People and Blogs: Steve Ledlow

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

Certainly. I'm Steve Ledlow. When introducing myself online, I'm quick to use the phrase, "I father. I write. I drink coffee." There is more to me than that, but it is easy and represents me fairly well. I was born and raised in Miami, Florida in the United States, which was an amazing place to grow up with so many rich cultures and experiences. I live in the Central Florida area now with my lovely wife, Isa. I'm in my early 40s and have six kids, one cat and one giant of a dog (he's an English Mastiff). I'll cover the usual questions regarding the kids by saying 3 boys/3 girls that span 17, 14, 13, 11 and twin 6 year olds. Earlier in life, I earned a college degree in Accounting, but found a career in data analytics. I've been leading teams of amazing people building data and analytics products for over 15 years at two different companies. Before that, I was an operations manager for a contact center vendor.

I've always been a geek and grew up in a generation where getting on the internet meant a deliberate action of clicking connect, taking up the family phone line and hearing that very distinct dial-up modem connection sequence of sounds. Before the internet was in my life, I enjoyed typing on typewriters and designing and building things with my hands. My interests have been varied, and I’ve noticed that the more popular or mainstream anything becomes, the more likely I am to question if it is something for me.

What's the story behind your blog?

Tangible Life is the evolved combination of a simplified focus and two blogs that came before it. Late last year, I decided that having multiple blogs and trying to compartmentalize the posts to the themes each represented was... exhausting. I'd often have something I'd want to write about and struggle to decide which blog to post it on. Many posts intertwined the themes. Tangible Life just felt like the right place to focus my energy and I merged all the existing content from tech & coffee and mnmlist.me into it. I detailed this journey with posts on the motivation, the mental struggle to get there and the completion of the process.

That's more the functional story of my blog's existence; the what and how of it. The other parts are why and when. I started my own blog in 2012. Before that, I posted in various forums and on Tumblr, but I felt this insatiable urge to have my own thing. Having spent countless hours writing emails, chats, documentation and presentations in the corporate world by that point, I knew I held a strong belief that the written word is where I feel most comfortable. Writing organizes my thoughts and I felt I had things that would be worth sharing with the world. All that being said, chunks of my life while having a blog were utterly distracted with the tinkering and aesthetics portions of the experience. The best analogy I can think of is that my blog was like a hotel always under constant upgrades and renovations, but with very little bookings and experiences being had in it.

Don't get me wrong, all that tinkering and tweaking brought me joy. I have a strong love of design and I have learned a lot about various blogging platforms and related technologies that have served me well and scratched various itches. At some point, I recognized that my various blog designs and iterations were starting to feel like nothing more than having the Internet Wayback Machine act as a design portfolio. I'd write in fits and spurts, and when life would get hard or time would get scarce, rather than write my way out, I'd just defer and clean out the dust and cobwebs and pick it back up after some time.

Where all this introspection leads me is that today, I write more and I love doing it. I'm no longer scared to post or treat it as some sacred event that requires perfection. Having my place in the chaotic world wide web gives me the feeling of being grounded to something more permanent than social media or fast feeds elsewhere. As my life trucks on, I have an ever increasing feeling that I have value to share with others beyond my smallish in-person network and the best way I can think of to do that is to post to my blog.

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

I find inspiration to write everywhere. With such a large family, we spend a lot of time together and out of the house experiencing life together. Ironically, not much of my writing focuses on the father role or familial interactions themselves. I learn so much about the world through conversations with my kids and my wife. We talk about anything and everything. Even topics that may feel mundane tend to stew in my mind and create seeds of writing ideas. Trying to raise kids to be aware of the pitfalls of our modern obsession with social media and dwindling attention spans is tough. A lot of what I think about relates to the intersection of my career in data analytics and all the areas of concern I have for the societal impacts of not the technology itself, but how we have chosen (or influenced) to use it.

