indie web – Lucy Bellwood

Blogs on Blogs

I got to have an extensive chat with Manu Moreale a couple months ago for his People & Blogs series, which is a lovely project showcasing folks writing online and maintaining their own sites. It was a fun opportunity to examine my own blogging practice as a historical artifact (oh god, my first travel blog from 2007 is still online), financial expenditure (writing here costs me $35 a month?), and philosophical calling card (“From a branding perspective, it sometimes feels like a disaster. But I think that’s okay! A blog isn’t a billboard, it’s a garden. It can be a space for everything.”).

I’m also reproducing the following section in full because I do think everyone should know about these quality humans:

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

I have a huge creative peer crush on fellow cartoonist-with-blog Reimena Yee (Especially this sprawling portrait of her work and influences.)

Mandy Brown’s blog, A Working Library, makes me add books to my to-read list faster than anything else—and it’s lovely to look at

Reading Rob Wychert’s ongoing log of his site redesign makes me wish I knew more about building websites

Anna Iltnere is an absolute icon who’s been stewarding a growing library of sea-related books out of her home in Latvia for years

Sumana Harihareswara’s clarity and pragmatism are bracing, but also deeply human

Brendan Jerich is a good egg

Blog

“You can be a carpenter this time around.”

A lovely short post by Dave Rupert about platforms and silos and what we’re getting out of being in online spaces. Having been largely absent from social media since becoming a caregiver, I don’t feel a lot of Loud Feelings about the implosion of Twitter.¹ I do feel the urge to encourage folks, as Dave does, to “pour a foundation for your own silo or home.” A personal website is a lovely thing. Nobody will buy this platform and use it as their personal plaything. No advertisers will boycott and send me scrambling to produce different content. No seed funding will run out overnight.

But as Robin said: “It’s not enough to make something and post it online; you must also inject it into some channel that will carry it to people.”

For now, that channel is mostly RSS, with the occasional direct share to Discord and Slack. I’ve contented myself with carrying these posts to far fewer people of late, and maybe that trend will continue. I’m toying with the idea of Dunbar’s Digital Number. How many meaningful online relationships can I maintain? The number shifts dramatically given what I’m doing in the rest of my life, and the fact is that I’m currently walking around with overwhelming emotions sloshing perilously close to my airways at all times. So I don’t let myself worry over what will become of Twitter, even though it brought me so many treasures and connections and friendships and opportunities over the years, because I’m doing as Dave suggests and pouring value into myself.

That’s enough for now.

^{1. This might change when it’s time to promote my next book and I emerge from the bunker to find tumbleweeds where my weird and far-flung online friends once stood, but that’s a problem for Future Lucy. ↩}

Brain Food

Fade Out

I expect and hope that eventually I will no longer be a public person — no blog, no Twitter, no public online presence at all.
I have no plan. I’m feeling my way to that destination, which is years off, surely, and I just hope to manage it gracefully. (I don’t know of any role models with this.)
Brent Simmons

Brent spearheads NetNewsWire, the open source app I use and love for reading blogs via RSS. I didn’t even know he had a blog until Winnie (who, I should point out, I never would’ve met if she hadn’t tagged me in a post she’d written in response to something on this blog a week or so ago) wrote a little about the magic of the app being free earlier today.

I wonder about this, too. Whether there are people I know who are already working towards having not less of an online presence, but zero online presence. What it would feel like to return to the liberating anonymity of growing up on the early internet. Whether I’ll ever reach a stage of life where I can withdraw permanently, or if I’ll want to, or if it’ll always be a seasonal ebb and flow.

Glad I’m not the only one.