People and Blogs: Luke Harris

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

I’m Luke, I’m 29, and I live in Chicago with my partner and five cats. I grew up in Austin, Texas. I was homeschooled—which was horrific—and haven’t gone to college yet.

I’m in-between jobs at the moment; I’ve been looking for IT and web development work. For the last eleven years I’ve been doing web design on the side in addition to full-time jobs in electrical, HVAC, apartment maintenance, logistics brokering, and healthcare IT. Web design and working in tech was The Dream™ for a long time; with each new non-tech job I kept telling myself it was just a brief interlude before I was “discovered” and hired for a wonderful position doing what I love. But experience and rejection slowly eroded the naivety away. I still love this stuff but with how turbulent things have been in the industry these last few years, I’ve been looking at what else I can do for a career besides drawing rectangles and making logos bigger.

My hobbies include blogging (whoa), playing video games, reading books, listening to music, and coding. Lately I’ve been playing Helldivers 2, Diablo IV, and Rimworld. Learning Go has been an obsession for the last year and I’ve been having fun building a form handler. The code is a complete mess right now but a couple weeks ago I got it to take a form submission and send me an email—which made me so excited that I haven’t touched the project since.

What's the story behind your blog?

My first blog was on Blogger in 2010. I frequented a number of forums at the time and I saw other people had their blogs linked in their signature, and I thought it was cool to have a spot all my own for topics that didn’t fit the theme of those forums. Early posts centered around the computer forum I started during that time.

In March 2011 I moved to WordPress and decided the previous posts weren’t worth moving, and their teenage angst is lost to time. Frustrated with WordPress, I moved over to Tumblr for a couple months before pulling a 180 and moving right back to WordPress in June 2011. My posts continued to revolve around running my forums—now multiple—and random computer activities I was up to that day.

In 2013 I switched to Anchor CMS (RIP Charlotte). This is when the first rendition of the cactus logo I use on my site showed up. I loved the Markdown approach to blogging after fighting the WordPress editor, but I wasn’t able to delete comments and I missed the WordPress media gallery. Later that same year I moved to WordPress for the third time. For the next couple of years I wrote about my solutions to problems I encountered and my adventures in Elite: Dangerous.

2016 saw a decline in posts and the beginning of a 4-year hiatus from blogging altogether. I met my partner that same year. Embarrassed by my teenage self and uncertain how to market my web design services, I took down the blog and switched my site to a resume-like Gatsby template.

I started things back up again in 2020 with the fourth return to WordPress, this time embracing the Gutenberg editor and boasting about how not-Jamstack my site was—out of exasperation with Gatsby’s build times. But as usual at this point, my time on WordPress wouldn’t last long and in 2021 I moved to Eleventy, followed by Hugo a few months later.

For the first year after my return to blogging, I mainly wrote about web development and tech. In 2022 I grew tired of this; I love those things but they can be incredibly dry and I wanted to express myself more. I started writing more about life and posted about my trip to purchase wiper blades, which became a reader favorite. I went back and forth on whether to separate the tech posts or keep posting through it, and ultimately decided it doesn’t matter. I write about what interests me and let the people following my blog decide for themselves.

My blog also functioned as my portfolio, and I went back and forth on this for years until I removed the portfolio and business parts for good a couple years ago. I felt like trying to attract business on my personal site limited what I could write about, and it was so freeing to finally rip that stuff out.

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

I consume an unhealthy amount of articles every day and a lot of my inspiration comes from the excellent people who live in my RSS reader. I’ll get an idea in my head and start writing to uncover more meaning behind it—like sculpting but less cool. Sometimes I start with a good title and then the rest flows out as I think through it in real time. Other times I might be journaling my thoughts and a sentence will grow into three paragraphs, a title will appear, and eventually the whole mess finds its way into my blog. I try to publish posts the same day I start them; my drafts folder is where posts go to die.

I research almost every post, which is a problem because I can get way too into the research portion and kill my writing flow. Even the personal posts will have me going through maps and photos to make sure I’ve got the story and names straight. I keep reminding myself that I don’t need to provide proof for absolutely everything.

On days or topics where I feel less confident I ask my partner to proofread. I re-read what I write about 15-20 times and when the frustration reaches a breaking point I switch to Sublime Merge, close my eyes, hit the keys to stage/commit/push, and whisper a prayer to the gods of blogging.

