Alexandra

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Alexandra, whose blog can be found at xandra.cc.

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

this the hardest question! i’m alexandra! i’m in my mid-30s. i’m originally from the south but now live in the pacific northwest. i did the better part of a decade living in san francisco, and i can attest that leaving your heart there is inevitable when you move away.

i am trying to break myself from the habit of launching into work when describing myself, so i’ll start with these. i’m a bardic (level 1) druid in OBOD and deeply revere nature. i am a poet, a writer, and i dabble in visual arts. i am a legal marriage officiant. i have a boyfriend of three years who lives with me and our dog, pepper, in our home. i used to be a hardcore gamer, but i find myself playing cozy games these days. i am not very good at cooking, but i’m an excellent baker. i forget names constantly, but i never forget a face. i write lowercase-only in all of my personal work to distinguish it from my serious professional writing, which has always had rules and guidelines and policies that aren’t quite as flexible to be fun. i prefer to play with expectations of language, grammar, and wordplay in my writing, and doing that in traditional case feels … off.

i’ve been working on websites for over two-thirds of my life. i started in 1997/1998, just thinking the internet was complete magic. i ended up becoming a journalist with a coding problem, and that led me to working in tech- and tech-adjacent positions alongside my reporter role. (i eventually pivoted into digital content, and my consistent field for the last 10 years has been web content management.) i’d always just hopped on new tools as they emerged, becoming an early adopter of platforms like twitter, and with that came lessons in how people engaged with content and read/consume online.

i rejoined “this side of the web” during the pandemic, when i was feeling nostalgic and wondering where the internet “went” (turns out: nowhere). my latest personal site, xandra.cc, launched in 2021.

oh, and i’ve been called “incredibly verbose.”

What’s the story behind your blog?

i launched the library of alexandra after some egging on by flamed. i have always had a sour taste in my mouth related to being called a capital-b blogger left over from journalism school, but i thought it was important to have a place for me to be able to ramble as long as i’d like about the minute and perhaps boring details of my life in addition to commentary on things going on. i often see folks lament blogging because they don’t feel as if they do enough to “warrant” a blog entry, but i think having so-called “smaller” moments in these blogging spaces (that are often oversaturated with nazel-gazing about coding projects, software development, or careers–said lovingly, of course!) is important to see and read to understand others while navigating our lives outside of the internet. i enjoy reading others’ blogs because i do not think the way they do, and i want to understand their perspective and outlook. i truly believe we learn from each other through our personal websites and blogs, and hope more folks write more about their lives and less about their work. just trying to be the change i want to see!

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

usually, it looks like me rattling off about something to my partner too much. (not that he minds!) but i get tossed up between whether or not something belongs on mastodon versus my blog. i think i treat my blog a bit like assuming you’re searching out this type of content rather than on the fediverse, which can just put your posts in front of folks.

i write the entry all at once. it’s typically late at night before bed. i read it over once and, if it’s particularly spicy, i might send it off to a friend for reading over before publishing. after i publish, i’ll read it over once again to check for glaring errors. (i only seem to catch them after publication.)

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

i wish i was one of those people who could type away in a coffee shop, but i just get too distracted. my ideal creative environment is cool (not cold), alone, and either at night or from a vista i don’t mind daydreaming at, with one of my keyboards that sound particularly soothing when typing a long spell. different keyboards for different activities!

i do think physical space can influence my creativity. if my desk is messy, i tend to do more creative work but feeling overwhelmed and stressed. on the other end, if my desk is clean, i find myself doing more productive or organizational tasks.

i’m also in the process of moving all of my productivity tools over to a self-hosted nextcloud instance, and setting all of that up does feel like it’s keeping me on track with my creative projects.

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

hell yeah, broseph! i really like supporting independent web projects if i can, so i opt to use services and projects specifically made by small teams or individuals: bearblog for my blog, chyrp lite for my microblog, and neocities for my personal website.

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

i would absolutely not try to pigeonhole my content into specific buckets. i thought it’d help me with coming up with essay ideas, but i find myself limited by not really wanting to create additional categories. i’d also change the CSS theming sooner; i used default link styling and the font family used in the theme i picked, but it was really irking me for a while since i enjoy long link text.

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?

i pay $50/year for bearblog’s paid subscription, $5/month for neocities, and $10/month for my shared hosting on dreamhost for my side projects.

honestly, i think the future of content work and content creation is centered around supporting individual and small team creators individually rather than paying for streaming services or legacy media companies. you see this already with 404 media’s flourishing; patreon, onlyfans, ko-fi, ghost… the amount of tools that are being streamlined and improved upon is exploding for bloggers, content creators, and independent developers to make their living essentially crowdsourced. i think anything we can do to gain independence and self-sufficiency outside of a system that is designed to rule/control/manipulate us (e.g. big tech platforms) is a net positive.

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

the bearblog discovery feed is one of the coolest feeds i’ve seen in a while–just the variation of content is so nice to see. and being able to see so much written by real humans feels really, really nice. i recommend going through and finding your next favorite blogger there. there’s something for everyone.

suggesting someone new is so hard because you’ve already interviewed so many of my friends! i’ll throw these 32-bit cafe members out whose blogs i really enjoy:

amazing people and amazing writings! :)

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

yeah! you’re so cool for doing this! p&b is definitely a gem in the indieweb. :)

if you want to follow more of my stuff, here’s what i’ve been working on lately: