Sure, the defaults are elegant, but they are constant reminders that you’re ultimately building castles in someone else’s sandbox, which is sad and unfortunate when you’re trying to build the coolest castle you can.

This is about far more than merely being able to customize the look of your site, although that is clearly important too.

#IndieWeb

I wish there were a way to quantify effectiveness rather than efficiency. It is surely effectiveness that matters.

the United States is exceptional, in a very bad way.

It's not the only country that's exceptional, but it is exceptionally bad.

Anyone who thinks blogging died at some point in the past twenty years presumably just lost interest themselves, because there have always been plenty of blogs to read. Some slow down, some die, new ones appear. It’s as easy as it’s ever been to write and read blogs.

Phil Gyford's lovely look back to SXSW 2000 and the blogging around it. I don't actually have a crucial event like that, maybe BlogTalk in Vienna, which I didn't do nearly enough to record at the time.

I have about 100 Chrome bookmarks, and I try to visit at least 2 or 3 of them a day to make sure I’m not missing something. But even as I do that, I do it with a private irritation that they don’t have an RSS feed.

Yeah, me too. Except for the bit about checking Chrome bookmarks, because life is too short.

I was hesitating to blog about it because I was embarrassed at how my website looked. This is it, I thought. If it has gotten so bad that I avoid blogging because I don’t want people to be reminded of how old my website looks, I need to get my shit together and fix this, I told myself.

Isn't that the most perfect reason of all?