Once a post is published I have a habit of re-reading what I wrote 5–10 more times because the context switch from my editor to the wild web tends to inspire additional changes. I consider this part an unhealthy obsession and I’m working on not doing that and posting carefree to the wind.

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

My ideal creative environment is on an airplane mid-flight after they’ve passed out the complimentary snacks and drinks that you can’t taste because you’ve temporarily surfaced above nature’s tender embrace, and in your newfound godhood your thoughts drift to thinking about how we never should have left the trees all those years ago. Many posts have started in the shower, where I’ll strike upon a turn of phrase that I like and then do my darnedest to remember it when I’m dry enough to type it out.

I can’t be airborne or in the shower perpetually, so I gladly settle for my desk in the corner with a nice cup of coffee and one of five cats in my lap. The physical space I’m in absolutely influences my creativity; I struggle to think in loud environments with sounds I can’t tune out.

Noise-cancelling headphones help a lot. I find being unable to hear my keystrokes to be incredibly helpful for staying in the trance-like state of the zone while writing. I put on music that I’ve either heard a bazillion times or with few lyrics. Lately my go-to has been Chicago house inspired.

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

My blog is generated with Hugo and hosted on Cloudflare Pages. The domain is registered through Namecheap. My CMS is my operating system and text editor, which can be a frustrating combination at times but it works. I use Hugo’s archetypes feature to start a new post with the front matter populated, and then Hugo opens it in iA Writer. Final edits happen in Sublime Text.

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

There’s a lot I’d do with hindsight. For example, I had to switch my domain from a .work to a .com TLD a few years ago because the .work TLD made it onto a few widely-used corporate firewall blocklists years after I registered mine, to the point where I couldn’t access my own website in a coffee shop one day. While preventing potential employers and coworkers from accessing my site could be a useful feature, I’d go with a boring TLD from the start.

I would have separated my consulting from my personal site earlier. And I would have kept my site as my main online presence, instead of dumping words into various social media platforms for five minutes of fame. A lot of those words and images are lost now.

I’d still switch up my tech stack with the season though. Part of me enjoys creating problems for my future self.

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?

• Domains renewal: $28 USD/year
• Cloudflare Pages: $0

Way back near the start I had banner ads, but they produced pennies a year and looked terrible. I recently set up a Ko-fi page and added the link to the bottom of my blog posts, and a couple wonderful readers have funded domain renewals for the next couple of years. And I’ve been hired by people who found me via my blog—that counts, right?

I absolutely support monetizing personal blogs. Those recurring costs add up and it’s another avenue for people to send you warm and fuzzy feelings. But it should be tasteful. Am I running around town wearing clothing plastered with ads for the latest VC-funded grift? (No, but please reach out if that’s an option. People don’t need to know it’s me). On the blog it’s different; my literal name and persona is wrapped up in it. When I added banner ads it felt filthy, like I sold my soul to the company with the largest fraction of a penny on AdSense. It would take a large—not small—dump truck load of pennies to make me consider doing that again. The sponsored article people have tried hard, but every time I ask for the load of zinc measured in cubic yards, negotiations fall through.

I encourage a cautious, almost hesitant approach. Monetization should be an afterthought, not the primary goal.

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

I recommend checking out each of these blogs and interviewing their wonderful owners. A few of them have been interviewed already.

• A Very Good Blog by Keenan
• Aegir.org
• Brain Baking
• Bryce Wray
• Chris Glass
• Chris Wiegman
• Kev Quirk (_Read Kev's P&B Interview_)
• Minutes to Midnight (_Read Simone 's P&B Interview_)
• Rubenerd
• Stillness.Digital by Henry From Online

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

While writing this I came across the album *Ease the Work* by the instrumental group Hour. It feels like a nice stroll at sunset with a cool breeze behind you and an endless expanse of tired and dusty landscape in front. It beckons you to explore its gentle swells and sweeping strings while the beat steadily plods along, kicking up little swirls of vague nostalgia. Thoughts you’ve thought before but hadn’t properly put to rest will surface and demand to be explored, to be wholly perceived; thoughts that may have first surfaced decades prior. They nibble at your attention, threatening the tranquil state of your mind, but it is effortless to cast them away. You lose yourself in the fiery sun, yearning to someday follow its passage behind the hazy horizon. Not today though. Today is a great day to write a blog post.