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What I Want in a Writing Application

. . . and what I don’t want.

No: The cursor disappearing on me.

Yes: Nothing to slow me down when I get rolling. Just type, enter, type, enter . . .

Yes: An understanding there are many different ways people want or need to write.

Yes: Easy, flawless pasting into the writing area.

Yes: Minimalist link creation, that gets what I want right the first time every time.

Yes: Automatic backup in the background, plus versioning.

Yes: Endless customization. I know, dream on.

Yes: If I’m not interested in syndication or a feed, a way to completely disengage from outside services.

Yes: The option to have the writing screen displayed in whatever font I want. I’ve switched this website to Atkinson Hyperlegible and enjoy its hyperlegibility.

Well now, only one “dont want to see”. A good thing, I guess. No developer wants just a list of No.

I’ll expand on these points when I get some time.

More later . . .

The Savviest Voters

Tim Snyder: Orwell said that it is a constant struggle to see what is right in front of your nose. Culture can blind us to the obvious. Non-Blacks tend to project onto Blacks political irrationality and “identity politics.” But who in America votes consistently with their economic interests? African Americans, in general. And is this because they are somehow free of culture, and just more rational than the rest of us? Perhaps. Or is it rather that they are not subject to the dominant form of identity politics, and can see through it? And that this knowledge is not just the experience of one life, but generationally transmitted, deeply connected to the actual history of the country? The very notion that African Americans are the savviest voters is practically unsayable in American English.

The Price of Coffee

I’ve been roasting coffee at home for about twenty years. I do it in a steel wok, stirring by hand, on a turkey-fryer burner, in my basement. Very low tech, but effective, at least for my day to day needs. My palate for coffee is not sophisticated enough for me to get geeky and obsessive and expensive about the roasting process, something very doable in this hobby.

I do it for a few simple reasons: 1) the quality of the green beans is better because I source from a knowledgeable and quality-obsessed supplier, Sweet Maria’s in Oakland; 2) I know it’s fresh because I roast it, let it rest, usually, then brew within days of roasting; 3) it’s an enjoyable process, like cooking good food. I also pay attention to brewing methods, again seeking quality without becoming obsessive or breaking the bank. And last and certainly not least, I pay less than I’d pay for high quality local roasted coffee. Lately my cost per pound, roasted, is less than ten dollars.

All this is a wind-up to a short essay on what I’m learning about coffee prices. Discussion of pricing is full of myths and misconceptions, in any market, and this is true in the coffee market. Thom Owen at Sweet Maria’s weighs in here, in the context of April 2025 tariff changes.

It’s complicated. Coffee’s been a globally traded commodity for a very long time. Like all commodities, a lot of factors go into the price for the end consumer. Costs of transport are a large factor. Costs of production, land, labor and supplies are another. Like any crop, coffee has good years and bad, weather and disease come and go, plus the trees’ capacity tends to run on multi-year cycles. All this can change quickly and for reasons beyond anyone’s control. All of these costs have risen sharply since the pandemic, for all commodities.

Another factor is the part of the market hardly connected to the product at all – trading in futures and the derivatives of that type of speculative market. Futures are useful for hedging against uneven cash flow and cost fluctuation, in most food related markets, like grains, but this is most useful for large players, big farmers and traders. When a local market, including the small producers of specialty coffees (most of the producers are small) ties its prices to the price on an exchange in New York City, you get increases even when the other costs aren’t going up as much as the futures and derivatives. This sometimes baleful effect is another facet of the damage speculative markets can do.

The recent insane tariffs will increase coffee prices. This has virtually nothing to do with any market, trade relationship or any real-world part of the trade. Tariffs on goods coming from coffee-producing countries have rarely or never been used to encourage US production, as US production of coffee is almost nil (Hawaii and Puerto Rico, that’s it). So increasing the cost of imported coffee does only that, increases the cost.

