People and Blogs: Ploum

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

You should, like my wife and my children, call me Ploum!

I’m a 43 years Belgian writer, free software developer and blogger. I write novels (in French) and teach open source development at École Polytechnique de Louvain. I’m also a cyclist and a freediver. As a native French speaker, I apalogise for the English mistakes. Please read my answer with an atrocious French accent.

On the Wikipedia page about me, the first word next to my name is "blogueur" (blogger in French). I conclude that my most important activity is being a blogger. All important things in my life happened, directly or indirectly, because of my blog.

I’ve been hired in most of my professional positions because of my blog. I’ve met my wife because, after reading a tweet of mine that went viral, she started to read my blog. I’ve written the first book ever about Ubuntu because of my blog. I’ve met my current publisher through my blog. I’ve even started doing long distance bikepacking trips thanks to Thierry Crouzet, a French writer that I knew for years because we were reading each other blog.

My blog is thus irremediably linked to my identity. I would say that the only part of my life insulated from my blog is my passion for freediving. Being a freediver at heart but living far from the sea, I’ve been practising under water hockey for years. It allows me to spend time at the bottom of the pool.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started my first website in 1998, a few weeks after my parents got an Internet connection. I quickly had multiple websites, one of them being a kind of online journal for which I was updating a monthly page by hand. I also started a quite popular generalist wiki which attracted many external contributors.

Around 2002, I declared that blog was just a stupid name for what was a normal website, that I would never have a blog myself. I’m a visionary, you see. In 1995, after trying to browse the web for the first time on a friend’s computer, I’ve said that the web had no future, that it was only a temporary fad.

At the same time, I was very active on many different forums. Remember forums? I was often repeating myself on them and posting same stuff for various communities. So, at some point, I wanted to centralise all my writing in one place. Inspired by the blogger Tristan Nitot, I installed the Dotclear CMS and opened my blog.

On forums, my avatar was often a small Waldo from the "Where is Waldo?" books. A roommate suggested that if I ever started a blog, it should be called "Where is Ploum?" So I called my first blog with that name on a subdomain from one of my websites.

There was also a hidden motivation behind the blog. At the time, I was really involved in a project called "no-name-yet" that would soon become public. And I wanted a platform to spread the word about that project. That "no-name-yet" was later released under the name "Ubuntu". So it happens that my blog has the exact same age as Ubuntu and shares a lot of its history.

Writing on my blog quickly became a lifestyle. The success of my blog also took me by surprise: people I didn’t know were reading me, commenting, contacting me, inviting me to conferences. For 4 years, I used Dotclear. As a side gig, I started a small business hosting people’s blogs on a Dotclear version 2 platform but kept Dotclear version 1 for my own blog.

In 2008, I eventually migrated to Wordpress because it was the de facto standard in the industry. I’ve always been self-hosted and made sure to import all my old blog posts. Beside a theme change, the migration was totally transparent for my readers. Even URLs were kept because cool URLs never change.

I started to hate Wordpress more every year but, despite multiple attempts, I could not get rid of it. In 2020, I encountered the Gemini protocol and started a gemlog (a blog on Gemini), completely separated from my blog. It started to grow and I wanted to integrate my gemlog posts into my historical blog (that I was still using).

In 2022, I had a "Eureka" moment. Instead of integrating my gemlog into my wordpress blog, I would do the opposite and import all my historical blog posts into my gemlog. Then, I would make an HTML version of my gemlog.

I called that "the last version of ploum.net" because I’m not dependent anymore on any external tools. Everything is now done through a handmade python script. All I have to do is to write text files in the Gemtext format. It cannot be simpler.

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

Firstly, I never force myself to write or publish. I don’t have any schedule or any mandatory thing to do.

Every single post is there because I wanted to write it and publish it. I’ve been through many iterations of my creative process, using stuff like Evernote or other. I threw it all away.

I simply have an "inbox" folder where there are drafts in gemtext format. They could linger there for months or years. Sometimes, they are published one hour after starting them. There’s no rule.

