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People and Websites #1 - Benjamin Hollon

~10 mins 18 Sep 2024

And here comes the #1 edition of People and Websites!

Hey! Can you introduce yourself to the readers?

Howdy! I’m Benjamin Hollon, and the best descriptor I've found for myself is “part-time polymath”.

I grew up in Afghanistan (6 years), India (3 years), and Malaysia (7 years), and I am currently studying Communications and Professional Writing at Texas A&M University. Needless to say, I have a strong interest in international and intercultural cooperation and dialogue, and in that vein the web (especially the small/independent web) is a fascinating subject.

I’m a serial collector and hobbyist. Looking under my metaphorical bed would reveal a rock collection, shell collection, stamp collection, coin collection, book collection, and more. I even, for a brief time, collected tiles that fell off of the walls in our community’s swimming pool and have a couple hundred.

My hobbies, though, are more interesting for discussion. I’m a storyteller, programmer, musician and composer, actor and playwright, Fediverse admin, and much more.

I've been coding websites for eight years, since I was twelve years old. I've been blogging for four years, now, across a total of six blogs (depending on how you count it). At this point, designing and writing for the web is a deeply ingrained part of me.

My current web presence is, primarily:

What's the story behind your website? What made you want to start it? Run me through the whole history!

It's a long and confusing history, but it mostly starts when I was eleven years old and was taught by my mom how to use Microsoft Office, most notably Microsoft Publisher. Shortly, I was designing, writing for, and printing my own magazine.

Within a couple years, as I grew more in-tune with computers, I had a growing interest in moving my self-publishing to the web. Why? I don't really know. But I played around a bit with WYSIWYG web editors to make a digital version of my magazine, and eventually encountered a book on basic HTML(4!) and CSS.

At this point things really took off, with me coding my own site from scratch and rapidly iterating, adding new projects and new designs and even, at one point, plotting to take over the world. (Yes, you read that right. Do I still have World Domination plans in the works? That's classified.)

What really was the foundation point for my website as it is today, though, was in late 2019, seeing the blogs of a teacher I admired and a couple classmates and… well… feeling jealous. Yeah, I saw their blogs and wanted my own.

Thus was born See With Eyes Closed, my first blog, which still remains dear to my heart. I began to take writing seriously and even considering it as a possible career, and my blog is really where I played with my writing and grew and improved. Some of the early articles are… a little painful to reread now, but in some I can clearly see the signs of habits I still hold today.

After a lot of iterating and improving on the blog, I eventually created my personal site and its accompanying blog, Musings, where most of my blogging continues to reside to this day.

It's not my only blog, though:

So, if you want to read my writing, I've got tens of thousands of words of backlog there for you, still ready and available. I'm currently publishing anywhere from zero to five posts on my blogs per week.

One other thought while I've got you here: I want to introduce you a word I invented: the "blost", or blog post. Why?

You may hate it, but the eventual ubiquity of the blost is nigh inevitable.

What's your tech stack?

I iterate rapidly on my stack, but overall I have a prevailing do-it-yourself ethic. In the past, this meant coding my own content management system in PHP, NodeJS, or Deno. Currently, it means using a static site generator (Lume, currently) to generate a site from hand-written templates and my very own CSS stylesheet, readable.css.

The great thing about static sites is that they can be hosted just about anywhere; if you're looking to start up a blog for cheap, I recently wrote an article on blogging on a budget that is a great place to start. tl;dr: my top pick is Uberspace, they're amazing and hosted all my sites for a long time.

Recently, though, all the collective things I host finally reached the tipping point where it made since to obtain a dedicated server from OVH and consolidate them all. I currently use lighttpd to serve static sites, of which I have a good dozen or so.

What's your favorite part of having a website?

Three words: it is mine.

My websites are the one place in the massive conglomeration that is the world wide web that I can plant a flag and definitively say that favorite declaration of toddlers everywhere: "MINE!"

No one can tell me what to say on my websites. No one can tell me how to run my websites. No one can make a subtle interface change to my websites that completely breaks my workflow. If I want to put a slashpage on my site listing all of my favorite taco toppings, then let them eat tacos, it's happening!

