People and Blogs is a series by Manuel Moreale featuring the people behind personal blogs and the stories of their corners of the web. This conversation is with Nicolas Solerieu. Do go visit their blog and say hello!
I’m dad, designer, cyclist, designer, texture guy – currently living in San Luis Obispo, CA. My oldest kid just learned to blow his nose. The other one is in his prime baby time. These days I day dream about bikepacking and permaculture.
Born and raised in France, I landed in California in 2016. An odd mix of work ethic and ego led me to define myself through the stuff I make: all sorts of combinations of rectangles and text boxes, mostly for screens, solely because I got good enough to get paid for it. While I'm filled with gratitude for my career, I spend a humorously uncomfortable amount of time torn between ascetic ideals and pragmatism.
While I’m not a technologist, I’m not a monk either. I’m way too fidgety. Time outdoors, family life, movement, and occasional meditation keep me sane.
I adopted this domain name in 2016 as I didn't like having my real name spelled out in the URL, it felt weird. I bought my initial domain back in 2012: nicolas-soleri.eu, I thought it was clever. SLRNCL is a concatenation of my last name and my first name without the vowels. It's hard to remember, which is great since I'm not trying to play the SEO game.
I truly started to put effort into writing in 2022. The birth of my first child probably had a lot to do with it – and getting off instagram. I couldn’t fathom the idea of being a dad with an instagram account. But I’d love for my kids to one days read the blog of their silly dad.
Self-awareness and allergy to grandiosity creates a tension between craft, skepticism, and my embodied experience which I love to put into words. The blog-therapy is (still) working. It’s eating up most of my creative ego and filling my feed.
Nowadays I use the default iOS notes app. I write whenever. I edit little.
I used to have a notes.txt file on my desktop where I was putting down all interesting nuggets, like a wine cellar, hoping for them to mature. Instead, they mostly degenerated and created a bunch of anxiety from doing nothing of it.
I breed an uncomfortably large amount of thoughts daily. Most of them are unexceptional. I cultivate poor writing hygiene because I do not want to truly get into writing. Yet, there seems to be something that keeps bringing me back to words. To tame my ego and avoid creating a generational supply of passable notes I use my blog as a graveyard.
Typos are my own, I’m working on it. With AI it now feels like a mark of authenticity. Sometimes I ask my wife to proof-read, but that is rare because we end up arguing, worth it.
Following the flow of life is what makes my creative juice flow. I often write on the toilet or in public parks while keeping an eye on my kids. I thrive in “white-space” time - time in between things. So I jot down notes when I’m out and about. I’m not a coffee shop person and I hate my home office.
My website is home cooked. It runs mostly on PHP. I still have Jquery installed but I’m slowly removing all Javascript dependencies. I'm not a great dev and prefer to stay 5 years behind trends. My website is constrained by my skills. This has kept me grounded and covered most of my needs and ambitions. I don't recommend inspecting my code, it's really not great but decently light. Building stuff is a great way to keep myself grounded in the process. I use Inter as the only font because it's nice, plain, and open source. It will default to system font if Inter isn't available. Because I don't want to import anything custom or use CDN. I'm not better than Inter (and few out there are IMO).
The site is hosted by OVH in France. I’m considering self-hosting since my house produces excess solar power.
I’d use bearblog if I was not a pretentious web designer and had to start over. I recommended it to my wife, she likes it. The simplicity and authenticity of the project is lovely. That said I do not regret the torturous process of having redesigned my website tirelessly over the last decade. The process taught me a lot about myself.
My domain name + hosting cost under 20 euros/year. I do not run ads or track anything - I don’t plan or change this ever.
That means my website has had an incredible ROI considering the career opportunities it gave me. The many people who hired me all visited my website (and told me about it). I had some rewarding connections with internet strangers. My gratitude is larger than an html file can hold, and definitely magnitude greater than what it cost me to run my website.
Money is important, and I’m a lucky bastard. I don’t have anything against people monetizing their thoughts - though I’m rarely compelled by a paywall. Digital patronage and crowdfunding seems highly relevant to get out of the social media hell realm of today. It has pitfalls, the main one being requiring mass adoption which seems highly delusional. But hope and compassion are contagious while big tech fights entropy. Social media always comes back in a different form, meanwhile, html is still there. It’s the cockroach business model.
There are so many goodies out there, one link away. Sharing is fun, side projects too. In my case it took me a decade to get my head out of my own butt and realize the cost of my own ventures. I believe a lot of us are similar to me, moving through life and accumulating stuff. Cleaning up, giving up, and passing along are necessary processes. So as a closing thought I’d suggest to sit, close your eyes and think of all your stuff. If you’re comfortable with it, great. Otherwise, spring is coming.
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