Riccardo Mori

This week on the People and Blogs series we have an interview with Riccardo Mori, whose blog can be found at morrick.me.

Tired of the browser? Follow P&B using RSS or sign up for the newsletter.

The People and Blogs series is supported by Frank Meeuwsen and the other 122 members of my "One a Month" club. If you enjoy P&B, consider becoming one.

Become a supporter

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

Hi everyone, I’m Riccardo Mori. When it’s time to introduce myself, I rarely deviate from what you can read in the About Me page on my website, mostly because I did my best there to condense so much information in a few paragraphs. Anyway, I’m from Italy but I permanently relocated to Spain almost 20 years ago. I’m a writer — I write about technology, design, user interfaces and usability, but I also write fiction. While I wish writing were my one and only job, the daily bread is currently provided by my work as freelance translator and localisation specialist.

My educational background is rooted in the liberal arts. During my university years, I focused on philology, Italian and English literature, and art history. While I was in uni I also did some theatre, both as an actor and also as a dramatist, but that was a brief experience. Something that lasted a bit longer were reading performances, where I used to read some of my poetry in front of a live audience. There were also specific pieces I wrote for specific performances where I was accompanied by jazz musicians. I also did some book designing work and I even worked at an advertising agency for a relatively brief period of time.

How did I end up doing what I do today? Well, my fascination with computers started at a young age, in the early 1980s (yeah, this is sort of an age reveal, haha), and towards the end of that decade I was involved with DTP (Desktop Publishing) and the Macintosh as my primary platform. I had been wanting an Apple computer for a long time, but back then those machines were really out of my and my family’s budget. Having the opportunity to use them for work was a blast. My first workstation was a Macintosh SE with a laser printer and a handheld black-and-white scanner. But I had to wait until 1993 to finally be able to have a Mac all for myself. Up until then, it was essentially PC at home, and Mac at work. Which actually was kind of cool, because I was learning a lot of things about both platforms.

So, as my technical experience grew during the 1990s, I started doing some freelance work as ‘tech support guy’ and consultant. At the same time, I was equally busy on the literary side: between the late 1980s and early 1990s I wrote a lot of poetry and short stories, and in 1993 I started Laboratorio Quillink (The Quillink Workshop), later renamed Quillink Press, a sort of small design & print centre aimed at publishing and distributing my own and other people’s works, which soon became the official brand for all my self-published material.

Since I had been studying English since the age of 4, by this time I was quite proficient and fluent in it, so I did some literary translations as well. Then I was commissioned a few technical translations for computer magazines, and eventually I started freelancing as technical translator (this was late 2000-early 2001). I was a collaborator of Macworld Italia magazine for the better part of the 2000s. Another thing I’m proud of is that in the years 2001-2010, I translated into Italian Bruce Schneier’s Crypto-Gram, free monthly newsletter providing summaries, analyses, insights, and commentary on security. By the way, I strongly recommend subscribing to it and following Schneier’s work if you care about cybersecurity and security in general (and in today’s world, you definitely should care about this stuff).

After relocating to Spain and learning Spanish, I extended my translation services to include Spanish as well. For the past 8 years or so, my translation work has for the most part shifted towards localisation, which means providing translations for software applications and interfaces; and this has its own set of challenges, as you don’t simply translate text from a language to another. You often have to work with UI constraints, and you have to translate following a specific context with its own rules, which may change from project to project.

I really hope this doesn’t come across as me bragging about all the things I’ve done… The truth is, there are people who, right from the start, have a clear idea of what they will do in their lives, and they work relentlessly towards that goal. I’m not one of those people. Sure, I knew I wanted to be a writer, and I worked hard to be a good writer, but I soon realised that writing was simply not enough to make a living. I’ve always been a curious person, obsessed with learning stuff and expanding my knowledge. All the things I’ve mentioned here — and, believe me, I left out a lot of other stuff — just reflect this kind of hunger, and also the need to find my path in life.