The frustrating truth is that we've reached a point as a society where controlling what people say and pay attention to is profitable and exploitable. We don't live in a fiscal economy, we live in an attention economy. Your attention is the world's most valuable resource.

You could spend that valuable, valuable attention doomscrolling on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or Twitter (I refuse to honor its new, terrible name) . You could spend it posting updates on LinkedIn to try and catch the also-super-valuable attention of a potential employer. You could even spend it doing something creative, but then posting it to a site that wants to churn up the precious ones and zeros you've made into a machine learning model to take your job.

But really, when you can instead use your site, why would you?

I used to be anti-branding (I mean, even the name shows how terrible the practice is). I don't think that was an incorrect stance. But my new stance is this: if I get a choice, I want to use things that were made by people for other people, not things that were made by corporations for customers.

So make a website. Please. It's not hard. You don't even have to learn to code, if you don't want to; find a static site generator and a pre-made theme you like, write some posts in Markdown, and publish them. But claim for yourself a space that is truly, fully yours.

Recently, I had the realization that it's become difficult to tell whether my internet is having trouble or whether my own server was down, because such a huge percentage of the things I use are self-made or hosted on my own server. That's a good problem to have.

More of a blog question, but, as an amateur writer, I'm curious: what's your writing process like?

It starts with an idea. And I know, that's not an easy place to start. One of the most frequent questions any author gets is the classic "Where do you get your ideas?"

My perspective is that getting ideas is easy and a natural process, what's difficult is recognizing and capturing them, because they don't come at the time where you've sat down at your desk and have pen to paper, waiting and ready.

So, how do you (1) get, (2) recognize, and (3) capture an idea?

  1. If you're having problems thinking of ideas in the first place, which is common especially when starting out as a writer, my recommendation is to think inside the box. Yes, inside. Write something using an idea that someone else has already had or used. What many don't realize is that receiving ideas starts with using ideas, which is a Catch-22. You need to start with an idea from somewhere to get your writing brain flowing, and then more ideas will flow faster and faster as you get more practice.
  2. You have hundreds of ideas every day. I promise. Maybe more, even. Not all of them would make great blog posts, so it takes practice to recognize which ideas are worth pursuing further. Here are a few starting points:
    • If you tell a friend a "hot take", that's a good blog post idea.
    • If you're telling a story to someone of something crazy that happened to you, try telling that story in a blog post.
    • If you're mad at something, try putting pen to paper (or hands to keyboard) and writing down those thoughts as a blog post.
  3. Finally, once you have an idea, write it down. I know you think you'll remember, but I promise you will forget. I've even forgotten the meaning of some ideas I have written down. Write down every idea you have, good or bad, and read over that list whenever you're stuck.

Once you have the idea, you need to write it all down.

I start with headings. Most of my blog posts have a number of headings marking different sections or avenues of thought. I write down each heading before I've written any of the main text. This tricks my brain into writing an outline, an act it would normally dismiss as pointless, because I get to actually use the text of that outline as part of my post.

Next comes the actual text, the bulk of the post. I write this all in one go. I block out an hour or two of my day, sit down at my keyboard, close everything else, and start filling in the blanks. If I don't have time to do everything, I focus on attacking it one section at a time. (Helpfully, I've already marked out the sections when I wrote my headings.)

After I've got a draft, I could just publish the post, but I like to proofread it.

The one most useful method I have for proofreading anything you write: read it out loud. I do this with all of my posts. Something about the action of reading a draft out loud forces me to solidify it into a crystallized, solid form in my brain. I start noticing mistakes, run-on sentences, fallacies, plot holes… everything.

Read your work out loud. It will improve your writing. If it sounds wrong, there's something to improve.

And that is how my posts go from idea to my readers' screens.

Recommend me a few people that have a really cool website and who I should interview next!

My blogroll is an excellent start, it has a ton of my favorite blogs to read. Here are a few favorites who I would particularly love to read interviews of:

Thank you for listening to the worst of silly old me, I hope that all you readers have a wonderful day.

This was Day 12 of #100DaysToOffload :D

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