Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself?
My name is Jeremy Keith. I’m from Ireland. Cork, like. Now I live in Brighton on the south coast of England.
I play traditional Irish music on the mandolin. I also play bouzouki in the indie rock band Salter Cane.
I also make websites. I made a community website all about traditional Irish music that’s been going for decades. It’s called The Session.
Back in 2005 I co-founded a design agency called Clearleft. It’s still going strong twenty years later (I mean, as strong as any agency can be going in these volatile times).
Oh, and I’ve written some nerdy books about making websites. The one I’m most proud of is called Resilient Web Design.
What’s the story behind your blog?
I was living in Freiburg in southern Germany in the 1990s. That’s when I started making websites. My first ever website was for a band I was playing in at the time. My second ever website was for someone else’s band. Then I figured I should have my own website.
I didn’t want the domain name to be in German but I also didn’t want it to be in English. So I got adactio.com.
To begin with, it wasn’t a blog. It was more of a portfolio-type professional site. Although if you look at it now, it looks anything other than professional. Would ya look at that—the frameset still works!
Anyway, after moving to Brighton at the beginning of the 21st century, I decided I wanted to have one of those blogs that all the cool kids had. I thought I was very, very late to the game. This was in November 2001. That’s when I started my blog, though I just called it (and continue to call it) a journal.
What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging?
Sometimes a thing will pop into my head and I’ll blog it straight away. More often, it bounces around inside my skull for a while. Sometimes it’s about spotting connections, like if if I’ve linked to a few different things that have some kind of connective thread, I’ll blog in order to point out the connections.
I never write down those things bouncing around in my head. I know I probably should. But then if I’m going to take the time to write down an idea for a blog post, I might as well write the blog post itself.
I never write drafts. I just publish. I can always go back and fix any mistakes later. The words are written on the web, not carved in stone.
Do you have an ideal creative environment? Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity?
I mostly just blog from home, sitting at my laptop like I’m doing now. I have no idea whether there’s any connection between physical space and writing. That said, I do like writing on trains.
A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack?
I use my own hand-rolled hodge-podge of PHP and MySQL that could only very generously be described as a content management system. It works for me. It might not be the most powerful system, but it’s fairly simple. I like having control over everything. If there’s some feature I want, it’s up to me to add it.
So yeah, it’s a nice boring LAMP stack—Linux Apache MySQL PHP. It’s currently hosted on Digital Ocean. I use DNSimple for all the DNS stuff and Fastmail for my email. I like keeping those things separate so that I don’t have a single point of failure.
I realise this all makes me sound kind of paranoid, but when you’ve been making websites for as long as I have, you come to understand that you can’t rely on anything sticking around in the long term so a certain amount of paranoia is justified.
Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently?
I’m not sure. I’m not entirely comfortable about using a database. It feels more fragile than just having static files. But I do cache the blog posts as static HTML too, so I’m not entirely reliant on the database. And having a database allows me to do fun relational stuff like search.
If I were starting from scratch, I probably wouldn’t end up making the same codebase I’ve got now, but I almost certainly would still be aiming to keep it as simple as possible. Cleverness isn’t good for code in the long term.
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’ve got hosting costs but that’s pretty much it. I don’t make any money from my website.
That Irish traditional music website I mentioned, The Session, that does accept donations to cover the costs. As well as hosting, there’s a newsletter to pay for, and third-party mapping services.
Time for some recommendations: any blog you think is worth checking out? And also, who do you think I should be interviewing next?
You should absolutely check out Walknotes by Denise Wilton.
It’s about going out in the morning to pick up litter before work. From that simple premise you get some of the most beautiful writing on the web. Every week there’s a sentence that just stops me in my tracks. I love it.
We wife, Jessica Spengler, also has a wonderful blog, but I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Final question: is there anything you want to share with us?
You know I mentioned that The Session is funded by donations? Well, actually, this month—April 2025—any donations go towards funding something different; bursary sponsorship places for young musicians to attend workshops at the Belfest Trad Fest who otherwise wouldn’t be able to go:
thesession.org/donate
So if you’ve ever liked something I’ve written on my blog, you can thank me by contributing a little something to that.
Cheers,
Jeremy