So, I’m happy sourcing all my green coffee from Sweet Maria’s. They’re committed to quality. As part of this commitment, they’re also committed to establishing and nurturing close relationships with the people who grow the coffee, the small farmers in the coffee countries. They call their most direct pipeline “Farm Gate”, meaning they buy directly from the coffee farm. These farmers need a lot of support, and much of this support is provided by paying them as directly as possible through vendors like Sweet Maria’s. A number of coffee importers give technical advice, help build the local school, direct aid like that, to improve the lives of their suppliers. The pressures on coffee pricing derived from labor and land shortages can be lessened by this type of support from Sweet Maria’s and customers like me. Sweet Maria’s aren’t the only coffee bean supplier doing this, of course, but they’ve earned my trust.

I’ve been stocking up, partly because it feels good to have a large supply to feed my roasting hobby and partly because I can save a few nickels by buying now rather than later. I’m also thinking of selling some of the roasted coffee, which would definitely reduce the cost of the coffee I drink.

The price of crappy coffee in the supermarkets and the chain stores will go up, and only partly for valid reasons of increased production and transport costs. A fair amount will come from, as we saw during the pandemic, price gouging by Big Corp. Yet another reason to avoid buying from Big Corp.

Note: I’m far from an expert, but I’m learning more every day about this subject. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, so I increase my understanding of trade in general by learning about the coffee trade.

More later . . .

bookshop.org

I’m weaning myself from Amazon. I’ve been lazy, using Amazon’s impressive delivery abilities, when I should have been cultivating and using healthier ways to buy books and other things.

For work purchases, I’ve stopped cold turkey and am discovering alternative channels to buy supplies. I’m buying our gaffer tape directly from Gaffer Power, but was surprised to see it’s being shipped by “Amazon Shipping”, something new to me but not surprising. Oh well, one small step.

For other supplies, I’m moving to Eaton’s, a local office supply distributor. They’ll deliver for free to the store, and would be as convenient if not more than Amazon’s rapid delivery to their lockers. If it costs a bit more, the upside is the money goes to local people at Eaton’s.

Now, for books, and I’m almost exclusively speaking of e-books, I’ve been using bookshop.org. Their business model is to sell books, physical and e, including the customer’s choice of a local bookstore as a partner in the commerce. The local bookstore gets a cut of the profit, and not just a pittance, an actual, meaningful piece of the action, upwards of 30%. I can also have a practice of checking with the library before buying an e-book, though their service leaves out a lot of books.

bookshop’s a B-corp, which allows them to channel more of the profit away from personal or corporate profit and toward helping out struggling businesses such as local bookstores. And they seem to be what they say they are, an altruistic but profitable enterprise doing some real good and providing a true alternative to Amazon’s growing near-monopoly.

One thing I’ve found, searching for and using the alternatives–a small, focused retailer will often provide as good a price and always better customer service. An example is B&B Supply, where we get our price guns and labels. They do nothing but that, and are clearly focused and obsessive. I also like their small-townness and pride in reusing cardboard boxes for shipping. Plus they can repair the price guns if we need that. So, why buy these things at Amazon? B&B points out you can get off-brand labels and will for sure pay less, but for noticeably poorer quality. This poor quality makes for trouble down the road, not worth the pennies saved.

Another example is MyTee Products, the Ohio company where we bought the rails we installed on the box truck’s walls, to fasten our tie-downs to. They specialize and focus on truck equipment, make a lot of their own products or source in the USA, and clearly know their business.

A local example is Schuele Paint and Hardware, a long time vendor of ours, and one of my personal favorite local businesses. A Benjamin Moore dealer, with a lot of freely available institutional knowledge and a great line of products. And they’ve been running one of the best local hardware stores for a while now, the smallest we’ve ever seen while still full service. And of course, our money goes to local people, owner Paul Leahy and his superior employees.

You get a lot more than you might realize, buying from companies like this. That’s one way they survive.

As always, more later . . .

Olma

David Franczyk toasting Greg Olma, In Community at Mickey’s, March 21, 2025

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich

Find and stage the ingredients: Peanut butter, jelly of some kind, bread. You may need to run to the store. If so, I’ll wait right here.

Grab a couple essential utensils: Small plate, broad dull knife.

