People and Blogs: Winnie Lim

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

This is Winnie, and I’m from Singapore where I’ve spent most of my life except a few years when I worked in San Francisco. I was a self-taught designer in both print and digital from 2000-2016 before I had to quit due to chronic migraines and photosensitivity.

I don’t have any hobbies per se in the sense of things I enjoy doing because I seem to lack the ability to feel pleasure, but I do a variety of things that enrich me: reading, exercise, photography, learning, and I am trying to pick up drawing. Perhaps one day I would like to learn how to play the keyboard.

I try to publish at least once a week, mostly documenting my life and struggles with both my health and existence.

What's the story behind your blog?

I got really into learning how to make websites when I had my first computer at 15 all the way back in 1996. So my first website was on Geocities. It felt like a natural progression to start blogging when I saw other people start doing it in the late 90s. My first blog was on Greymatter) on a now defunct domain. I would just post links to websites I liked and perhaps some emo poetry. A while later my friend introduced me to Livejournal, which is interesting to me till this day because the inherent culture and dynamics of it encouraged people to pour out their feelings on it. I don’t know if I am rewriting my own history but I feel like Livejournal was instrumental in the process in setting the tone of my writing till today. It gave me the idea that writing my feelings out to some invisible audience could be somewhat therapeutic. One thing that is now permanently gone from the Livejournal era is the ability to easily follow and like your friend’s blog, and publish only to your network of friends. I hope something like this can exist on federated systems one day.

Sadly Livejournal got sold, and I moved to Vox), which also got sold, then to Posterous – well you get the idea. I finally bought the domain winnielim.org sometime in 2012 and set up my blog there. I had loved the network effects and community of early twitter, so when Medium came along I got a job there, hence publishing exclusively there for a while, continued even after I left the job but stopped when it started putting up paywalls. My personal lived history of the internet has taught me it is really important to have our own domain. It is not just about the ownership of content but it is sad when urls go dead.

I felt very alienated and lonely as a young person in the 1990s. It was incredible to discover the internet and know there is an entire world out there, that there are actually many people living diverse lives that were not visible or encouraged in Singapore. Reading people’s vulnerable and honest writing on their blogs made me feel like I was not alone. So I try to pay it forward by doing the same with my writing.

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

Since 2013 I mostly just turn up every Sunday, and start writing. Half the time I have no idea what I’m writing about till I finish writing it. The other times I have an idea but it becomes something else entirely in the writing process. They call it intuitive writing I guess. Once in a long while I write book reviews or essays to share something in a more structured way. Those take considerable focus and multiple-sittings, so I don’t do it very often.

I do publish more frequently than weekly if I get inspired or if circumstances encourage it, like my recent trip to Japan where I tried to travel blog during the trip.

I’ve tried writing “proper” pieces before where there is a ton of editing and proofreading by other people, but I didn’t enjoy the process. It made me feel disconnected from the writing. Some of these pieces did very well, which made me realise that being able to write however I want is more important than views.

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

I do believe that physical space influences creativity. I constantly feel inspired in a place like Japan, where the culture itself has aesthetic and creative elements. But I also believe it is important to cultivate a capacity to be creative anywhere, because sometimes in life we get caught in circumstances and environments that are not ideal.

I try to keep my entire home a creative environment. It is not one of those beautiful minimalistic environments like you see in youtube videos. It is more like zakka style, where it contains things that feel creative to me: lots of (my partner’s) artwork hung up on the walls, tons of books, art materials and tools, a warm and cosy space that feels psychologically safe. A lot of it is thanks to my partner who is an artist and an efficient organiser.

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

I use Opalstack as my webhost, they offer VPS-like hosting but managed. I chose them because I used to use Webfaction, which got sold. For a few years in between I hosted my website on a droplet at Digital Ocean, but I decided managing my own server is too tedious.

Like many others I use Namecheap for my domains. It was highly recommended in the 2000s, so I used it and stuck with it since I have no issues with it so far.