I’ve been greatly influenced by Cory Doctorow and his memex method. In my inbox, I keep a "today.gmi" file in which I write small reflections and links to interesting articles. When the file is bigger than 1000 words, I try to give it a direction, I reorder the nuggets and publish it without thinking too much about it.

As a consequence, my blog is a mix of focused posts that took a long time to write, focused posts that were written in a whim and posts containing random thoughts and links. I let you try to guess in which category is a given post.

The gemtext format had a great influence on my process. It doesn’t allow inline links and forces a link to be alone on its own line. This constraint was a liberating tool. Instead of putting links everywhere in my posts, I started to really think about each link. A link can only be added if it is clear why it is there and if it is not interrupting too much the reading flow. Which means that it should add real value for the reader. I feel my writing greatly improved because of this. I can write without thinking in HTML, without thinking about the links. Every post is a standalone with optional links for readers who want to investigate more the subject.

I must add that I write my own journal on a mechanical typewriter. Sometimes, I realise that an entry could be made public so I copy it to a file by hand (I’ve tried OCR but without much success. It is easier to copy everything by hand as it allows me to make corrections).

One day, I will write a whole book about my typewriter creative process.

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

Yes, I do believe that the body associate a physical space with a given activity. It is a learned habit. The bad news is that my body learned that my home office is the place to answer emails, read stuff and do administrative work.

When I need to work on a new book, I often need to walk away. I would take my typewriter in a hotel room or a cabin in the wood and spend multiple days disconnected to « just write ».

I also hate every single noise and don’t listen to music during the creative phase. But I may listen to loud metal, punk rock or classic music during all the "boring" steps: proofreading, general corrections, spelling, etc.

Hopefully, writing blog posts is now part of my daily automatic tasks so I can do it in my home office.

The editor is also important. I’ve been using Gedit, Pyroom, Ulysses, Zettlr. But, a few years ago, I decided to really improve my Vim skills and I’m now doing everything in Vim without any plugins nor special configuration. Vim and my Bépo keyboard are unbeatable power tools. I see my writing on the screen before thinking of it.

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

I’ve told above the history of my blogs. The current setup is quite interesting.

I write gemtext files and give them a name that starts with the date such as "2024-06-25-blogpost.gmi". When this is done, I have a simple python script that does two things: first it creates an index.gmi file with a list of all blog posts in anti-chronological order. This is the gemini capsule. Then, the python file convert all the gemtext into html, creating the website itself.

There are some subtleties: the script also handle the atom feed, the fact that I write in French and English (thus generating two indexes) and send an email version for my mailing-list subscribers. But everything is done by one python file without any dependency. It is extremely simple.

The HTML template itself has around 40 lines of CSS and nothing else. Very clean, very efficient, very fast to load even on bad connections.

Currently, I host it on Sourcehut. It allows me to simply do a "git push" and have the HTML version generated on the server. Sourcehut is also, to my knowledge, one of the only Gemini hosting providers.

But if I had to move, it would be only a matter of changing my git remote.

I don’t need to backup anything from the server side: my blog and all its history are now in a git repository.

It should be highlighted than I’m a command-line junkie. So I do everything in Vim and even developed a command-line offline-first browser to read Gemini, RSS and other blogs. It is called Offpunk .

So, yeah, my screen is fully black with tiled terminals. I live with Neovim, Offpunk, Neomutt and a couple of bash/python scripts. This is so comfy that I’m frustrated each time I need to open Firefox or any other GUI application.

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

My blog is exactly where I want it to be. If I had to start again, I would simply do it like I did in 2022. I was quick to remove any form of comments from my blog and, later, any kind of statistics. As far as I know, I’m one of the few strong advocates for the complete removal of statistics/analytic/tracking tools. It’s not ethical to spy on users but it is also completely counterproductive. Statistics on websites are a brainworm. People are obsessed by it and it makes them write dumb stuff in order to increase a dumb counter. Getting rid of any audience-measuring tool is one of the best things I did in 2013.

