People and Blogs: Nick Simson

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

Hello! I’m Nick, a graphic/interaction designer and blogger. I currently live in Albuquerque, a desert city in the Southwestern United States. I’m married to a visual artist and together we are raising a preschooler and a small dog.

I grew up in Upstate New York as a bit of a misfit creative kid. I spent hours by myself in my room every day, messing around on a Commodore 64 and drawing my own comics. My parents bestowed two incredible gifts to me in my youth: an electric guitar and amp when I turned 13, and dial-up internet.

Somehow I attended university on an academic scholarship, and declared a major in graphic design (actually, it was called “visual communication” back then). I started working as a graphic and web designer at another state university in 2011. I owe so much of my career to that first web manager who sent me a link to Ethan Marcotte’s Responsive Web Design article and said “your job is to help us figure this stuff out.” 14 years later, I am working somewhere else, but still figuring stuff out.

Outside of work, I am trying to get better at guitar. My wife plays violin, and we have a few people here in Albuquerque we like to play music with. I also enjoy following sports, especially New York Mets baseball and New York Liberty basketball right now. My other teams are the Bills, the Knicks, and the Sabres. If anyone knows of a professional ⚽ club that can break my heart in equal measure, let me know.

What's the story behind your blog?

A requirement for graduating with my degree was to turn in a website version of my design portfolio. So I registered the domain name nicksimson.com in February 2008 and went to work.

V1: A graphic design portfolio of student work. Hosted website builder tool Squarespace also has a little blogging feature. I make a “News” section. A recession happens and I do not generate much “news.” I carry this website around with me for a few years, picking up a little freelance work here and there. I eventually get hired in an entry-level staff designer role.

V2: Imposter syndrome! I’m embarrassed by my XHTML squarespace site and all my earnest blog posts. I replace the site with a proper HTML5 responsive one-page lander (no blog) while I hit the books, learning to be a proper Web Designer.

V3: I fork a Jekyll template in 2014 and make it my own, hosting a site for free on GitHub Pages. I am following people like Jen Simmons and Brad Frost, and want to share all the cool webby stuff I’m learning on the job. The blog goes dormant again between 2016 and 2020.

V4: I’m stuck at home, due to the ongoing novel coronavirus pandemic, and decide to rebuild my blog, this time with Eleventy and Netlify. I start attending Homebrew Website Club meetings and meet a bunch of other web builders and bloggers. I grow tired of Twitter, Instagram, and Goodreads, and try out Micro.blog as a replacement to these things. Now I’m maintaining two blogs.

V5: I use WordPress to tie my microblogging and long form blogging all under one roof. I am all in on the Block Editor and full-site editing. I install most of the IndieWeb plugins. My blog is connected to the Fediverse and the social web.

V6 (current version): The WordPress founder and project lead sues the company hosting my website. I question how much of my future I want tied up in this software. I simplify things a bit: back to static site generation, back to Netlify. I also disconnect from a number of social media platforms.

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

The need to blog comes from a desire to share. I have two types of entries on my blog: notes, which are around 300-500 characters, and posts, which are usually longer and have a title. My notes are often links or quotes I want to share, and sometimes fleeting thoughts or jokes. Posts take me longer to write and publish, which is why there may only be one or two per month.

If I see something on the web I want to bookmark on my blog, for example, I will start a new markdown document in VSCode and use a YAML front matter tag of “Bookmarks” Since its all done manually, I have to remember to put my tags in alphabetical order. I use tags pretty liberally on my blog, and they do help me find and reference my older stuff.

When I get an idea for a new post, I start a new note in Apple Notes, where it might start out as a bulleted list outline and get refined over time. This allows me to start typing out a post on my phone in bed, or on the go, and iCloud sync lets it appear on my laptop where I can polish things up. Apple Notes is not a Markdown editor and the autocorrect feature is quite annoying. I should probably look into Obsidian or something to upgrade my workflow.

Everything happens in one draft usually. When I feel like a post is ready in Apple Notes, I copy and paste the plain, unformatted text into VSCode and use Markdown or HTML to format things, add hyperlinks, etc. I proof read in the browser (localhost) before I publish. I don’t use AI tools to write and I don’t have a human editor besides me. The best tip I ever heard for bloggers is to “write the way you speak.” I really aim for plain language but I have my own idiosyncrasies, like heavy use of ellipsis (…) or using words like “idiosyncrasies”.

Often I get inspired to write a response to something I’ve read, or something that happened in daily life. While my blog is very much a journal, I'm careful to make sure details I’m sharing publicly are just about me. I try not to write about stuff from my job or publish photos of my kid’s face. Sometimes I participate in writing challenges. In February 2024 I wrote about type every day of the month, and that series is still one of the most popular things I’ve done with my blog.

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

I am lucky enough to have a home office—a spare bedroom in our home that I work out of. I’m able to justify this since I have a remote job during the week. Having a dumpy little room with easy access to one’s books and guitars and trinkets is a joy and a privilege I want more people to have.

