People and Blogs: fLaMEd

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

What's going on, Internet? Kia ora, I'm fLaMEd 🔥. I'm originally from Te Awa Kairangi (Lower Hutt), now living in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa, New Zealand with my wife and two kids.

I get up every morning at 4:30 am to get to the gym before the kids get up and the day begins. I've recently picked up golf again, but find less time for that than I do for website work.

You can get a better idea of what I'm into over at my website, Flamed Fury.

I'm not a developer, not a designer, just a guy who loves the web.

What's the story behind your blog?

Flamed Fury started in 1999. It's been through more versions than I can properly count, but the rough timeline: 5 versions before it became a personal blog, a few side quests at different domains inbetween, and finally 4 versions in the 2020 era when I landed back at flamedfury.com where I started.

Started in summer 1999 on one of the free hosts, I don't remember (probably cjb.net). Moved to sweeetnet.com in 2000 through hanging out in the #sweeet IRC channel. A guy called kertiz from #sweeet took pity on my design skills and gave me a proper redesign, then stuck around contributing. Another guy fitty-two joined in. We iterated every couple of years until the dot-com bubble burst, advertising money dried up and the IRC crew drifted apart. I tried to keep it going by myself with a 2002 layout that wasn't great. But "blog" isn't really the word for any of this. The 1999–2003 version was effectively microblogging before microblogging was a thing, built around a niche (lifestyle magazine style, lol) before niche blogging was a thing either. We just didn't have the vocabulary yet.

November 2003 was when Flamed Fury became a blog in the way I'd recognise the format today. Posts about polytech, nights out, whatever was going on. That lasted until 2005, then I parked it and tried being "more adult" at another domain through 2006–2008. Took a break as MySpace, Bebo, Facebook and Twitter took over. Came back in 2012 with a niche barbeque blog and carried on with it for six years before archiving the whole thing in 2018, once I realised how much I absolutely loathed niche recipe blogging.

Revived the fLaMEd persona in 2019 on a new domain (Hugo + Netlify). In 2021 I settled back on flamedfury.com with Eleventy on Neocities. Two redesigns later and a move to a local VPS, here we are.

Every version of this site, going back to 1999, has been the same instinct: a personal site as a place to be yourself on the web. The 1999 version was more of a microblogging website with three friends collaborating around celebrity magazine scans, that's where the era pointed. The 2026 version is the opposite. Everything and nothing, no algorithm to satisfy, no brand. Different tools, same instinct.

There's a longer version of this story I'll get round to writing on the site soon. It's in draft, I promise. Hit me up if you want to see me finish it.

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

Inspiration for what I put and write on my website comes from across the web and life experiences. A gig, a new record, a beer, a trip with the family, or any number of posts I find across the web gets me thinking. Storytelling, sharing my experiences and interests.

I love monthly recaps to populate my now page, reflections of last night's gig, new (usually local) music finds, a fun time out with my friends or family.

Drafts begin as a note on my phone, my notebook before I find myself with a spare opportunity at my computer.

I'll begin with these rough notes and begin fleshing them out. I'll have a couple of tabs open to grab details and links of what I'm talking about to sprinkle through the post.

Sometimes I'll start a draft and they'll sit there for days, weeks, and sometimes months in an untracked markdown file in Codium.

Depending on what I'm writing about I won't have any proof reading. If I'm writing about something topical about the web I'll often have xandra or one of the other 32-Bit Cafe crew read over it and give me some pointers or a thumbs up.

Then after sitting on it for a minute, an hour or a day, I'll publish it.

Other pages on the website will get worked on and usually published in unfinished states and I'll continue to work on these over time — nothing is ever really finished is it?

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

My ideal creative environment is in my home office, at my desk or couch in silence. I might listen to a few songs or watch a couple music videos to get me in the zone, but when it comes to focus time, all noise off and I work in silence, often talking to myself.

If I'm away from home and I get a moment to myself, it's either at a table, kitchen bench or an arm chair. Hopefully with silence, but usually with the chaos of family life going on around me.

Our kids are young, they're busy, noisy and need lots of attention so focus time these days is few and far between :)

Do I believe the physical space influences my creativity? Heck yeah, if I'm not in the office, then a walk around the block or through the village listening to music will help me get creative — as long as I get those thoughts out of my head before they dissapear. If I'm travelling, then any beautiful location might inspire some spark.