If your bread’s sliced, pull out two pieces. If it’s not, cut two slices. Find your bread knife, your dull one won’t cut it.

Lay one piece of bread on the plate or your work surface. Open the peanut butter jar, scoop out an appropriate amount of peanut butter, to your liking, spread it onto the bread. The proper amount is up to you, but I’d recommend creating a layer no more than a quarter-inch thick, and don’t get too close to the edges of the bread. I recommend starting with the peanut butter. It’s denser and thicker than the jelly, usually, and provides a good backing to the lighter jelly. But you can switch the sequence around and see how it works.

Then go to your jelly jar, scoop out some jelly, again to your taste, spread it on top of the peanut butter. Again, the amount’s up to you. I personally like a neat sandwich and don’t overdo the adding of ingredients. A good sandwich has a balance of bread and the sandwiched materials.

Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches don’t often get too thick, the way lots of other sandwich assemblies do, so that’s not much of a problem. If you’re really hungry, you might make a thick sandwich and rush to the eating stage. If you’re just regular hungry and can hold off a minute, make two sandwiches, one after the other. To me, this approach is better, as a too-thick sandwich made from liquid ingredients can escape your mouth when you bite down, making a mess.

Close the jars. If you’re a neatnik and don’t plan on making another such sandwich soon, clean and put away the knives, brush any breadcrumbs or stray ingredients off the counter. Put away the jars of peanut butter and jelly and your loaf of bread.

Back to the sandwich: Put the unspread-upon bread slice on top of the spread-upon one, press down slightly to get the jelly to adhere the top slice to the bottom slice.

It’s done, your sandwich is made, Enjoy!

—————————————————————————

This is the first exercise in John Warner’s book The Writer’s Practice. He asks the reader to do it, right off the bat on the first page. His explanation of why he did this included these ideas–we’re all writers, we can improve our writing practice by doing, we must always consider the audience we’re writing for, and we can and should approach any writing task as a writing experience, more than a mere task.

The Writer’s Web

Dave Winer asks: “What does the writer’s web mean to you?” He’s been working on tools for writing on the web for, oh maybe twenty years, and recently gained some speed and released WordLand, his conception, in early stages, of a writer’s tool.

Well, to begin to answer Dave’s question, I’ll start by saying I’m by no means a voluble person on the web. Elsewhere, yes, I can bloviate with the best of us. And I regularly need to write for my paid employment and volunteer work, and I do quite a lot of editing for other people.

But being voluble’s not a requirement for any writing, or blogging. I have no problem with my sporadic output, though I occasionally want to set some minor production goals, usually to no effect. It’s more natural for me to enjoy the writing as I do it, and having past writing available to read later, sometimes much later. A craft, an intellectual exercise, easily available and easy to pick up.

So, a writer’s web is a larger idea than just my own experience. I’m all for it. More speech is better than less, and we’re at a point of increasing attacks on speech, in the US at least or most notably. We need more writers. As a few of my recent posts show, I’ve been working on providing basic WordPress hosting for an inner circle of friends, so I’m able to directly support a writer’s web.

A big part of that is the writing interface. I’m OK with vanilla Gutenberg in WordPress, with the useful addition of GenerateBlocks from Tom Usborne’s crew. But I’m not sure how good it will be for others. I have a long experience writing with computers and have developed some skills and also some preferences over the years.

Hell, I can write just fine in a desktop publishing program, though I’d rather not. I can write just fine in a text editor, using HTML code. Did it for years. I’ve been interested in Markdown for a long time, but haven’t really put it to use. I see the usefulness of a “no distraction” writing tool. I do a lot of editing of my own work, so the editing part is important – making changes, trying new phrasing or word use.

I can see the usefulness of examining the writing interface, so more later.

One thing I don’t care for is Dave’s tying his tool to WordPress.com. I’ve been avoiding BigCorp, and weaning myself a bit from social media, pivoting to my own website, so I don’t want to use wp.com or Automattic. But I suspect Dave will open it up properly, in keeping with IndieWeb principles, so I’m keeping an open mind and will likely give his latest work a fair shot. I’ve had a wp.com account for years, though I don’t use it.