I jot down items in an ideas.md file in iA Writer. Sometimes when I feel mentally stuck, but with the urge to write, I'll open this up and grab one that ignites the mind and clears the fog. More often than pulling from that list, I get the itch to write about something and sit down and knock it out in a single writing session. If the post is particularly long, I may break that up into multiple sessions and then will come back to read the entire thing as a cohesive thought to make sure it flows as well as if I'd have done it all at once. I wrote in more detail about my blogging workflow based on a theme that Robert Birming sparked around the indie web scene.

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

I do believe that physical spaces have the opportunity to influence creativity, but not in the traditional sense. I don't need to be in a quiet or serene place to write, but being somewhere that isn't mentally linked to another compartment of my mind is helpful. For example, I have a lovely home office that I built out during COVID when my company went remote in 2020. It has a sit/stand desk with a nice 27" Samsung Space monitor and a mechanical keyboard I enjoy typing on. It is almost impossible for me to write blog posts while sitting at that desk. For whatever reason, my brain is instantly consumed with the work relating to my day job when I'm at that desk. If I try to write for the blog there, I usually get distracted and come back to some work task or thought that comes to me.

So what I do is take my personal laptop or iPad with keyboard and head to one of the replica Eames loungers that are also in my home office or I sit/stand at the kitchen counter and write. We have a small table and chairs on our front and back porches that also are great places to write. I sometimes write out in public at a coffee shop or a park or in the hallway of a convention center while my daughters are in dance workshops. You get the picture. I can write almost anywhere, with the one exception being the place I configured with the thought it would be where I'd do the majority of my writing. Irony strikes again.

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

I was going to detail the history of my blogging tech stack in the first question, but realized it may be more appropriate here. I'll start with my current tech stack and then summarize the trail of bodies that got me here.

The blog runs on Blot with Dropbox serving as the file store. The domain name is registered at Porkbun. I love the simplicity of the static site generator approach. Blot has been an awesome experience and I can't see myself moving off it unless I had to.

Before I migrated to Blot, my blogs have used the following alternatives (in mostly chronological order): Squarespace, Ghost, Hugo, Collected Notes + Vercel, write.as and Paper Website. Cloudinary and Snap.as used to serve images. I also have used (and still do) Hover for some domains.

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

It's easy to say that with the current solution and consolidation working so well that I'd just start with it and have been better off. I don't believe that's true, though. If I would have started on Blot (which didn't exist when I started blogging), I likely would have still jumped around to other things because I needed to satisfy that yearning to learn platforms and different options and sharpen my CSS skills. I'm resolved with where I am, but also how I got here.

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?

Blot is $44/year. Domain is $12.50/year. I have a ton of Dropbox space I don't pay anything for because back in the day I spun up a round of Google Ads for referals (when that was a little hack) and have plenty of space for my needs.

I'm not opposed to people seeking to monitize their online writing efforts, if that's their bag. I don't have ads on my blog and never have. I have a link to Ko-fi on my About page, for those that want to donate to help me offset costs. I am also a proud participant in the One a Month Club.

I support a few internet friends with various content creation efforts, including writers. I should put a bit more toward indie blogs, specifically. Uh-oh... is this one of those "disclosures" I should have stated up at the top? I support the very series I'm contributing to right now. It was not a pay-for-play contribution.

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

There are so many, but I'll try to mention some that I've found via P&B and some that I've been reading for years:

• Carl's blog
• Zen Habits
• John Jago's blog
• Along the Ray <-- Should totally be a future P&B guest
• 575.life
• Robert Birming's blog

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

I've been enjoying the Orphan X series by Gregg Hurwitz as a way to wind down at night. The first season of Evan Ratliff's new podcast Shell Game was thought provoking. His book Mastermind was great as well. Merlin Mann's Wisdom Project is a gem. The Gentlemen was a great movie and TV Series (both by Guy Ritchie). Dense Discovery is an amazing weekly newsletter if you're into those.

Shameless self promo time... I have a guestbook I'd enjoy having folks sign. I have a sporadically published newsletter called ▲ of the Mind. I'm launching some design-focused products (shirts/prints) in the near future. They'll be announced on the blog once available. I'm also in the planning phase for a book I'll write that I have some cool plans for how I'll launch and distribute both digitally and physically.

In closing, thanks for this awesome opportunity and for letting me kick off year 2 of P&B!