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

I use Eleventy for building my website. I originally started with Eleventy Excellent by Lene Saile, but it's evolved beyond that over the years. I often check in with her when she releases new versions to make sure I take in any key updates, but also find some changes I've made find their way back into the starter template :)

These days flamedfury.com runs on an NZ-based VPS to keep the site close to home. I use a local domain registrar for my domains.

Deployment is a simple npm run build then rsync directly to the VPS.

To participate in the web, I've implemented a bunch of IndieWeb features, Webmentions, h-cards, h-entries and of course provide a number of Atom/RSS/JSON feeds which are syndicated to Mastodon through EchoFeed to meet people where they are.

My Bookmarks are backed by the 32-Bit Cafe's instance of Linkding and pulled into my website at build time and shared via Atom/RSS/JSON and EchoFeed.

I run an instance of Forgejo on my homeserver and commit the project there multiple times a day.

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

I don't think so. If anything I would have tried to preserve everything rather than ditching things over the years. I've managed to recover a lot of the old stuff through old CD-Roms where I'd burnt old versions of the website or from the Wayback Machine.

I would have definitely tried to keep in contact with a lot of the old crew from IRC. We drifted apart before it was easy to keep in contact with each other. I do regret losing those early relationships.

I'm really happy with how I've managed to salvage a lot of the old stuff and merge it into what the website is today. It really is a labour of love.

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?

All in NZD. The domain is $39/year and my VPS is $82/year. All the other infrastructure on my home network is sunk cost over the years and I'm not sure how I'd put a $ value against that.

I haven't made money from my website since 2001 along with the original internet advertising bubble burst. I did have a go with ads and affiliate marketing with the barbeque blog, but that left a sour taste in my mouth. I'm a fan of services like ko-fi and the like but haven't looked into setting it up for myself — not sure if anyone would be interested in supporting me.

I throw money at the 32-Bit Cafe's ko-fi and contribute to infrastructure costs there as well as my time to help moderate and run the forums and will throw other bloggers tips here and there through their ko-fis, and will buy sticker packs wherever I see them being sold in the wider hobby web community.

When I need some new graphics for the website I'm always on the look out for a commission and will happily pay for talented graphic designers services.

I support a few independent journalists through their newsletters that I enjoy reading and support a local independent news/media website to help keep the lights on there as I enjoy their local content. A great way to keep up with what's going on in the country and the world without the doom-and-gloom.

What's my position on people monetising personal blogs? Go for it as long as it's not intrusive or full of dark patterns. Keep it personal and creative. I love the sticker packs or graphic commissions.

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

So many to mention!

• Chris Burnell — we've become great friends over the years. I love to bounce ideas with; dev, IndieWeb, beer, music.
• Xandra — xandra is my small web bestie and I've got to know her pretty well over the years through the Cafe.
• yequari — another of the Cafe barista team. The driving force behind our infrastructure endeavours. His new project webweav.ing recently launched a guestbook service that I'm using on Flamed Fury.
• jay, fyr, key, and rodrick — all my fellow 32-Bit Cafe baristas who help running and making the Cafe an awesome place to hangout.
• Cory Dransfeldt — another I've chatted to heaps with over the past few years. We have heaps of the same interests. His media collection and the direction he's taken his website is "beyond amazing".
• Robb Knight — Robb always has a new and interesting project to check out. I'm always picking up neat things to add to my website from his.
• america's decline — not often seen outside of the Neocities circles, but one of my favourites on Neocities. A throwback to my favourite era of the web, music, celeb, pop culture, and fantastic graphics.
• shellsharks — an indie web powerhouse and curator of the fantastic scrolls weekly.
• James — another indie web powerhouse. James's blog is full of thoughtful and insightful posts about the web and has recently launched a new podcast centered around the independent web, Wonders of Web Weaving.

More at my blogroll and links pages.

Who do I think you should be interviewing next? Hit up Chris Burnell if you have time before wrapping the project up :)

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

If you're into making websites, or you want to start you should most definitely come and check out the 32-Bit Cafe — our small community of the web where we welcome hobby web developers of all skill levels and help each other out building our websites. We have monthly web weaving workshops, discussion forums, and other fantastic services offered free for the community and join in on the discussion at our forums.

Plugging my own stuff, check out my record collection, and my ever growing list of bookmarks.

And for all the readers out there, keep building the web you want to be part of. There's so much great stuff going on out here. Laterz 🤙