People and Blogs: Taylor Troesh

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

Hello! I’m Taylor (mayor of taylor.town).

I collect hobbies, build things, incite chaos, and engage in elaborate tomfoolery. I work as a developer, designer, DB architect, and other things.

What's the story behind your blog?

I created my first personal website to quickly teach myself how to make websites, because I fudged my resume and accidentally landed a job as a web developer before I was ready.

My website became a blog when I posted my digital notebooks online circa 2015. I maintained hundreds of markdown files on various topics and ideas, but I was too embarrassed to publish most of the actual notes, so I replaced the body of each file with “Coming soon!”. My private ideas.txt file sits at 110,427 words right now. This does not include hundreds of unfinished essays, papers, books, stories, games, gadgets, etc.

As I grew more specific and organized, my notes became easier to digest. In 2019, I started writing about my opinions, my fears, my inspirations, and my paradoxes.

But I didn’t start writing seriously until I stopped drinking in 2022. Writing was welcome respite from alcohol withdrawals. Without booze to fill my emptiness, I suddenly found myself with plenty of “boring” hours. So I kept writing. And now I can’t stop writing.

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

I consume absurd amounts of books, small blogs, music, podcasts, and other internet media.

From there, my inspiration ferments in a 1Mb text file called ideas.txt. When I’m not doing chores, I start from the top of ideas.txt and work my way down, making small pseudoprose edits along the way. An idea usually sits at the top of the list for a few months before it’s ripe enough to publish.

Here’s an excerpt from the top of my list on Dec 7, 2023:

Krampus and negative punishment

• holiday alignment chart
• does negative punishment work?
• santa claus is not a god: https://brill.com/view/journals/jocc/8/1-2/article-p149_8.xml
• is santa effective? https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/0361476X84900031 santa
• visits rich sick children: https://www.bmj.com/content/355/bmj.i6355.abstract

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

Countless creations die in the pursuit of Ideal Creative Environments. After hearing how much quality work Tyler Cowen completes while traveling, I taught myself how to scrounge for in-between time. Through that process, I made more time for creative pursuits via extinguishing notifications and bespoke time-tracking software.

Today, most of my creative process occurs on couches – just me and my laptop. When I need more real-estate, I use my battlestation. When my thoughts become tangled, I clean my home or play with my daughter or walk outside. When I draw, I use our makeshift art studio in the basement. And so on.

Everything in a home or office eventually becomes invisible gorillas. In my experience, physical propinquity is the fastest way to modulate creativity. Unsurprisingly, surrounding myself with healthy and supportive people was a really good way to become healthy and supported.

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

• All my writings are markdown files (with YAML frontmatter) in a GitHub repo.
• An ugly Elixir script converts each file into HTML and compiles an atom feed.
• All of these files are served to the public via Cloudflare Pages.
• Every few weeks, I copy/paste stuff into Buttondown for my email newsletter.

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

• More doodles! I’m still working up the courage to share more of my drawings…
• People cannot spell “Troesh” from memory, so I’m glad I chose taylor.town over taylor.troe.sh. But I’ll never know if taylor.town was a better choice than taylor.land.
• If I started over, I probably wouldn’t write my build script in Elixir – maybe Haskell or Go or JS instead?
• I wasted a lot of time on essay ideas that were time-consuming but obviously worthless. I should’ve learned earlier to sort by difficulty vs. impact.
• I’m still unsure about Instagram, X, and other socials media. I love meeting strangers via email – am I missing cool people from other corners of the web?)

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?

It costs $0 to host my blog on GitHub and Cloudflare. I spend $30/mo on Buttondown. I once hoped that my blog would land me some sweet consulting gigs. As of 2023, total consulting revenue is $0.

I aim to be worth $1/hour. Advertising is spooky, so I’ve been working on books and games and services to sell instead. But it’s hard to juggle making worthwhile art while working for an employer while publishing free content.

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

I support TodePond and Hundred Rabbits via Patreon.

I would also love to support Experimental History and Escaping Flatland, but I’m avoiding Substack for now.

Other people/blogs I follow: Derek Sivers, sonnet.io, BenKuhn, And now it’s all this, Beyond the Frame, Scope of Work, and Steph Ango.

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

Things I’ve made recently:

• flashcasts: audio flashcards in a private podcast feed
• scrapscript: a sharable programming language
• wigwam.directory: alternatives to bloat
• blogs.hn: a directory of small tech blogs
• the cheap web: small web manifesto

Ways to keep up:

• rss
• spam
• email me