People and Blogs: Peter Rukavina

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

I am an inveterately curious person, with a lifelong passion for words (writing them, reading them, typesetting them, binding them together). In the mid-1980s, after an aborted attempt at college, where I never found my mojo, I set off on a career as a coder and a graphic designer. I apprenticed in the composing room of a daily newsletter. I designed posters for a modern dance company. I learned to design books. I created database systems for apartment buildings, for a palæontologist, and for a tire store.

When the web came along in the 1990s, I embraced it, and was part of the very early efforts in organizing and displaying government information to the public, along the way becoming interested in open source software and open data, and becoming an advocate for both. Professionally, I settled into a position maintaining the infrastructure of Almanac.com, the website of The Old Farmer’s Almanac, a platform that gave me great latitude to explore whatever the web frontier of the moment was, working with a venerable publication to help it chart its course beyond print.

About a decade ago, while continuing digital work, I started to become interested in letterpress printing—an embrace of print in its purest form. I run a small letterpress shop, Queen Square Press, based in a church basement, and let my creativity take me where it leads me, producing posters, broadsides, cards, and ephemera, mostly to scratch my own itches.

This year, after thinking about it for a long time, I decided to step away from digital work altogether. It was a hard decision: I’d been working with a great team, on interesting projects, for more than 25 years. I was well-paid, in control of my own schedule. I had no complaints. But I knew in my heart of hearts that I wanted to try something else. What? I don’t know.

This decision to transition can, in part, be explained by my being four years a widower, being the father of a 23 year old autistic trans woman, and, recently, burgeoning stepfather to a delightful 12 year old, and partner to her mother, a fascinating, creative, woman who challenges and delights me every day. All of this change swirling around me has opened me up and allowed me to relax into new possibilities.

What's the story behind your blog?

In 1999 I found myself writing an “about” page for my tiny web business, then called Digital Island. I watched myself falling into familiar “about page” tropes — “Digital Island is a leading provider of innovative solutions for… blah blah blah…” — and thought, inspired by early bloggers who were emerging around the time, perhaps I’d, instead, create a place to write about myself, my interests, my work, my life. I wrote a tiny CMS in PHP, and made my first post in May 1999, a simple announcement that I was changing my company name.

I started off slowly, making only 13 posts the first year, but gradually developed an approach, and a style, and a notion of “the kinds of things I blog about” (travel, personal projects, my family, local businesses, my eccentricities), to the point, almost 25 years later, where it’s become interwoven into my emotional life, a way of organizing my thoughts about things, of explaining things to myself by way of explaining them to my readership.

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

I generally write in real time: an idea occurs to me, and the idea takes on a life of its own, gets “called to be written about,” and I try to carve out the time to do so right away. I don’t find the process of writing onerous; generally words flow out of me, and while I will go back and edit the words, finessing the meaning, correcting errors, what emerges is generally fairly close to what I wrote down in the first place.

I write a lot of posts via email, a capability that has allowed me to take my writing out of “sitting in front of a laptop” and, really, anywhere I’m struck. Writing on a tiny iPhone SE isn’t the best and most natural environment (though voice-to-text helps), but the benefit of being able to "strike while the iron is hot" outweighs the fussiness of the tool. These days perhaps half of what I write is on the phone.

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

My blogging flourishes, as does my life, when I’m on the road. I love writing about my travels, of seeing new things, meeting new people. And so “away” is the ideal creative environment. That said, as I’ve been remaking my days, stepping away from an office with a desk and a chair, what “away” means can be as close as the public library or coffee shop up the street.

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

After running my home-brew PHP blogging engine for many years, I eventually migrated to using Drupal, and have been using Drupal ever since. This was partly for professional reasons — Almanac.com is a Drupal site, so I've wanted to “eat my own dogfood” on my personal site — and partly because I found Drupal a nice balance of canned and extendable.

My ability to blog-by-email is enabled by Postmark, which fires a web hook upon receiving email to a dedicated email address; the web hook fires some custom code on my server that uses the Drupal API to create a new post.

The site is hosted on an AWS EC2 instance, running MySQL and Apache.

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

As I’m stepping away from coding professionally, I find myself at a crossroads: I’ve always believed deeply in owning and managing as much of my own technology stack as possible (I only migrated away from running my own mail server in recent memory), and I like the flexibility of “I’ll just code up a Drupal module to do that.”

But I’m trying to spend less time at the keyboard, and things that fascinated me at one point I now find technical drudgery, to the point where I might go looking for a home for my writing that I don’t need to care and feed so frequently, a place where I can just focus on writing.

But rewinding back to the beginning, no, I don’t think I’d do anything differently. I’ve loved my blog, and writing, for a long time; it’s part of me.

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?

In the early days of Google Adsense I ran ads on the blog, and because the web was smaller, and I had a deep archive with good organic SEO, I made good money doing so.

But I gradually became uncomfortable with my own words, often deeply personal words, being surrounded by ads for who-knows-what, and so eventually turned off the ads entirely, and I’ve been ad-free (and analytics, and tracking free) ever since. I feel confident in this decision.

I generally read other blogs with an RSS reader (currently Readwise Reader, which I love; formerly FreshRSS and, like everyone else, Google Reader before that), I almost never see advertising on blogs, so it’s opaque to me.

It costs me about $50/month to host my blog on AWS; I’ve got a long-festering to-do list item to optimize and lower this, but it has yet to rise to the top of the list.

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

Some friends with blogs:

• Lisa Chandler RSS
• Steven Garrity RSS
• Jeremy Cherfas RSS
• Elmine Wijnia RSS
• Ton Zijlstra RSS
• Clark MacLeod RSS

Longtime favourites:

• Matt Webb RSS
• Mita Williams RSS
• Paul Capewell RSS
• Edward Hasbrouck RSS
• William Denton RSS

Some recent lovely discoveries:

• Annie Mueller RSS
• Chip Scanlan RSS
• Georgie Luhur Cooke RSS
• Maya.land RSS

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

Podcasts:

• BOOKNESS at the Bodleian Library
• Ingenious with Caterina Fake
• Pigeonhole
• Transom

YouTube videos:

• The Making of MMXX!
• The East Pointers - Stronger Than You Know
• Lucy Farrell with Kris Drever - Suddenly (Woken By Alarms)
• I planted a forest two years ago

Side projects of mine:

• Electricity and water consumption at my house
• Electricity load and generation in my province
• The Island Walk
• My OpenStreetMap edits