Physical space totally influences creativity: I spent years of my life working in a windowless basement room with a leaky ceiling at the “deferred maintenance” corner of our university campus. It was quite challenging to come up with creative concepts and solve other people’s problems when you have the background noise of water slowly dripping into a bucket or a car hitting a speed bump directly over your head because someone decided to build offices into the same level as a parking garage and put you in the middle of it.

I was blown away by my own productivity once I started working at home. I now sit in front of a window that lets in just enough light and has a great view of my apricot tree and the Sandia Mountains all year long. I can close the door and put up a 'do not disturb' sign while I’m taking a call. My office is where I get most my work done, but I do enjoy moving my laptop into our dining area, or on the couch with my stinky dog to surf the web and work on my blog.

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

The whole website is a static site programmed and generated with Origami, an open source project run by Jan Miksovsky. Jan was incredibly generous with his time, helping me set up the site exactly the way I wanted it to work, and giving me the room to start learning the language in the process.

My blog is a collection of markdown files in a Git repository. There’s no CMS. I have a local version of my site on my computer and when I commit a change to GitHub, Netlify builds the site and deploys a new version. For a taste of how Origami works, you can check out this file, called site.ori. It's the nucleus of my website: There’s RSS and JSON feeds in there, markdown to HTML, and a directory of slash pages. If you’re familiar with NodeJS or running npm commands, or using a static site generator like Eleventy, you can probably figure out what’s going on under the hood.

My domain is registered through Namecheap, but I use Netlify for DNS. The only other dependency besides Origami is a JavaScript-powered search library called PageFind. Contact forms are also Netlify, with Akismet for spam protection. I’m also exploring adding map images to geolocated posts with the MapBox API.

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

The web is this inherently noisy, chaotic place. Trying to tame it into a genteel, country club atmosphere never works out well either. I wish I learned this lesson much earlier and wasted less time in various walled gardens and silos that only looked nice on the outside. I’m so much happier on my front porch on my little block of our noisy digital neighborhood.

That said, writing on your own website can get a bit lonely. Ever since reading Leon’s "Blogging collectively" post from last year, I have a desire to invite a few others into my world and make something new, like a collaborative bloggy zine.

As far as platforms are concerned, I only trust systems that let you easily import and export your content, and don’t add a bunch of junk to your markup, so you can move around easily. I’ve been so fickle with my tech choices over the years that I’ve repeatedly broken links and feeds on the various versions of my site. There is such an art to good URL design.

I don’t know if I would register a .com again when so many expressive alternatives exist today.

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?

My domain name is registered through Namecheap, where the price of a .com is already up to $17 USD a year, plus the ICANN fee. For email I pay $6 +sales tax each month for a Google Workspace account, which I’m not proud of, but it does a decent job of filtering out guest post inquiries and SEO services spam. My setup with Netlify is simple enough that I do not need to pay for hosting, but I feel like I should pay the company something, so I started using their basic server-side project analytics for $9 a month.

I used to pay a lot more for managed WordPress hosting, and put a support this website link in my footer back then, with links to my Bookshop.org affiliate store and ko-fi profile. I just added a simple membership tier and I’m in the process of designing some fun stickers to sell through a ko-fi shop. I know very well that the tens of dollars I could earn each year won’t replace income from my day job, but it goes a way toward covering my various costs, or could even help me fund future side projects.

I do take issue with others monetizing their personal blogs, since they are my competition and this is a zero-sum game. 😜

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

So I have a lot of people and blogs listed on my /following page, several who have been featured on People and Blogs before. I tried to check out the P&B archives and come up with some names and blogs that haven’t seen featured here before:

• Susan Jean Robertson is not on any social media; just her wonderful blog where she shares her reading and the things that she makes with her own two hands.
• Mandy Brown has two great blogs: A Working Library is about reading and work; and Everything Changes is about… work and reading. Mandy is an essential voice in the blogosphere.
• artlung.com: Joe embraces the “share what you know” ethos of the early web more than anyone else in my RSS reader.
• LMNT.me: an entertaining and creative blog by digital artist Louie Mantia.
• fromjason.xyz: Great writing and a blog design I’m insanely jealous of.
• livelaugh.blog: The funniest and most creative approach I’ve seen to “weeknotes”.
• thisdaysportion.com: I don’t know Leon personally, but I learn so much from the links he shares.

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

If anyone out there seriously wants to dip their toe into HTML and CSS, check out the website piccalil.li. They publish so much helpful free content and a couple of paid courses, too. I keep this one bookmarked, mostly because I can’t spell Piccalilli.

Check out Mike Aparicio’s wonderful Dogs of Dev to meet the canine companions helping out your favorite web developers each day.

You can check out my wife’s artwork at eleanoraldrich.com. I put her site together years ago, and it probably needs a redesign, but she does a great job keeping it all up to date.

I also built theordinarythings.com for my favorite Albuquerque-based band. My pal Jackie and her group have already written and recorded four albums worth of material. Selfishly, I want to make more websites like this one in the future, so get in touch if you want/need a decent website to show off your music.

Finally, I didn’t make circlejerk.blog, but I enjoy reading this machine-generated satire of some myopic tech bro takes.