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

Born in the early 1970s, I was raised in a small village on the North-East Adriatic coast of Italy. After studying music and getting a degree, I moved to Milan in 1996. To fund my music activities, I worked as a print designer and editor for a large publisher, which got me into technology and computers. Seeing it as a natural evolution of my day job, I fell in love with the early internet. Using my pre-existing skills to learn web design, I deployed my first site in 1997. Been honing the craft for all these years, while keeping up with sound design and music activities at the same time.

In 2011 I moved to the UK, where I worked for a large gaming company. A year later I co-founded a design and development company in London. Got married there, changed city, and released a concept album on the 30th anniversary of the opening of the Berlin Wall. I now live in Cambridge with my wife, Silvia.

What's the story behind your blog?

In 2002 I suddenly lost a loved one to suicide, experiencing a downward spiral of depression that made me feel detached from everything and everyone. I decided then to open my first blog, called Morula. It was an anonymous and safe place where I could express pain, anger, and direct frustration towards an inexplicable trauma. Since those pages were excruciatingly intimate, I erased the site a few years later, even sending a deletion request to the Internet Archive. I own a complete copy printed on paper, so every now and then I unearth an old post that I still deem relatable, to be published on my current site. Someone called this practice necroposting, a definition that I like.

In 2017 I released the current incarnation, Minutes to Midnight, named after the moniker I chose for my music releases. It was a work-related website for a while, later split in two, and now merged into one again. I needed time to understand how to present myself online, after the dark ages of the personal brand era.

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

I don't have a defined workflow, I only start a post when I feel like I have something to say. I tend to write about things that I either personally experienced, or that I've researched. It starts in a plain text editor, usually iA Writer on my computer. New drafts stay there for as long as needed, later to get refined and completed in Sublime Text. When I feel ready, I send the post to Silvia, which proofreads and gives me invaluable suggestions. Even though I absolutely love personal stories and storytelling, something is still preventing me from sharing more of those. I'd rather have my blog full of posts like Andy.

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

Ideally, I would enjoy living in a place where only the sounds of nature can be heard. However, I have this mysterious ability to detach from my surroundings, finding an inner space where I can lose myself and start writing. The most productive day in the last few years happened in a busy and packed Feltrinelli cafe in Milan, next door to Microsoft HQ... It doesn't alway work, so when it does it's precious.

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

I worked with HTML and CSS from 1997 up to when I discovered WordPress. It was the 1.5 release, and I liked it to the point of staying with them for a long time. I ditched it in 2020 to go back to my roots, this time with Jekyll as a static site generator. I don't use frameworks, and since I have a knack for minimalistic and fast performant websites, I have no reasons to add Javascript or other inessential tools.

Coming from PHP, I've found Jekyll's Liquid template language easy to pick up, yet powerful enough to replace what WordPress offered. I wrote a couple of tiny Ruby plugins to adapt the HTML build process to my needs, and went through subsequent degrees of complexity before realising the inner beauty of simpler things. Two aspects that I take great care of are sustainability and accessibility. In my web dev line of work, the latter in particular is an area where I strive to constantly expand my knowledge.

I currently buy and renew my domains with Gandi, preferring to keep the hosting separate. While I'd been deploying all my sites to Netlify, I've recently migrated to a traditional Apache server by Mythic Beasts, which is a non-VC-funded business based in the UK. Very happy about this transition: not only I moved my data over to Europe again, with a stable and transparent company, but particularly because the suggestion came from Leon Paternoster, one of the best bloggers I met along the vague but exciting perimeter of the small web.

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

I'd pick a different moniker. While Minutes to Midnight has a clear connection with my upbringing, I should have done more research. I only found out about the Linkin Park album and the Iron Maiden song when it was too late. Tech-wise, I would avoid bloated CMSes, and stick to essential tools.

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 have two fixed costs: £10 for renewing the domain, and £30 for the hosting. Since both are annual costs, the final tally is less than £3.50 per month. People can do whatever they prefer with their personal websites, but when I stumble on someone who's clearly writing as a way to make some money, I become suspicious about the nature of what I'm reading. It usually ruins the experience.

It's a matter of perception and transparency though. For example, I feel like the model used by Jason Kottke, or your 1 a month, are genuine and well thought. The fact that monetising a personal blog is not my thing doesn't imply a disdain for who does it in a mindful way.

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

Here's a Top 5 out of the many blogs I follow.

• The one that I know and like the most is written by Silvia Maggi, my wife. It's an eclectic journey into design, accessibility, usability, photography, and personal musings. I love how her posts are written with care and empathy, plus she has a fantastic extra section that lives outside the normal timeline, called Jeremy Bearimy.
• Life is Such a Sweet Insanity by J.P. Nearl is a type of blog that I'm enamoured with, because it's genuinely varied and clearly unscripted: a direct window on his author's daily life.
• Zinzy Waleson Geene has a website that's a constant source of curiosity. She alters the look, changes typography, structure, navigation so often that following through RSS isn't enough. When I see a new post, I go check the website.
• Along the Ray documents the daily adventures of Raymond (creator of Ye Olde Blogroll), who wanders the world in a tiny camper. Every photo is a glimpse into beauty.
• When I discovered the blog of Matthew Graybosch I spent hours on end reading his posts. It was like one of those books that you can't put down. His style is extremely direct, which I enjoy a lot.

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

I started looking at how language is used on personal websites, finding that most people I know tend to publicly identify with their job role. Something along the lines of: Hey, I'm Simone, and I'm a web developer (or whatever). It's unsettling to me, maybe because I used to do the same until a few months ago. There was this inner voice saying "that's not who you are, it's what you do". Tired of this lifeless corporate lingo, I wrote posts about de-branding and the way we present ourselves on the internet, ending up rewriting large sections of my website.

Anecdotally speaking, it's something that I've mostly observed outside of Europe, particularly the States. I think it's a crucial topic. Personal blogs are not part of the commercial web, so why don't we present ourselves as people instead of shallow business cards? I've grown tired of having to remove the work disguise to get to know the person I'm talking to.