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

I’ve been a technical writer for a little over a decade now, after a previous decade and change as a web developer. I’ve been a writer of one sort or another for as long as I can remember—when I’m not writing for the job, I’m often off at a coffee shop or craft brewery working on a science fiction or fantasy story. (Or occasionally a blog post.)

Other than too much writing, I like traveling—both around the United States and just on day trips around my local area. Right now, that local area is the middle of nowhere, Florida, about fifty miles north of Tampa and fifty miles west of Orlando; on Saturdays I’m usually puttering somewhere around one of those two metro areas. I also love tiki bars in the mold of Trader Vic’s and Don the Beachcomber’s; while you might imagine Florida is full of tiki bars, it’s actually full of beach bars, not at all the same thing.

For roughly the first two decades of this century, I lived around the San Francisco Bay Area, which is much more my vibe as far as climate, geography, culture, and politics—basically everything except housing costs. I’m in Florida for family reasons, so I don’t regret moving back, but sometimes I wish I’d found a way to swing moving my mother to the West Coast rather than moving myself here.

What's the story behind your blog?

Huh. Well, I’ve had something resembling a blog for an absurdly long time, going back to the LiveJournal days. Coyote Tracks got started on Tumblr when I decided to sort of “soft reboot” it—I’d been trying to tumble-blog and failing—and began writing musings on tech, particularly Apple. Like many people around that time, I was inspired by John Gruber of Daring Fireball.

I tried several other platforms after Tumblr, although to this day I’d argue it’s severely underrated given what you get for essentially nothing. WordPress was in there at one point, and I think I tried something else I’ve forgotten before moving to Micro.blog for a few years. Most recently I’ve gone back to self-hosting.

As for the name “Coyote Tracks,” I don’t know if I have a great reason. I’m a semi-closeted furry who likes coyotes, and as mentioned, I’m pretty peripatetic.

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

I keep a list of ideas for articles, but also sometimes just get inspired by stories I happen to come across—a news article, another blog post, a social media post, whatever. Sometimes posts will come together in an afternoon, other times they’ll kick around for days, depending on how much research they need. The very long post in which I used an “AI novel writer” to see if it was as bad as I expected (spoiler: yes) took quite a while.

Lately, I’ve been writing (and keeping the list of ideas) in Obsidian. I’ve used other tools over the years: Ulysses (which is what I write most of my fiction in, after moving there from Scrivener), iA Writer, and BBEdit (still my favorite tool for technical writing). In Obsidian, I use a LanguageTool plug-in for a semi-automatic proofing pass; this is the same technology Ulysses uses for its “revision mode.” (I don’t use LanguageTool’s new “AI” features, for the record.) For both of those, I also use Marked as a preview tool, turning on its keyword highlighter to show oft-overused words, passive verbs, that sort of thing. I do this all for fiction, too, by the way. LanguageTool almost always catches something I missed, even if it frets that I use the word “fuck” too much.

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

I think the space does influence my creativity, but I don’t know if I have an ideal environment—it depends on my mood. At home, I have an office space set up with lots of natural light, a nice keyboard, and an overpriced office chair. Sometimes I get my best writing done when I’m out, though. If I really want to go out and sit somewhere to work, I’ll take my iPad and a low-profile Keychron K3 mechanical keyboard that fits in the same bag, and sit down at a coffee shop or, better yet, a brewery. (Macs are better for editing/publishing, but iPads are as good, if not better, for doing first drafts.)

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

My website, including the blog, is generated with Zola, a static site generator similar to Hugo. I maintain it, and publish it, with Panic’s Nova—I have tasks configured so I can press a button to run a local preview, and press another button to deploy it.

My blog also supports webmentions now—when I make a post, the link goes out on Bluesky and Mastodon, and if someone favorites that link, reposts it, or replies to it, that gets sent back to the blog and shows up under the post. This is handled using a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of Bridgy, Webmention.io, and get-mentions, a small client-side bit of JavaScript I wrote.

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

I don’t know; I like static site generators, and appreciate that most of what I’ve done is pretty “close to the metal”. Having said that, Zola is better at building websites than it is at building blogs—it has absolutely zero special handling for blog articles, and the more posts you write, the more unwieldy it gets.

I suspect if I moved to another system, it would end up being Ghost, or maybe a CMS like Craft. I’d probably avoid WordPress; as nice as it would be to have such a huge ecosystem, their new block-based editor seems actively hostile to people who just want to, you know, write. And Matt Mullenweg needs to do for WordPress what Markus Persson did for Minecraft, by which I mean disappear and never be heard from again.

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 monetizing personal blogs?

I’m hosting the blog on Hetzner, so it’s €4.49/month, which is just over $5/month at current exchange rates. So, it’s as close to free as you can realistically get. While I have a Ko-Fi set up, people mostly don’t bite.

If you figure out how to monetize a personal blog, I mean, more power to you, right? There's an alternate universe where I did figure that out sometime around 2012—I got linked to semi-regularly by bigger blogs, sometimes by Techmeme, was a featured technology blog on Tumblr, all that. I was never a “big name,” but I probably made it to medium name.

Even so, putting Google Ads on my Tumblr—remember when that was a thing?—earned me like seven bucks. Before I tried anything else, I ended up getting my first tech writing job at a startup whose founders had been reading my blog. So, I suppose you could say I did find a way to monetize…just not directly.

I think newsletters are interesting as a strategy, and I might try to start one—but I feel like I’d have to be a more consistent blogger to pull that off.

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

I’m going to be a dingus here and recommend two blogs that are technically newsletters. Since they’re both on Buttondown, though, you can read them on the web and subscribe to their RSS feeds, so they’re kind of blog-shaped.

First, Mike Monteiro’s Good News is amazing—every article takes the premise of answering a “how to” question, from “how to make a book” to “how to choose a donut,” and turns it into a beautiful rhapsody of righteous leftist politics and warm-hearted compassion, and he’s a ferociously good writer.

Next, science fiction and fantasy author Charlie Jane Anders has a newsletter/blog called Happy Dancing that talks about writing, politics, and sci-fi/pop culture news, all in her beautifully quirky style.

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

Let’s see. The aforementioned Charlie Jane Anders co-hosts a podcast with her former co-worker from io9 (and also a great writer), Annalee Newitz, called Our Opinions Are Correct, which explores the connections between science fiction and real life. It’s often a lot of fun, and the episodes are kept to a reasonable length.

And, even if you’re not particularly into science fiction and fantasy but you’re into incredibly well-crafted short stories, I’d recommend a collection from last decade called At the Mouth of the River of Bees by Kij Johnson. All the pieces in it are weird and literate and beautiful. And if you’re an aspiring genre writer, look into her novel-writing course—or Chris McKitterick’s short story course—at the Ad Astra Institute, a residential workshop in Lawrence, Kansas that used to be part of KU until the college decided to institute a policy against being interesting. My own novel, Kismet, probably wouldn’t have ever been finished, let alone be as good, without that workshop, and I’ve returned to Lawrence a few times as a “graduate.”