A Journey Back to Enjoying Web Development and Personal Blogging

Bob Dunn:
Hey, Bob here. Welcome to Open Channels FM. We are continuing our Open Tabs series under Channel 4. And as you know, I usually bring somebody in. And we talk about what their open tab is, kind of what’s on their mind, what’s on their computer, what’s anywhere, because there’s tabs everywhere, I think. And today we have a good friend, Simon Kraft. So what’s on your mind, Simon?

Simon Kraft:
I actually have a literal open tab. Yes, yes, it’s insane. I did something last week, and I think it can be like the beginning of a nice arc that we can walk through. So bear with me, okay? I will show Bob something which is super unhelpful for anyone else. But Bob, look at this. I had something commissioned to be done for me.

Bob Dunn:
Oh, cool.

Simon Kraft:
I paid money to a real artist doing real art, like a human, not AI.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah.

Simon Kraft:
Which I think these days is an insane thing to do, but it’s so, so lovely.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. So describe that for what I just looked at.

Simon Kraft:
Yeah, I give the backstory and then it will make more sense. So ever since, oh, 2015, I’ve been writing a WordPress newsletter, like a weekly newsletter in German. It’s really good. People like it. It’s because it’s very me. You know, I don’t pull my punches usually. And I say things how I see them. And I send it out every Monday morning. So the first thing people see in their inboxes when they come to work, which I know we all love doing on Mondays, is this newsletter. And ever since I inherited it from another guy, Sergey Mueller, lovely, lovely person, left the WordPress ecosystem. 10-ish years ago. And I inherited from him like that newsletter and that newsletter’s icon logo, whatever. And there was a red envelope with like a piece of paper sticking out of it. And I’ve been staring at this thing for 10-ish years now, always thinking this is the blandest logo I could ever have. And it annoyed me so much. So I reached out to this lovely artist. Her name is HeyHeyMomo, and she draws these lovely, lovely comics with what she calls little dudes. So this— it’s a little frog that’s friends with some other little things. And I love her style. It’s a bit quirky. It’s quirky and like not super refined. It’s very rough shapes and all the things have lovely little faces. So I reached out to her and was like, hey, I have this very boring logo or icon and I need a fun little envelope dude. So that’s exactly what she did. She drew the version of that envelope With a smiley face, big red cheeks, and it is insanely cute.

Bob Dunn:
It is cool. Trust me, everyone. In fact, I’ll have to put a picture or put the graphic on there just for everybody can enjoy as much as we just did.

Simon Kraft:
Feels like this will be kind of a soft launch for that new envelope.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, it does.

Simon Kraft:
So, but the bigger arc that I’m trying to get at is I’ve been on a, I don’t want to call it spiritual journey, but it slightly feels like it for about a year and a half now. You know, back in the day, I built WordPress websites myself and did that for customers, did that for myself in the first place, learned all the stuff, made all the mistakes, whatever. And on my way to becoming like a proper grown-up professional person in this world and had to like start making money and stuff like that. I kind of lost the joy of working on websites. And at some point I stopped making websites even for customers. I like left the more developer-y kind of our craft and moved, pun intended, moved to the product side. I’m a product manager now, which is way more fun than it sounds. But on New Year’s Day, 2025, I sat down, was like, okay, I will get my stuff together now and have like a proper website for myself because I’m a serious person. But also I want to have as much fun with it as possible.

Bob Dunn:
All right.

Simon Kraft:
So I started just tinkering around with my website, which is the best domain, by the way, and shameless self-plug, simon.blog. And I looked at all the lovely stuff that Matthias Pfefferle, one of your hosts, does with the indie web, with ActivityPub, a whole can of worms. We won’t get into that here, I think. We only have so much time. But I started putting all of these little things together, and while doing that, really enjoyed the process. And for the first time in years, really enjoyed building websites again. And that is something I try now to bring to all the stuff I do, like figuring out, hey, what’s a fun thing that can just spice up my day-to-day a bit? And that logo is one of those things.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, yeah, I totally get it because, well, and it’s not necessarily, it’s a different path for me in the sense that I pivot so much. I mean, God, 20 years in WordPress or something, I’ve just done everything. And when I do it, I do it. I don’t, there isn’t some long-term plan. I don’t say, oh, I’m gonna pivot to this. What is my 5-year plan? I’m going to pivot to this and what will I do tomorrow? That’s about my future planning. I’m really terrible at future planning. And I can totally relate because it’s the same, but it’s different because I always, even with the site, you know, this site here, I’m always finding something different to do. And it isn’t because, oh, just drudgery, I got to do this. It’s like, oh, kind of, this would be cool. I think this would be a cool little addition. Maybe people will notice it, maybe not or something. And Yeah, I get it. And I was just going to add a little story because it was interesting when you talked about quitting building sites. And I did build sites, long history back, tried to build sites in Flash and all that stuff. Because I was a print designer and I did these horrible things for a long time, found WordPress, blah, blah, blah. But when I got to the point where I thought, ’cause I called myself a designer, not a developer. You know, I’d build a WordPress site, but I was more into the design part of it and understood it a bit better. But I decided to quit it. And I said, I’m just tired. I’m tired of working with clients. I’m tired with whatever. And so I just called it quits. And that was around, oh, I think 2014 or so. And I remember this was so interesting because I just quit it, no more. Somebody come and begged me, literally. They had somebody they knew that needed a site.

