Steven Garrity

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

Hi, I’m Steven Garrity. I live and work in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island on the east coast of Canada with my wife and three kids. I am the Creative Director at a web/app design & development agency called silverorange. I’ve been at silverorange for over 25 years and was one of the team of original founding partners. I’m a tired dad, I enjoy playing guitar, and have aspirations of writing / recording music.

What's the story behind your blog?

I started the Acts of Volition blog <conan-obrien-voice>in the year 2000</conan-obrien-voice> along with my two friends Rob & Matt. This was prime “start a blog” time, and I worked at a web development agency where we had the time and headspace to spin up our own simple blogging engine. I’m grateful to my much more capable colleagues who helped build the system and taught me a lot in the process.

Rob & Matt stuck around for a couple of years, but eventually drifted away from posting. I kept at it and eventually started to think about the site as my own blog (with appreciation for Matt & Rob’s contributions).

I just kept writing over the years. I wrote about whatever interested me. Music, the web, uninformed opinions that occur while in the shower, etc. I also like naming things after myself.

In the first ten years or so, it felt very much as though the blog was part of a ‘social network’ (in today’s terms) of other blogs. We read each other's blogs, commented on each other’s posts, and followed along with RSS feed readers.

Gradually, this blog-centered social networking was mostly replaced with centralized social networks, like Facebook and Twitter. I bristled at the idea of giving control of my own writing and thoughts to a privately-owned centralized system, and so never participated in any significant way in any social networks until Mastodon came along (and even then, only casually).

After most of the conversations moved to Twitter, I kept writing on the blog, mostly for my own sake. These days I write less frequently, but I still appreciate having an outlet for my writing.

I also made a music podcast, Acts of Volition Radio, published through the site. From 2003-2009, I recorded a podcast with music recommendations. I never really ‘finished’ it and hold out vague dreams of adding new episodes, even though it’s been over 15 years (!?) since the last episode. I don’t think I could continue the same format, where I played full songs that I didn’t own, without figuring out the ownership/payment/legal issues.

I do occasionally write/publish on the silverorange blog about more work-related items as well.

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

I do a lot of writing and have a lot of creative freedom in my work at silverorange. I have found that having a great job that I love has met many of the creative needs that might have pushed me to write more on a blog, or to other creative outlets.

I’m a bit embarrassed to hold the dubious title of most-frequent poster in our company Slack. To spare my co-workers as much as possible, when an idea strikes me and I think to post it on Slack, I try to stop and ask myself if it’s something specific to our company. If it’s not, I try to redirect it to the blog.

I generally have two types of posts:

1. The carefully drafted post: This is something I may think about for weeks or months. I may have a draft I pick at occasionally. These tend to be longer posts with more structure. It’s not like I’m writing for The Atlantic - but they aren’t just tweet-level think-and-post pieces. For example, my post about the design of license plates in my province, or about my favourite guitar.

2. The quick ‘write & publish’ posts: These tend to be short and rich with typos. I try to minimize the process behind these posts, aiming to get them out while they are fresh in my mind.

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

I’m pretty good at ignoring my physical surroundings while working. At the start of the pandemic, I set up an old card table in an already crowded bedroom, and for better and for worse was able to disappear into work easily each day even though I was surrounded by laundry, chores, and general life distractions.

I’ve now got a much better setup with my ideal home office. It’s bright, climate-controlled, has a comfortable desk/chair and a sofa, and also houses my guitars. As far as a physical location and setup, I’m swimming in privilege. That said, I do associate this desk setup with ‘work’, so I will sometimes bring the laptop to the couch for a change of pace.

I think the people around you influence your creativity. In that respect, a lot of my thoughts end up in our company Slack. Working remotely, as I do, there’s much less opportunity for meandering lunch conversation that can be fertile ground for blog post ideas.

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

The blog was originally hosted on a custom blogging CMS we affectionately called “blorgy”. It was built on some open-source frameworks we had developed at silverorange. There was an early version written in ColdFusion, and we then migrated it to PHP.

After a decade or so, we were moving on to more modern frameworks. I decided to migrate the blog to Wordpress, as it seemed like (and maybe still is) the closest thing to an industry standard format for a blog. If I ever want to migrate to another platform (which I do think about occasionally), Wordpress feels like a system that will be well supported in terms of import/export options.

I use a cheap web host that I don’t want to plug, because it’s a cesspool of upselling. I’d like to find a host that’s a bit less of a bargain-basement service, but to be fair, this one has been stable (and cheap).

My general goals for the tech setup are to not get stuck with any one vendor or platform. With some care to preserve URL structure, I could change the CMS or point the domain to a new host without much disruption.

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

Though it’s a bit of a discouraging thought, I probably wouldn’t start a blog today. I’m glad I have Acts of Volition as an occasional outlet, but the energy to create it initially was easier to come by 25 years ago.

Imagining I did start anew today though, I wouldn’t be starting a multi-author blog, as Acts of Volition was initially. I’d likely explore a static-site-builder approach, or the Ghost platform. When I first started the blog, I wanted absolute control over every aspect of the site. These days, I’d be a bit more content to let a good service handle some of the details for me as long as the domain name remained my own.

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?

The costs to keep the blog alive come down to two hard costs (hosting & domain) and then my own time. The domain name is registered with Hover (which I’m quite pleased with) for about $20/year (Canadian). The hosting is with a cheap-o host for about $150/year (Canadian).

If I could put up with the pain-in-the-neck, I’d find a host less interested in upselling add-ons I don’t need.

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

I thought I’d have dozens of blogs to recommend, but when I looked at my list of subscriptions in Feedbin (which I love), there were a lot of dead or stagnant feeds. I do feel like I’m a part of an alumni class of bloggers from a few (online) generations ago. Quite understandably, many of us have other creative outlets and draws on our energy than we did when we were younger.

My first recommendation is my friend Peter Rukavina. We both live in Charlottetown and have had many meandering lunch conversations turn into blog posts. I was delighted to see Peter has already been featured on P&B.

I enjoy the Shoptalk Show podcast (about web design & development). Chris Coyier has already been featured here, but I’d recommend talking to co-host Dave Rupert as well.

I love the visual polish and interactive examples that Josh W. Comeau builds into his blog.

He doesn’t publish frequently, but I’ll read anything that James Long posts online.

One of my colleagues at silverorange has a great blog: Maureen Holland.

It’s inevitably self-promotional, but I do love sharing writing duties with my colleagues at silverorange on our silverorange blog. My friend Kristen’s post, Be Kind, is one we reference often.

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

I will leave you with a suggested question to ask other blog writers: What will happen to your blog after you’re gone? I ask because I don’t have a good answer for this. I don’t think anything I’ve written is critical for future generations, but I’d also like my eventual great-grand-kids to be able to read a bit about how their old great-grand-dad saw the world (if they care to).

Ideally, I’d like to not have my blog just turn into link-rot, but I also don’t want to burden my family with tech debt either. I’d love to hear how others plan to address their digital legacy, if at all.

I would also just like to reinforce the value of writing as a tool to shape our own thoughts, and as a means to build shared understanding with others.