When you have so many interests, you end up having a lot of hobbies too, but since this is getting long already, I’ll just briefly mention photography, vintage technology and devices, typography, watches and horology in general, music and gaming. Of course I don’t have enough time to be a real nerd in any of these sectors (apart maybe from photography, which is something I cultivated since the 1980s, in film and digital format), so I’ll typically go through these in a sort of rotation, with periods where I’m more into typography, or watches, or old computers, etc. You get the idea.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started writing online in 1998, but at first my contributions were limited to mailing lists and Usenet newsgroups. In 2001 I opened an account on LiveJournal, and kept a sort of hybrid between blog and journal for many years there. In its early years, LiveJournal was a fantastic social network, deeper and more meaningful than anything that came after, like Facebook, Twitter or Tumblr. I have ‘met’ people there I still correspond with after all these years; people whom I consider good personal friends and not just Internet acquaintances.

The years between circa 2000 and 2007 saw a real boom for the blog as a form of personal expression, and I was fascinated. So much quality writing, so many interesting subjects, so many interesting people, especially in the tech sphere. But before WordPress came about, having a personal blog meant doing almost everything by hand. Registering a domain, paying for Web hosting, and knowing your HTML (and later CSS and JavaScript) to craft your own website. I didn’t have that expertise, and I didn’t know where to begin. When Apple launched iTools — the first iteration of what would become MobileMe and then iCloud — one of the service’s features was giving each user a small personal Web space (HomePage) to publish online. My first official tech blog was published there using a mediocre Mac application called BlogWave Studio. This was around late 2004-early 2005. It was mostly in Italian.

It was bare-bones, slow to load, clunky to publish. When WordPress arrived in 2006 (if I remember well), that changed everything. I opened an account on WordPress.com (the free blogging service) and published my ‘proper’ tech blog in Italian there from late 2005 to 2010. It was called Autoritratto con mele (“Self-portrait with apples”) to mean it was about tech from the perspective of an Apple user.

To reach a wider audience, and taking advantage of how easy publishing with WordPress was, I started a tech blog in English around 2007, called The Quillink Observer. Having two separate blogs seemed a good idea at the time. I could provide articles and insights for both my Italian audience, and the wider English-speaking audience at large.

But then I started yet another blog in 2008, to specifically talk about my passion for vintage Macs, vintage software and technology in general. It was aptly called System Folder. It’s still accessible, but sadly these past years I’ve only had very little time to update it.

At this point, however, properly maintaining three main blogs was becoming a little too much work. So in 2011 I finally decided to merge Autoritratto con mele and The Quillink Observer into one website featuring articles in both English and Italian. I also decided it was time to own my identity, so I launched morrick.me by registering and paying for the domain and for the Web hosting, and using WordPress as content management system because it was the one I was most familiar with, and still one of the most flexible.

When I was ready to launch my website/blog, I tried hard to find a name that could be catchy and also could really encapsulate my identity. But the few decent names I came up with just weren’t good enough, so my blog’s title is simply my name.

As for the writing style and my main source of inspiration: it was John Gruber and his Daring Fireball blog, initially. He has certainly inspired a lot of tech bloggers and writers over the years, and I have enjoyed his production for a long time. Lately, however, I feel he has lost a lot of his initial objectivity and what I call ‘critical grip’ by being a bit too close to Apple.

At the time of writing, my main blog is 13 years old, and it has gone through three major visual redesigns. Every time I changed its look, it was mostly due to strictly technical reasons: the blog’s WordPress theme was no longer supported, the theme creator couldn’t keep up with WordPress’ updates, and things started to break. At first I tried salvaging the whole theme structure by heavily editing chunks of CSS myself, but it was too cumbersome, and ultimately too fragile. Switching to a better-maintained WordPress theme was more efficient. The one I’m currently using is a paid theme by a small company called ElmaStudio, it’s still maintained, and it’s simple enough to not interfere too much with the platform updates WordPress routinely puts out.

You can see how my blog looked in 2011, and read about other trivia (like the evolution of my identity logo) in an article I published in 2021, 10 years of morrick.me.

