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Blog Questions 087

The Indie Web is Back, Baby

Luke Dorny

Luke Dorny runs this website and attached are the explanations behind some of it. This is me in 2010 at SXSW.

By: Paul Armstrong Lic: CC BY-ND 4.0

https://www.flickr.com/photos/wiseacre/4439921834/

Luke Dorny
Luke Dorny runs this website and attached are the explanations behind some of it. This is me in 2010 at SXSW.

Hi, welcome to my little site. I was inspired to design a pixelated site years ago. This is it. I know it’s hard to read. That will change soon.

I was tagged in the “Blog Questions Challenge” by Scott Boms ✅ last week along with Jon Hicks ✅, Naz Hamid ✅, and Chris Glass ✅. I suppose I should get off my duff and answer some questions with my dodgy old brain (Edit: Caution, it’s a bit lengthy).

(Another edit: I’ve added checkmarks to those who’ve completed the challenge)

Thank you, Scott. Deep breath. Here we go.

Blog Questions

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I was already making websites, but by 2001 or so I finally had a site of my own for myself. You know, the ‘sandbox’ site.

Of course, little did I know, blogging didn’t actually start then. In my head it started around 2002, but clearly Blogs were started long before that. I remember it was cool to have sites to use as calling cards, and only real enthusiasts (respect!) were actually writing articles. Mine was more of a static site updated occasionally with boring details about my interests, links from Del.icio.us, eventually links to Flickr, music tracking on Last.fm, whether the markup was certified valid clean and proper, semantics of XHTML, small .gifs of construction barricades, et al. Man, I miss the webrings, guestbooks, and hard hats. 👷‍♂️

I tinkered with WordPress as it was fairly new at that point (2003). Then I met Tantek Çelik, Crystal Williams, and some of their friends at BarCamp in Los Angeles discussing platforms, blogs, microformats,… which also felt like an incredible moment for the web. Felt very grass roots, almost like a movement (spoiler: it still is!).

I had also discovered one of the most popular designer/dev websites out there for Wordpress, which was Michael Heileman’s Binary Bonsai. He was making the default theme for WP (K2) and it really catapulted the engine into the limelight, as well as the blog design books that were emerging.

Spent some great times in the Long Beach blogger’s group with the great Kelly Sims ✅, and Jennifer Hanen in those times, too.

At this point there were several popular blogging engines to be had, all sorts of varieties. More on that below.

But it was around the year 2000 or so that I had tried auto publishing my music tracks from iTunes using a utility called RecentTunes(? Edit: Yes! https://illuminex.com/recenttunes/), an app that could auto-publish music track info via ftp at intervals, and had theming, too. I just looked and I still have remnants of the software on my server. It was important because while researching some of the themes for the task, I discovered a theme written and published by a fella named Scott Boms in Canada. I seem to recall interacting with him, eventually a lot on Flickr, in those early years, but I later met up with him at Web Directions North in Vancouver. We’ve been great friends, the best of friends, ever since.

Like others, I’m sure, I never really felt like I had much to say online. Didn’t feel the need. Flickr really served that purpose for me, visually, as I ended up posting photos, screenshots, web bugs, features, etc., and tracking newfound friends there on a daily basis, discovering many of the friends that I have today. Salad days. Early web. Feel very lucky to have been a part of it.

Speaking of the early web, blogs were a massive part of how the technical standards of the web we know today were formed. Flash was so over. Especially once the iPhone came along. But interacting on blog posts with comment systems was THE thing to have, and there were so much comment discussions happening that you had to track the discussions in order to see follow up replies, the web was bubbling up!

Speaking of Canada, it was around 2004 when I discovered the CSS Zen Garden by Dave Shea. Another major turning point in the early web regarding design.

Back to it, I think I started blogging proper when a lot of my colleagues and friends started to use Expression Engine, so I finally kicked it into gear. Of course, ‘blogging proper’ for me still was writing anything of substance. It was imposter syndrome.

Also around the mid 2000’s I met someone who shared admiration for the VW Golf, pretty sure that was on Flickr, and later met up with Greg Storey for coffee in Orange County and this also formed one of the very rewarding friendships from the web. We also started working together at his company Airbag Industries. But, more to the point, Greg has always said: “Write more.” Which is why this site exists.

I’ve met and enjoyed the company of so many people that work on the internet in real life, it’s crazy. While searching for the Zen Garden posts, I came upon this photo of some of them:

Jason, Jeremy, and Dave
Jason Santa Maria (photographer, designer, typographer), Jeremy Keith (developer, innovator, thinker, (and Bouzouki player!)), and Dave Shea (gardener, brewer, chef) at the Hampton Inn in Austin, TX some time ago.
So many people missing from this photo. So many good times.

Still, even by 2010, my ‘blog’ was not anything to speak of, and I never did submit my own theme to the Zen Garden. In a way, Flickr was my blog pre-2010.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

This current site, as of January 2025, runs Kirby, which has been my favorite ever since discovering it when it was first released around 2012. An instant buy at a very reasonable price, and I began learning it in earnest from that day forward. Eventually my ExpressionEngine site died a pitiful death and Kirby has been the trustworthy quiver ever since. Immensely flexible and powerful.

Interacting with the creator Bastian Allgeier since then, has been very rewarding. We finally got on the phone last year with him in Germany to chat about it all. Fantastic fellow (and his team, too). And btw, Bastian, that Kirby tee shirt has been lost. Need new shirts, ASAP.

Want a flat file website that uses text files instead of a database? Want to use templates, how about blueprints, create your own control panel, multi-lingual, and FAST? There’s your answer. Simple. Complex. Powerful.

