typos on the site are probably part of my personal brand at this point. Currently all the source Markdown content is on my local machine, and backed up to Owncloud. I simply run the script to produce the site, then rsync the output directory to the server. I have a goal of learning git and managing the site via git. But I have not done anything towards achieving that goal it. That might make it more of a wish than a goal.

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

Physical space most definitely influences creativity. We were just on Cape Cod for vacation and saw the writers shacks that have long by used by writers and poets to isolate themselves while writing. However, I live in the close in suburbs of a US state capital city. I'm sure my blog would be more creative if I had a mountain chalet to write from. We do have an RV, so I spend plenty of time out in nature, and I write about that often, but always after the fact. I read a lot when out in nature, but I have not yet felt any pull to write in nature. I do occasionally make a few notes for later.

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

The site launched in 1995 as an html page edited in Notepad. I wrote raw HTML up until about 2000. As mentioned above, it was kind of a blog in 96 and 97. Sometime around 98 I started tinkering with actual blog software. I think Grey Matter was the first that I used. After that, I cycled through Blogger, Typepad, WordPress, Anchor, Drupal, and Pelican at various times, roughly in that order. In 2016/17 I embarked on a massive content overhaul of the over 5000 posts on the site at that time. A combination of an automated daily link dump post, and way too many one sentence link posts meant there was a lot of cruft on the site. A high percentage of those links were dead, so I deleted all of those content types, and along with cleaning up other posts with bad links, and maybe a few posts I regretted posting, I ended up with a much leaner site. I then converted everything still there to Markdown, and migrated to the Pelican Static Site Generator. The Pelican scripts only reside on my home computer, which creates friction between me and posting. That limits volume, and I hope, improves quality.

I run Pop_OS (linux) on my desktop machine at home. Most posts are composed in the Apostrophe Markdown editor. If I'm away from home, or for longer posts, I'll write it in Google Docs, convert it to Markdown with a Google Docs add-on, then copy and paste into Apostrophe. Photos are edited in GThumb or GIMP. Editing photos for me means pushing the auto white balance button to see if it looks better, and cropping and resizing the photos as needed.

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

I don't have any serious regrets about how my digital life has evolved. If I could do it over again I would probably buy a shorter domain name in 1998. I maintain chrisod at gmail just because it's so easy to share verbally. It forwards to my domain email account. Nobody ever spells ODonnellweb correctly on the first try. Given the prominence the site had in Google for a few years, I probably could have generated a lot more income with it than I did. I tried starting a tech blog for parents back in 2007/8. It grew to several thousand RSS subscribers in just a few weeks, but I learned quickly that I hated "having" to write every day, and I got bored quickly with writing about the same general topic every day. I sold the site for a few hundred bucks after about 90 days. But that was still a more successful exit than pets.com! I've also contributed to a few group blogs over the years. I was a writer for ADDReviews.com, a music review site that limited reviews to 20 words. I also did a book blog with a friend, and a beer tasting blog with another friend. All those projects are dormant or dead.

If asked for advice, I would not recommend a new blogger adopt my approach. It's weird and works for me after 28 years of writing online. I'd point a newbie to micro.blog and tell then to go at it. I'm greatly enjoying the resurgence of the Indieweb that we have seen over the last few years. I don't know that we'll ever completely get away from monolithic corporations dominating large chunks of our digital lives, but I'm happy knowing if I ever decide to pull the plug completely on Facebook and IG that I'll still have my digital outpost. I'm also very aware that 98% of the people I keep in touch with on social platforms won't bother to seek out the site. I was #1 for my name on Google for the entire first decade of this century. I remember exactly one old friend finding me that way.

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?

Today, the site earns no revenue. My hosting cost is about $1.50 a month at NearlyFreeSpeech.net, and everything used to produce content and manage the site is open source or free. I'm down to owning just the one domain, as I've let my collection of project idea domains expire over the last few years. In theory, I have no issue with writers monetizing their blogs. In practice, many (most?) blogs created for income are key-word stuffed, SEO optimized dreck that nobody except search engine spiders wants to read. In most cases, the blog as a supporting element to some other career works better than the blog as the career.

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

To wrap this up, here are a few blogs I always keep up with. Instead of trying to impress you with artisanal, organic, hard to find blogs, I'm going to recommend several larger blogs that have been around forever, but did not bail for Facebook, etc. 15 years ago. They kept the focus on their blogs. These may not not be new, but sometimes it's good to be reminded of the classics.

Author John Scalzi posted his first book to his website back in 2005ish. An editor found it and like it, and today he is one of the most recognized and awarded sci-fi authors on the planet, with millions of books sold. His blog still features frequent dog and cat photos though.

whatever.scalzi.com

Actor / author Wil Wheaton started blogging in the very early days, probably around 2002 or 2003. His site was hand crafted HTML for the first few years, until blog CMS' became mainstream and he migrated. Visit for GenX nostalgia, video games, and Star Trek related memories.

wilwheaton.net

Mike Masnick started Techdirt as an email newsletter for friends while in grad school in the late 90s. It became a website recognized for smart, insightful commentary on the intersection of tech, government, policy, and privacy. Side note - Mike and I "met" when he left a comment on a baseball related post on my blog in 2001 or 2002. We are still friends today.

techdirt.com

Editorial Cartoonist Clay Jones worked in the newspaper industry for many years, until those jobs dried up with the collapse of the print news industry. He then started posting his daily cartoon to his own blog, along with a well written blog post expanding on the issue addressed by the cartoon. He self syndicates today, and has a Substack, but the website is updated daily with his latest cartoon and blog post.

claytoonz.com

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

As a grizzled veteran of the internet design and content wars, I think side projects are in my past. I really don't want to work that hard anymore! It's been years since I tinkered with my blog. The design and layout work so I'm content to let it be and just write when I have something to say.

I'll finish up with a few books and bands that I've enjoyed this year. Since this is long enough already, no editorial on these recommendations. Consider it motivation to explore!

Books: The Murderbot series by Martha Wells, The Parliament by Aimee Pokwatka, The Twigs series by Charles Tabb, Murder Road by Simone St. James

Music: Jukebox the Ghost, Lawrence, Robert John and the Wreck, Bywater Call, The Commoners, Karen Jonas, Juliet Lloyd