More later . . .

Don’t Rent, Own

I’m compelled to write something about social media, personal websites, independence. This comes from reading all the bitching about how awful Facebook, Google, Twitter, AI and all the other Big Corp web is. The bitching, plus a longstanding aversion to using BigCorp for communicating.

I agree about the awfulness, but I don’t waste my time bitching about it. I use social media, but understand its limitations. Its basic limitation is, it’s not mine. I don’t own it. Rather, it owns me. Whatever I post at Facebook or other social media platforms is hoovered up by Big Corp so they can build a model of me and relentlessly sell shit to that discorporate model. They also sell my personal information to other Big Corps. They also can just shut me down whenever they feel like it. It’s also designed to be addictive, yay. All one big happy cycle of enshittification.

So, I have a personal website or two (or a dozen). It’s the only way to own my personal presence on the web. I can do pretty much any kind of website thing – blog posts, pages, images, apps, whatever.

www.kevinpadanhayes.com, where you’re reading this right now, or should be reading it, is my primary site, and it’s all mine. It’s almost entirely under my control – the domain name, which is my actual full name, the publishing platform, the web host, everything. Nothing on Big Corp’s servers. Costs me about $150 a year.

I see lots of my creative or small business friends who don’t have any real presence on the web, just a spot on Facebook or Instagram, and think to myself “They could do much better, they need their own place”. I see lots of my politically active friends doing the same and wonder “Why are they advocating for change on Big Corp’s website?”

Having your own place isn’t too hard. Yes, it’s technical, but it doesn’t have to be too technical, and people are available to advise – me being one of those people. It also isn’t free. Remember, if you aren’t paying for a service, you’re not a customer, you’re a product. You’re making money for Big Corp. And BigCorp is my word for those insane billionaires who are fucking everything up right now.

But it also doesn’t have to cost a bunch. I can set people up with their own WordPress website for less than $70 a year. Personal email with your own domain, less than $20/year. Domain name, $20/year. Total, less than $120/year. Simple, secure, performs well. Yes, you can do it cheaper or free, but I don’t advise doing that. You get what you pay for.

Now, I have little bandwidth to do this setting up, but I’m happy to give free advice and will probably write up a guide to doing it yourself. Here’s a work in progress describing the idea in more detail. I’m looking into offering it as a service, to a select group of people. I wouldn’t be making any money on the deal, as I’m not Big Corp and don’t have to relentlessly pursue profit. I also like doing this kind of work, it’s partly a hobby, honed by extensive paid work experience.

Comments are welcome, either emailing me at moc.seyahnadapnivekobfsctd-3d0536@nivek or commenting when this post gets posted at Facebook Big Corp. If you’d like me to make you an offer for having your own place on the web or just advise you based on my experience, let me know.

More Later on Free Press

At the end of my Free Press post, I said “More later”, so here’s some more.

Fred Clark talks about using an RSS reader, and links to a journalism site in North Carolina, The Assembly, where the writers tell us they want to to create “new models for state level news”. A wonderful idea, and the site’s full of good in-depth journalism.

We should have more of this. We desperately need it. One way to have more of this is for us to subscribe, pay some money and help them sustain themselves. Of course, if North Carolina’s not of interest or is too far away, find someone local or someone covering topics you find interesting. There are many good journalists out there, in a very discouraging world for journalists. When we find them, let’s support them.

A few words on Fred Clark. He’s a writer of long experience, and a damned good one. He should be getting a living wage from a legitimate publication. Instead, he writes/blogs for Patheos, for what I expect is a pittance. Patheos is a site with a focus on religion (Fred’s a progressive evangelical Christian, with great knowledge and insight to that community).

To feed his family, he works at a big box store – I think Home Depot, but maybe Costco. This is sad, he’s really good at what he does. Nothing wrong with working at Big Box, but our society should support Fred’s talent better. From time to time I send him some money from my meager funds, to show my direct support for his work.