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

I remember one tech blogger writing, many years ago, that the secret of a successful blog was to ‘show up every day, no matter what’. I appreciate those who do, those who indeed publish daily or almost daily on their blogs. But it’s just not my style. It’s not bad advice, but to me it feels like business advice. And for me, having a blog isn’t a business endeavour. I have a blog because I want to share knowledge and perspectives. It’s because I want to communicate whenever I feel I have something to say. Consequently, I only publish when I have something to say. As I wrote in a past article, for something to appear on my blog, three main conditions have to be fulfilled:

  1. I have something to talk about, something to say.
  2. I feel I have something useful to add to the conversation.
  3. I have time and will to commit to writing and publishing a piece.

I typically apply these rules/conditions strictly, that’s why I generally update my blog 1-3 times per month, sometimes less.

Ideas for articles may come from what’s currently being debated in tech; some important product or innovation that’s been introduced; some product I discovered and I’m satisfied with, which I feel I should review to let more people know about it; some particular user interface that’s worth talking about or criticising (be it the UI of an app, of an operating system, of an appliance, etc.); more general themes regarding technology and its impact on our lives; things like these. And I tend to do my homework before speaking. I don’t like to just talk about something because I feel I have to have an opinion on everything — like a lot of people do today, sadly.

As for the writing and the tools, my workflow is rather simple:

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

Not really. Whenever I’m writing an article I want to publish on my blog, I typically have a clear idea of what I want to talk about and how I want to talk about it. I’ve written pretty much everywhere — though I will admit I prefer to have a quiet environment around me. I write best at home, at dead of night.

Also, the tools I favour for writing are pen and paper, and traditional computers — sometimes even vintage computers, like one of my old ThinkPads, or my 2008 black MacBook running Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard. These are less distracting environments than iPads and iPhones for me.

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

Both the process of registering the website and providing Web hosting were handled by a dear friend of mine on my behalf. So I don’t exactly know where the domain is registered. Web hosting is provided by bluehost.com, which I would say it’s a pretty reliable service. I only experienced a couple of hiccups in thirteen years. And as mentioned above, I use WordPress as CMS.

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

No, not really. Maybe the only thing I would do differently would be to avoid free solutions and avoid publishing on Web spaces I don’t own. I would start immediately with having a personal website, hosting, etc. Which is the exact piece of advice I would give to anyone who wants to start seriously blogging today. Use free solutions if you just want to publish something online occasionally and don’t care much about owning your identity. I still think WordPress is the best option because the company has reached a ‘too big to fail’ level by now.

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 currently have to pay for two registered domains, and the Web hosting (which is shared between the two). The whole operation costs me about €100-120 annually. My blog doesn’t generate revenue, apart from the occasional donation, and what little I make by selling my two books of short stories (advertised in the footer of my website). Since I have a job, I don’t need to monetise my blog. Some people told me I should do it anyway, because ‘you never know’, but I currently see no way to monetise it apart from resorting to a) advertising, and b) putting some content behind a paywall. And I hate both options.

I hate what advertising has become online. I hate that today if you want a great browsing experience, you need to install all kinds of ad-blockers. And I don’t want to subject my readers to all that crap. You can visit my website with all blockers and trackers disabled, there’s pretty much nothing going on in the background apart from some basic WordPress analytics.

And since my blog is not a news outlet and I don’t have to pay anyone, putting what I write behind a paywall makes no sense to me. I don’t want to divide my audience into a privileged tier and a free-for-all tier. Nor do I want to create special content for ‘patrons’ that is invisible to everyone else.

Time ago I tried a new spin on a consolidated formula, and I called that the Small Fish sponsorship. As I mention on the relevant page of my website:

…The spirit behind this is simple: I’m (still) a small fish compared to other prominent tech-oriented blogs and websites, and I can’t offer their kind of traffic or visibility. Thus what I ask in return is relatively modest compared to those blogs. [€450 for a week-long slot] Still, if a sponsor has a particularly compelling product to offer, what I can provide is potentially more than just a mention and a thank you.

It hasn’t had much of a success, so far, but I’m not complaining. I thought it was an option worth offering. For now, I’m happy with the way things are: I provide free content, and if you really appreciate something I wrote, or you found it particularly useful or illuminating, you can send a donation or purchase my books — they’re only $1.99 each.

