Eli Mellen

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

Hi, I’m Eli. I live on the coast of Maine in the US with my family and a number of pets. I have a weird background in literary theory, art history, philosophy, animation and design, but backed my way into a career as an approximately programmer-shaped person. I’ve worked as a software architect, QA lead, accessibility specialist and product manager. These days I do that sorta stuff in the civic tech space. I love to read, play SNES-era jrpgs, cook vegetarian food, and wander around outside with my kids.

What's the story behind your blog?

I’ve had some iteration of my website at my current domain name since the spring of 2013. Before that, though, I also had various (embarrassing) tumblrs and livejournals. I’ve written online, for good and ill, for as long as I’ve been online. The first iteration of my current website was born a bit out of desperation and hubris. I thought being online could land me a job. It was also a space where I could teach myself more about web hosting and development.

I was freshly out of undergrad, and was barreling my way out of graduate school with a family on the way. I’d always dabbled with technology and programming, even though I hadn’t studied it in school, so it seemed like a good place to look for work. The internet world was all Bootstrap and Ruby on Rails at the time, so I dove deep into those things, and everything else that seemed hip at the time. I guess my hope was to blog so good that I got a job? And, it sort of worked out in that my website became a playground for me to learn technical skills that would eventually help me be employable.

Everything has changed a lot over the years. Around 2018 I got really excited about the indieweb and rebuilt my website to support all the indieweb functionality I could cram into my homespun CMS. At that point things took a turn towards microblogging — quick, short posts without titles — so, I did that on my website.

These days my setup is simpler. I’ve removed all the indieweb features, like webmentions and use a content management system called blot to publish plaintext as pretty well formatted HTML, with an RSS feed.

My domain name is entirely uncreative. I wanted the shortest, yet most affordable thing I could find, and my name happened to work out.)

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

I wish I had an elegant answer. Something about going for a swim in a mountain lake, then sitting on the floor with a beautiful notebook and drafting an initial sketch of a thing while a concerto plays softly in the background, leaf-dappled light filling the minimal, wood-hewn space.

In reality I’m more of a goblin than that. I tend to bang things out over breaks, or in little spare windows of time.

I have a drafts folder filled with dozens of long form things, partially researched and mostly unfinished. What gets posted to my website these days tends to be the quicker stuff. Photos and things I write on my phone or directly on my desktop, then read through once or twice before I share them.

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

I think I do have an ideal creative environment, I don’t think I’ve discovered it yet. Reading a lot helps me feel creative, as does listening to music. When I’m in a rut I usually pick up a book.

I have a strange relationship with technology. As a person who “does tech” for a job, I really really loathe most technology. I find it cumbersome and not something I wanna give attention to, so, these days I seek out things that get out of my way, support the accessibility features I need, and that won’t require heaps of my attention after setting them up.

Because of this I end up using a lot of default, or barebones, applications. Almost all my blog posts are composed in macOS’ default TextEdit application. If I’m writing something longer than a normal post, or writing code I’ll reach for either Acme or Emacs.

I like a clicky keyboard, but don’t have strong opinions about which ones, or types of keys.

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

The tech stack has changed a number of times. Originally my website was totally static, hosted with GitHub pages. I used a variety of static site generators there, including a few I made myself. For the hottest of seconds I used Wordpress hosted on a VPS, but I quickly became frustrated with how limiting that felt, and tore it all down to write my own CMS. That CMS took a few forms, in a few languages, but was mostly a PHP monstrosity that supported micropub for creating and editing posts.

These days I use blot.im — my website is a pile of directories and plaintext files on my computer that get synced to blot automatically. It is pretty magical. I built a custom theme for blot that I recently updated to make more accessible. Blot is one of the very few legitimately great web services I’ve ever used.

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

If I was starting again today, I think I would do a few things differently:

I would consider blogging anonymously, or more disconnected from my lived life. The hope would be that would let me feel cozier being more weird (I’m excited about a weirder, quieter internet).

I would lean away from the chronological timeline as the primary organizing mechanism of the website, and have better URLs without dates in them.

I have a wiki section these days, and like how that invites me to revisit stuff I’ve written, keeping it up-to-date and alive in a way that the chronological timeline doesn’t.

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 make, and have made exactly $0 from my website to date. I’ve no plans to try and monetize it. I have no clue how many folks read my site. I’ve never had analytics or anything of the sort.

I pay $20/year for my CMS, and $25/year for my domain name.

I’ve got no qualms with folks monetizing their websites, especially when they’re upfront about it. I’ve thought about it before, but nothing more than fancifully thinking “it’d be nice to work less and play more.”

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

Oh! So many!

I keep a blogroll of personal sites that I enjoy. Two great sites that I find really inspiring are maya.land and Bill Mill’s notes blog. I think they’d each make for fascinating interviews!

I love the writing, and sprawling topics across maya.land, and I dig how Bill’s website leans more personal tool than personal website. I used to post a ton of links to my website, but was never as organized about it.

I also love to explore spaces like Marginalia and the Merveilles webring.

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

Thanks for this opportunity and for maintaining this awesome project!

If anyone reading is looking for a lower key version of the Advent of Code, check out the December Adventure!

Supposedly, one day, I’ll either share a video game or some fiction I’ve created. Those will land on my website when that time comes, but for now I have a shout outs page on my website. I update that with stuff that I think is worth shouting out.