In the post I link to above Fred explains RSS, Really Simple Syndication. An old technology in internet time, but one I use every day with my RSS Reader. As Fred says, it’s a way to bypass BigCorp’s Almighty Algorithm and get articles to read based entirely on what you want to read, not what Mark Zuck’s robots want you to read. I encourage everyone to use an RSS reader, you might like it and it takes the edge off The Algorithm. I have a subscription to The Old Reader.

This post is also a test of syndicating from my personal website to my Bluesky account (@kevinphayes.bsky.social). The idea is to publish here, syndicate elsewhere, such as the social media monster sites. Let’s see how that goes.

It would also be my first Bluesky post, which shows you how much I like that type of web presence. This is an IndieWeb thing, and I love IndieWeb things.

I doubt if I’m the only one who sees “Bluesky” as a last name, perhaps Russian, Ivan Bluesky. I also see it in my head as “Blueski”, maybe someone’s babcia–Poles I know pronounce it as “botch”. Mrs. Blueski.

More later . . .

Twitter, Bluesky, all that jangly social media shit

I’ve never really used Twitter. I had an account, but it seems Twitter’s approach to publishing, if you can call it that, doesn’t fit with the way my mind works.

It never clicked, not that I tried that hard. I remember thinking, fifteen years ago, “why would anyone want to publish every stray thought?” That’s how I perceived it. Part of it, for me, is I never care to use my phone for anything but voice calls and texts. Anything beyond that is massively difficult, for me anyway, because it’s so goddammed small. I’m a desktop computer user, and I don’t see that changing any time soon.

Plus, I tend to be guarded and value my privacy, so blipping out my thoughts doesn’t fit in with my usual approach to communication.

I make extensive use of Facebook. As Facebook increases its enshittification pace, the stream of posts is getting cluttered with a lot of robot-produced crap, which I try to knock back with post moderation, to little avail.

The most useful aspects of Facebook are groups. Great ways to discuss specific issues with people having similar interests and experiences. It’s still hobbled by Facebook’s need to monetize as much as they can. The whole “Business” aspect of Facebook is utter crap. I suppose it would get better if we spend money on ads, but I doubt it, the enshittification being as advanced as it is.

My bitches about the business tools are the needless repetition, saying there’s something new when there’s not, and the overall difficulty of finding the thing you need to respond to or work on. It’s a hot mess. I’m not mentioning (as I mention it) that it can bring a bunch of clueless people into my work life, but then it’s part of my job to give clueless people a clue, or at least try. “No, I won’t come get your piano, or your moldy couch (only a little mold, on the bottom, not the seat), or, god forbid, engage with people who don’t have the slightest understanding of the business model of every second hand dealer in the world.

Beyond groups, the promotional features of Facebook are a cheap way to promote the buzz, with some downsides, mostly about me having to engage with clueless people, endlessly explaining why we don’t want their trash and certainly won’t expend any effort to help them with it, even if they paid us, to be honest. I can write about this at length, I think, and may do that, chips fall where they may.

So I closed my Twitter account and opened a Bluesky account at kevinphayes.bsky.social. While the political ambience seems to be better, it’s much the same jangly shit to me. I have enough jangly thoughts in my inattentive head without mainlining it from Twitter or Bluesky or whatever. It’s also no less likely to enshittify than Twitter and Facebook, it’s still venture capital owned and controlled. But it’s healthy to reject Twitter and that insane weirdo Musk.

Mastodon is much more attractive to my Indie Web way of thinking about this sort of thing. Real federation is much better than the existing silos or Bluesky’s proprietary implementation. But I’m no more active at my Mastodon account than anywhere else (see my most recent posts, informing the world about the Buffalo Christmas Blizzard of 2022). It’s still too jangly and nobody’s made a mass exodus as they are doing for Bluesky.

I’m old school, I guess, and am very happy with my RSS reader. Minimal jangle. Still a disciple of Dave Winer and his wise thinking about news, writing and publishing.

Now are you seeing why I write and publish on my own website? It doesn’t belong to anyone but me. I can move it around. Nobody can take it down, at least not yet.

More later . . .