Do I like people monetising their blogs and content? I guess it depends on how they do it, what they offer, the quality of such content, and so forth. As a reader, I tend to favour those creators who find a way to monetise their content that doesn’t influence the content itself. I mean, finding sponsors is great, but when your production is constantly sponsored, I start wondering about your objectivity. I generally appreciate those creators who manage to monetise what they do, what they write, by clearly separating the content from the money. An easy example: those who offer cool merchandise as a way to support them. Perhaps it’s not the greatest way to make money, but if you write tech reviews and you have a little e-store with t-shirts, mugs, desk accessories, etc., it’s very likely that I won’t question your integrity when I read the stuff you publish.

Another way to monetise content that’s quite popular today is to use Patreon. It’s not a bad idea, but again, it depends on how the creator embeds it in their production. Some people use it in its simplest form: Support me on Patreon. There are no particular perks, just different tiers for support, from the bare minimum to fan-level support. Others do the same, but also offer some perks if you pick higher tiers of patronage. I’m fine with these options. What I don’t like is using Patreon as a way to basically paywall your content. Like those ‘free’ apps you download from the App Store, which are barely functional in their free default state, and start being useful when you either make an in-app purchase or, worse, activate a subscription.

If 90% of what you offer is a ‘secret’ unless people become patrons, I can’t even evaluate how good (or bad) your stuff is without at least paying you once (by becoming a patron for one month, then cancelling in case I don’t like what I see).

There isn’t anyone in particular I’m supporting in the blog community on a regular basis. But I have shown support for different people in different ways at different times. By purchasing something via an affiliate link. By purchasing an app if the blogger in question is also a developer. By sending donations in difficult moments when the blogger specifically asked for it. By purchasing some merchandise. You get the idea.

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

Over the years, I’ve become increasingly selective with whom I read. There are a few prominent names in this short list, and chances are you already know them or they’ve already been mentioned by people you’ve previously interviewed. Anyway, here goes:

Other blogs I enjoy:

Picking a person from this list for your next interview is hard, as I’m tempted to just tell you to try contacting them all. I’d give precedence to Nick Heer, Michael Tsai and Lucio Bragagnolo if you haven’t interviewed them already. They’re all busy people, but they’re also approachable and amiable, so perhaps they’ll play along.

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

I’ll start with a little shameless self-promotion: I’ve written two books of short stories, which I call ‘Minigrooves’. They’re available on Apple’s Books Store and on the Amazon Kindle Store.

I’m currently working on a science-fiction novel called Low Fidelity, a project I started so many years ago. I’ve been working on it for a long time, not because it’s a particularly monumental work (although it’ll be comprised of more than one book), but because I’ve alternated periods of intense inspiration and periods of low tide where life and my main job took extreme precedence over it. You can read a bit more about Low Fidelity on this page at the Crosslines/Low Fidelity website. (That website is a bit old and may contain outdated information, so navigate the rest of it at your risk, haha).

With all this out of the way, here’s a brief list of books I recommend. I won’t add any commentary, because otherwise this interview would never end. It’s enough to say that these are all good food for the mind.

Fiction:

Non-fiction:

While I may listen to specific podcast episodes if they come strongly recommended, I’m currently not subscribed to any podcast. To be honest, I don’t particularly like the medium, but it’s mostly a ‘me’ problem. There are people who are capable of listening to podcasts while doing something else. I can do that with music, but with the spoken word, it gets complicated, especially for someone like me who has to read and write a lot for work.

To properly enjoy a podcast, I would have to just sit and listen to it. And many podcasts — particularly tech-oriented ones — are made of episodes lasting well over one hour and a half each. I just don’t have the time. I also think that it’s a bit disrespectful to commandeer the audience’s time by producing extremely long podcast episodes.

I shall end my response and this interview with a short list of games that I’ve found to be unique in one way or another. Everyone’s taste in games is different, so I’ll just offer their titles and people can check them out on their preferred platform (Steam, Epic Games, etc.). Not all of these are available for the Mac, unfortunately:

Thank you, Manuel, for contacting me and giving me the opportunity to talk about myself and share all this information. All the best, and let’s keep in touch!