Jamie Thingelstad

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Jamie Thingelstad, whose blog can be found at thingelstad.com.

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

Hello there! My name is Jamie Thingelstad, and I'm writing to you from Minneapolis, Minnesota, in the United States. Thank You, Manuel, for having me and thank you for reading! I'm happily married to my fantastic partner Tammy, and we have two children, Mazie and Tyler. Our family unit is rounded out with our Bernedoodle Lucky, who is equal parts loving, lazy, and large.

I am a passionate technologist and have been intrigued by computers since my mother got me a Texas Instruments TI-99/4A for $99 at JC Penney when they were exiting the computer business. My Uncle Tim helped me take that Christmas present, attach the RF modulator to a TV, and create my first BASIC program. I've been fascinated by technology my whole life. When I discovered the Internet at the University of Minnesota, in the days of FTP and Gopher, when the Web was still being born, I was smitten. While many undergrads were spending Friday nights out and about, I could often be found on the SPARCstation in the labs, learning Unix and exploring the early Internet.

I was lucky enough to start my career along with the Web. I left the University before completing my degree. I started an Internet Service Provider for businesses, helped build BigCharts as CTO, and led our technology into MarketWatch and, finally Dow Jones. I've spent significant time in publishing, financial services, social, and retail Software as a Service. Today, I am CTO for SPS Commerce, leading a team of 500 technologists to build and grow the World's Retail Network.

While my role is about leadership, I remain very close to technology. Some folks have hobbies like gardening, and mine are mostly around technology. I'm an active blogger. I write a newsletter. I love to explore and play with tech. Overall, I like learning. I enjoy photography to push my creative side. I enjoy writing. I enjoy cooking and entertaining. I make candles. We enjoy traveling both near and far.

Most of all, I enjoy time with family and friends.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started my blog nearly 20 years ago, and I don't remember the impetus to create it. I registered thingelstad.com in 1999, even before I set up my blog. I had a handmade HTML "home page" and other hand-created HTML pages for some trips. In 2004, I decided to start using .Text as a blogging system. I've used a variety of different technologies over the years.

.Text → WordPress → SquareSpace → Pelican → Jekyll → micro.blog

For nearly two decades, my blog has been my home on the Web. It is where I share my writing. It is where I record things I care about. There isn't a single story of my blog. There are hundreds. And that is what I love about it.

Having published for this long and now in my fifties, I think of my blog as one of my "life works." It is part of my long-term memory. It is part of how I want to leave an impact on the future.

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

"Creative process" is a pretty big word for my blogging. I tend to write on the fly when I find the energy and motivation flowing. My blogging is often things that happen in my life, stories I want to share, or my opinions. I don't do a lot of research, but I do make sure I add links to related websites.

Short posts I do right in the Micro.blog app. Longer posts I will write in Drafts. I typically author posts in one sitting. I prefer to do any final editing after the post is published. Longer posts I will often read the next day on my site and will make edits at that point.

I do have lists of blog posts I may want to write, and they are usually in OmniFocus in a "Create blog posts" project, or I will have a stub in Drafts in the "Blog/Ideas" tag. Most of these "ideas" never actually go anywhere. The posts that happen the most are the ones that I feel compelled to write about.

Building this need to write is something I recognized that Twitter was hurting. I'm not sure how to explain it, but over time, I feel compelled to write. I realized after a long time (too long) that blabbing 140 characters at a time on Twitter was scratching that same itch. Still, the outcome was just these blips of words disconnected from context. When I do less of that, the "urge to write" builds, and before I know it, I'm writing 1,000 words on something.

One last thing is I don't ever use "Drafts" in the blogging platform I'm using. I'm unsure why, but creating a draft in the system is like death for that post. It will never happen. For some reason, keeping that in the Drafts app or a list in OmniFocus works much better. I never use the Draft feature of micro.blog or other blogging systems.

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

For me it is less about the physical where (beyond basic comfort) and more about the when. My most prolific time for writing things of any length is on a weekend morning. Coffee nearby, everyone else still asleep, and the sun low in the sky. Usually, I'm on my laptop, but a desktop is fine. I'm nearly always going to be typing into Drafts. I have an outline I'm working to fill out.

The physical space can have an impact. If things are cluttered or distracting, that takes energy away. But that has a minor effect on me. It is all about energy, and that is most present in the morning for me.

That said, I'm okay writing at any other time, but I may prefer shorter or simpler things.

Mostly, "just write".

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

Here is my current setup for running my blog.

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

Having blogged for nearly two decades, I get asked for suggestions about how to start a blog, and my main point of advice is just one thing:

Just write.

Most people get hung up on "write about what?" I suggest writing about something they recently learned or experienced. Start as a journal and keep writing. Over time, you will find your voice and the topics or themes that resonate with you. But the most important thing is to write. Everything else is noise.

For folks who agree with the above, I have three suggestions.

First, embrace the KISS principle. Blogging platforms have a ton of options and customizations. I would ignore them all. One of the things I love about the modern pattern of using markdown and site generators is its simplicity. Customizations to a specific system are to be avoided, and for sure, ignore theme customizations. You will change themes, and you don't want any content dependencies.