There’s another thing I want to say to past me if time travel is ever invented: don’t fall into the social networks trap!

I’ve spent way too many time chasing followers on Twitter, Facebook, Medium and Google+. I’ve written many interesting stuff on those platforms, thinking they were not "interesting enough" for my blog. I regret all I’ve written on proprietary platforms. My blog is my personal history and I plan to keep it until I die.

I’ve completely deleted all my social network accounts and never felt so free. Ironically, the less I was using social networks, the more readers I had on my blog. Social networks don’t bring you an audience. This is a lie! Social networks distract you from your real work and prevent your audience from reaching you. That’s their whole business! I know how frightening it is to delete permanently an account with thousands of followers. But this number is also a lie.

Removing permanently those accounts (and not merely "deactivating them", as I’ve done multiple times before) changed my life and my blog.

The only account I still have is a Mastodon account. That I access through the command-line "toot". You can find me there if you really like but I don’t encourage you to follow me. Use RSS!

https://mamot.fr/@ploum - @ploum@mamot.fr

I don’t use Mastodon to reach an audience but only to communicate with interesting people. I hope Mastodon will one day hide the followers counter so we stop being obsessed with those silly numbers.

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 2006, I experimented with advertising on my blog, earning something between 35€ and 100€ every month (through Google).

I quickly realised the moral implications of that money and now consider that advertising is, by essence, a scam. Its goal is to make us consume stuff we don’t need and, in the process, make people dishonest. If you earn money through advertising, you are, by definition, dishonest. You cannot be honest as the whole definition of advertising is paying you to be dishonest. All in the name of destroying our natural resources as fast as possible.

Later, I was one of the first French bloggers to popularise the concept of "prix libre" (free price in French), asking my readers to make free donations. I managed to earn a regular income between 200€-300€ per month, mainly on the Flattr platform but also through direct donations. This was well before Patreon and similar platforms.

This experience was awesome. I was paid but I also received pictures, hand-written letters of support, nice messages. People really understood that it was not about money only, it was about supporting my work. I can never thank enough those who supported me.

With the advent of platforms like Patreon, the "free price" concept become a bit too popular for my taste. Everybody was asking for money. Also, I started to publish books. Now, I ask people that want to support me to simply buy my books. It’s the best way to support me but to also support my publisher (who took the risk of putting most of his catalogue into the Creative Commons license) and to support small bookstore.

Running the blog itself is cheap. 10€/year for a domain. To support the project, I decided to pay the maximum tier for Sourcehut, which is 100€/year. All in all, my blog costs me less than 10€ per month.

In 20 years, I’ve published ±900 blog posts. With all the pictures, this amount to less than 150Mo. If it was really needed, it could probably be hosted for next to nothing. Blogging is really cheap.

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

I read many blogs and gemlogs. The whole Gemini community is really interesting as it reminds me of the blogosphere I was reading in 2003-2004.

Maybe the most interesting are people I’m still reading after all those years, people that have a great influence on how I blog.

• Tristan Nitot (in French)
• Thierry Crouzet (in French)
• Cory Doctorow (in English)

I’m still reading and was also influenced a lot by Low-Tech Magazine:

• Low-Tech Magazine (in English)

For those that would like to try discovering Gemini and its gemlogs, I recommend starting with those two aggregators:

• Antenna - gemini://warmedal.se/~antenna/
• Cosmos - gemini://skyjake.fi/~Cosmos/recent.gmi

There are many gemlogs I like but you should probably follow Solderpunk as he’s the creator of the Gemini protocol.

• Solderpunk’s gemlog - gemini://zaibatsu.circumlunar.space/~solderpunk/gemlog/

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

I think I’ve covered it all about myself in all the previous questions. I’m currently working on several novels and one book about the history of computer science.

As that last one is in English and as we discuss translating my novels with my publisher, I find myself increasingly wanting to work with a literary agent. If you happen to know one, I would be happy to be put in touch.

And to all blog readers across the world: use RSS readers! Those are awesome and allows you to quickly subscribe/unsubscribe at your own pace.