For the beginning few years my blog in its current incarnation was on Jekyll, but it is now on Wordpress because I want to be able to dynamically query it like I am querying my second brain. I also use a plugin called Pods that allows me to create custom post types and surface relationships between them easily. Everything is connected, and I want to demonstrate and understand these connections. A blog post is not just a piece of writing to me. It is a piece of my self, and these pieces track the process of my becoming. Sometimes I forget and I get lost, so these pieces and connections help to bring me back to who I am and who I aspired to be. These are not things that a static website can do, so I stay with Wordpress despite its obvious issues.

It is also important to use something that has proven stability and longevity.

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

I would host my own website using the same domain right from the start. But given the highly-ephemeral and experimental nature of the web back then, I think it would have been challenging not to hop on new technologies and platforms, especially because I have an experimental nature. But I am envious of blogs who ignored all of those things and persistently stayed on their own domain or even on Blogger. It is such a magnificent thing to see an archive that spans decades because on the internet we create and destroy content like it doesn’t matter since it is so easy to do so. Witnessing some permanence is beautiful when everything is so transient.

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?

For now Opalstack is $115 a year, and it costs $15 to renew my domain. These costs increase every now and then. So roughly it is about $11 a month, which is about 2 cups of coffee.

When I first quit my job I tried to use Patreon to gather monetary support, not so much for my writing but for my interactive experiments. However along with my chronic illness, that experience made me realise I don’t have the personality required for this. I am too afraid of rejection, and it also makes me deeply uncomfortable to the point of being perpetually anxious when people do support me. It felt stressful to try to upkeep something to some invisible expectations, and during times when I fell sick and was unable to work on my projects I felt like I was letting people down.

I do understand when people monetise blogs, but I hope it can be a model where some people are supporting the content financially in order for everybody else to read it free. This is because there is already deep inequality in this world, and putting content behind pay walls is exacerbating that inequality.

Having freely accessible information on the internet during the 90s impacted my life so deeply, a major contributor to my career. I know it changed so many people’s lives, and lifted people out of their poor living circumstances. However I understand that it is the only source of income for some people and paywalls are the only way to go for them. I am encouraged by examples of people who are successful with the some-supporters-pay-for-the-rest model though, like kottke.org.

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

I love a ton of blogs – I have hundreds of blogs on my rss reader – so it is difficult to pick a few, but if I really have to:

• Brain Baking: Wouter writes widely and deeply, a quality I really appreciate on the internet.
• Peter Rukavina: classic example of blogging that is rare these days – frequent, slice of life updates.
• Popagandhi: Adrianna has been a huge inspiration for me because she has been writing transparently and vulnerably since the early 2000s. She was writing about lgbtq when it was still considered taboo (at least in Singapore), and till today continues to write on some potentially divisive topics. Some of her early writing has this heartbreaking poetic quality.
• another vote for maya.land: I’ve not seen a range of topics like this anywhere else.

I also love blogroll.org for always recommending new interesting blogs to follow. I think Wouter of Brain Baking would be a great interview subject.

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

The longevity of websites is something I still think about. I often wonder what would happen to my website after I pass on. I know of at least one great website that is being maintained by family and friends after the owner passed on, but what would happen when they too are no longer around? There is this attitude that websites are ephemeral and not important, but there is a lot of richness, history and information within them that deserves to be preserved. It would be sad that we didn’t try hard enough to keep them. I know there is the Internet Archive that is doing great work, but I wish there was an option to keep a website in its entirety. Wordpress has recently launched a 100-year plan, but it is only for wordpress.com users and it costs 38k. I wish there are more viable solutions out there.

Finally, I hope people will not be afraid to pick up new skills, hobbies or any learnings at any age. I recently started to learn how to draw, and I think being unafraid of “being ugly” or failure goes a long way. I see too many people not pursue art/skills/hobbies because it is “too late”, “no talent”, or if they do they give up because they cannot tolerate not living up to their internal standards. But we can relish the process of doing things without being great at it. For me, it is also an act of rebellion towards an utilitarian world.