Second, I've found Collections and Lists to be a fun thing on my blog. Like most blogging systems micro.blog allows for posts by date or pages using a manual structure. Collections are pages that I create to collect a set of blog posts together. You could think of them as a category, but they are usually time-bound events like a trip to Yellowstone. Having a page I can add content to and link to is a great way to curate a set of posts on something and add additional context about it. Lists use the same page function and are just various lists like a list of escape rooms, a list of words, and a list of POAP events I've created. Both of these pages are in the navigation of my site, and I've had people comment on how much they like them.

The last suggestion is to only have one site, one blog. This goes back to my main thing about "just write". Having multiple websites adds a decision point of "write where?". I find this question to be a big problem, and it stops me in my tracks. It's best to have only one place that you write so there is no decision.)

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?

Running thingelstad.com requires two things: a subscription to micro.blog and my domain name. I subscribe to the premium version of micro.blog more because I want to support the business than share videos, which is $100/year. I manage my domain registration with NameCheap, which is approximately $16/year. I also defensively own thinglestad.com (the most common misspelling of my name) and jamiethingelstad.com, which redirects, but that is an optional spend.

I love that micro.blog gives you an on-ramp to blogging for as low as $5/mo or $50 + domain name annually. That is a great deal.

I do not try to make money off of my blog at all. Like most bloggers, when affiliate stuff was big, I did try it. I even had a couple of hobby sites that I ran Google AdWords on. That was all before I developed as informed and vigorous a view on privacy as I do now. And in the early days, affiliate and ad networks were not the surveillance systems they are now.

I also do not have any analytics on my website.

My metaphor to think about all of this stuff is my home. I like to think of people visiting my blog as a digital version of somebody coming over for dinner or stopping by to visit. I do not give people who come to our house a unique identifier and follow them around after they leave. I don't provide them with coupons or ask if they bought the book we discussed. And I don't keep counters of how long they stay or if they "bounced" right after stopping by.

I want to respect the people who visit my site and respect their privacy, so I don't monetize any aspect of it and have no tracking codes at all.)

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

I must first recommend the blogs of Tammy and my kids, Mazie and Tyler. A long time ago, Tammy had a blog that she posted somewhat regularly with the delightful name "Smaller Than A Redwood." She took the site off the Web several years ago, and a couple years back I asked her if she would mind me resurrecting it back into micro.blog via the backup I took. She thought fine, and then, out of the blue this summer on our vacation, she made her first post in about 10 years.

I also set my kids up with their own blogs. All of them are on micro.blog. They don't post regularly, and I'm not pushing them. I'm vocal about my disdain for social media, and my kids have absorbed that opinion. Neither of them wants anything to do with those services. So we've set them up with a way to authentically publish online if or when the spirit moves them. They have it available to use as they wish.

Also, here are some bloggers that I particularly get excited about when I see a new item appear in my feed: Allen Pike, Om Malik, Tim Bray, Josh Bernoff, Fred Wilson, Rajiv Pant, Annie Mueller, Lee Zukor, David O'Hara, and Patrick Rhone.

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

Over 6 years ago, I decided to explore having a newsletter. I'd been blogging for 13 years then, so I had a consistent stream of things I was writing. I also had been a broad reader and curating links for years. I decided to bring those things as the core of the Weekly Thing. The name is a play on my last name, and it is weekly. I've published over 250 issues, and many people refer to the Weekly Thing as my "blog."

Publishing a newsletter has been an exciting journey and is similar to blogging but also very different. There is a reply mechanism that blogs don't have. There is no need for a feed reader to get to people. I like it and find it a great complement to my blog. I'm also honored to have over 1,400 people who have decided to let me into their mailbox. I don't know how many people subscribe to my RSS feed, but I suspect that the Weekly Thing is now the most common way people "subscribe" to my blog.

I also recently rebooted a fun hobby site of mine — Road Sign Math! This is a driving game we've played as a family for years. At one point, I had a complicated website running for it with multiple players and a leaderboard. I even transitioned it from a blog to a wiki. I took it and many other sites off the Web a long time ago, but mathematically significant road signs still delighted me, so I decided to bring it back with a reboot using micro.blog. It is a fun site, a great time on road trips, and my little contribution to keeping the Web weird.

I'd also put a plug out for book clubs. I've been in a book club for years with four other super-intelligent people, and reading and discussing books has been an incredible learning process and a great social connection. If you can be in a book club, leap at it. Or even better, start your own.

I love to learn and believe it is part of my purpose. I greatly enjoy (and subscribe) to two podcasts I learn from: Making Sense by Sam Harris and The Drive with Peter Attia. The Weekly Thing is my attempt to share my learning with others. Overall, the community of bloggers is a community of learners.

The thing I want to share the most, though, is gratitude. How fortunate I was to watch the Web coming to life when I was at the University of Minnesota in the early 1990's. How incredible it is to get to experience all of this technology. How lucky I am to be able to type on my laptop on a weekend morning and have those words appear anywhere in the world instantly. How honored that people actually read those words. And how my kid's kids and their descendants may even be able to read them after I'm gone.

That is truly remarkable, and I can't thank the Internet, the Web, and the amazing world it created enough.