I mean, it’s no PageMill, but there’s a good reason for that. Other (some archaic) software for the web I’ve used in the past: BBEdit, GoLive CyberStudio, Dreamweaver, and of course Panic’s Trans(m)it, then Coda, then Nova.
I should mention the one app that really accelerated my CSS: CSSEdit by Macrabbit. The Belgian Jan { Van Boghout } had a real gem on his hands. Then his full HTML/CSS editor Espresso, too, but sadly he sold it and went to work at Apple.

As mentioned above, to answer the question finally, I’d used textpattern, blogger, myspace, wordpress, expressionEngine, and basic PHP. I still like to call it Personal Home Pages.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Alright, that was all a bit wordy and boring, so I’ll keep it to the point from now on. I write both locally and remotely, either on the laptop, phone, or ipad, when I’m both at home or out of the house. I use the control panel of Kirby for writing. Keeping those in sync takes effort, but it’s flexible.

More details below.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

All the time, of course, but after discovering Mastodon, I keep my more fleeting thoughts and links there. Some sort of smart integration is on the list of TODOs.

In the past, the vehicle that got me writing was to write about music, bands, album cover designs, and related topics. Now topics are more design related, but, well… more details below.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

It’s a mix with me. Sometimes there are planned posts that relate to eachother, like my coffee shop posts that are still developing over a year, but otherwise it depends on the topic or the day.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

The one I think about most often is the Durable vs Disposable post I wrote more than a decade ago. It was all over the place, but contained many of my thoughts about disposable products and durable products, culture at large, etc.

Whether a post does very well is beyond me. I try to remind myself that I blog for myself, and there are no metrics beyond the mythical moment that my host starts billing me for overage traffic.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Okay, funny you should ask. Having launched this version 6 in May 2020, I began digging deeper (sort of) in how to implement more of the features of Kirby’s built in tools. The site as it is has several features that I don’t really need but explored at the time, like multiple authors, per post colors and features, random strings in the post meta, post thumbnails that mimic actual physical objects like vinyl records, cassette tapes, reel to reel, floppy disks, etc. I must say, at least it has an RSS feed now!

I started more in earnest in the last little while, chipping away at what I want the site to be, consolidating efforts elsewhere, honing it in to a manageable chunk of Lukeness, and making the playground/sandbox something more delightful to use, look at, and read. Sticking with Kirby, as it clearly still meets my needs and beyond, and is still being worked on.

Depending on how much more work I need to do for it to be a properly designed site that serves all of my purposes, it will launch soon.

I stay in touch with my best friends frequently and when I share my progress, they urge me to publish it. But it’s not done. On the other hand, they show me the beauty of the plan to just publish something, then start my own gardening instead of just expecting the pumpkin patch to bear fruit on day one. That’s great advice.

But I already grew the pumpkins and they’re starting to ripen, so I’m excited to show you once I’m ready.

Next?

Next is to continue on this path. So much has changed with the web, and the state of the internet. Networks grew, became the elephant in the room, and are now dying like so many rotten tomatoes. The Indie Web is ripe for a rebirth, or at least an explosion that the world can adapt to, instead of a handful of snake oil salesmen gobbling up the great communal websites and wringing the living daylights out of them, turning them into glop and doom machines that churn capital.

To avoid that end, I encourage you to dig up your own digital garden, plop yourself online in a place where you’re comfortable, interact with others, learn, write, read, share, and show the world that our uniqueness as humans is something that machines will struggle to understand at best, and eerily mimic, at worst.

Update: I’ve also added a website policy to this blog about a new term I’ve coined: SLoP. The Sinister Leveraging of Privacy. And I will not link to websites promoting horrible practices. You can now link to it from every page of my site using #slop. Feel free to add it or similar to your own site.

Really fine resources for running a website can be found at Manuel Moreale’s People & Blogs series of posts where “Bloggers” (including Naz) respond to a set of questions similar to these. I’ve been reading them for some time, and there are always a boatload of links to resources and insights on running your website.

Also, visit these three now:
https://scottboms.com/documenting/blog-questions-challenge
https://hicks.design/journal/blog-questions-challenge
https://chrisglass.com/2025/01/14/blog-qs/

Else

Even though this post is all over the place, I did it because it allowed me the chance to express myself and share my thoughts and memories of where we were and hopefully points to where we’re going, as an industry, but perhaps as a civilization.

So I am challenging several friends I know: Naz Hamid ✅, Anthony Baker ✅, Kelly Sims ✅, Brian Levy, Brian Warren, Jessica Hische, Jason Santa Maria, Jennifer Hanen, Jeremy Keith ✅, and Greg Storey ✅ to write up their own responses to this Blog Questions Challenge on their sites. GOOD LUCK.

Yeah, that’s a few people. It’s my blog. I’ve altered the rules of the challenge. I hope to not have to alter the rules any further.

Here are Manuel’s answers to the challenge. Also, Kev posted an alternate version of Ana’s original blog questions, and there are links to many more there. 🙌

Luke's blog
The most recent non-silly photo of me I could find. This photo will add zero respectability to your perceptions of me, but I bet this is the image that most people around me recognize as being me.

Please connect on Mastodon, Discogs, Last.FM, CodePen, or any of the other (what I’m calling) Non-Toxic sharespots on the web, and I look forward to meeting you.

Also, you can find more great web people on the blogroll:
https://lukedorny.com/people/luxuryluke#blogroll

Shared:
https://typo.social/@Luke/113874639312081110

https://scottboms.com/documenting/blog-questions-challenge

Like it? You can ☕️ Buy Me Cocoa.

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