Simon Kraft:
Wow.

Bob Dunn:
They said, you would be perfect for it. And this guy was a radiologist at a hospital. And on the side, he made films and he did writing. And he did this bit of a documentary. And he just enjoyed doing it on the side. And he wanted to do a site for that. And they said, would you consider doing it? And I thought, well, maybe just one more. And usually that’s a mistake you make. But actually, this guy was like, you know, we talked about it. I explained what I couldn’t do, what I can do, you know, some of the things you might want done, you’ll have to go to somebody else and ask, especially more on the development side of things. And he said, cool. And I gave him a quote. And he said, yeah, sounds good. And every time I asked him something or gave him an opinion or said, you know, I think you could use this plugin because we need to do this. Can you go ahead and purchase this? Yeah, if we need it, we’ll do it. He was like the perfect client. He loved everything. If I told him I couldn’t do something, he said, great, I’ll put it on the list and maybe you can help me find somebody to do these other things when we’re done. And we went through the process. It was really painless. And at the end he says, this is great. You’ve done everything you promised. You delivered it. I’m happy. You know, who do you recommend now for these final touches? And he paid me. Well, he actually paid me in advance, I think, and that was it. So it was like my final client I eked out was possibly the best client I ever had, and that did not change my mind about design. I thought, I’m gonna get out of it while the going’s good, you know.

Simon Kraft:
That sounds like a perfect way to end, end that kind of work.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah.

Simon Kraft:
That’s lovely. Also, probably a once-in-a-lifetime client.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, that’s it. There was never a client like that in my entire life. Do you have any specific content you write about, or you write about what you want, just what’s on your mind? What are you—

Simon Kraft:
Oh, you mean my personal blog?

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, your personal blog.

Simon Kraft:
Oh, that’s one of the problems I try to solve. And I think I did an okay enough job doing it. So on average, in over the last, for however many years I had this domain, let’s say it’s 7 to 8 years. I don’t know when .blog started, but I was there from the beginning. Managed to squeeze out like a blog post or 2 a year. Because First of all, I have a lot of websites and I can post in a lot of places. So my blog was not the first that came to mind. And then second of all, you might know that writer’s dilemma kind of thing. You look at the blank page and your brain is just like, nope.

Bob Dunn:
Exactly.

Simon Kraft:
That was a real issue with that. And I always felt like I had to be perfect. That’s a general me thing. I’m a perfectionist to a fault. It’s really bad, especially as a person that like puts stuff out there, always being like, no, no, it’s not a good character trait. And my way around that was, first of all, I over-engineered the whole blog now. It’s lovely. It has all the bells and whistles you could possibly think of. And I can go into detail of all the plugins I’ve built for it because it’s glorious.

Bob Dunn:
Oh, you built a bunch of plugins for it. Yes.

Simon Kraft:
A whole zoo of plugins. I started really, really slow though with a custom post type, which is something you can do in WordPress, as you know. It’s a microblog because I wanted something that is kind of like typical social media post, but I own it. I own all of it, like start to end. And then because I’m a madman, I imported all my old Instagram posts.

Bob Dunn:
Hmm.

Simon Kraft:
And I was like, oh, it would be lovely if I had post formats. Post formats is a thing in WordPress we had for a couple of years and then it went quietly into the background and it’s still in a corner somewhere, but nobody talks about it anymore. But you can tell WordPress, hey, this is an image, or this is a gallery, or this is a quote. And if your theme supports it, you can have different styles for these things, which is so cool and so much fun. So I did that, and I imported all my old LinkedIn posts— not LinkedIn, all my old Instagram posts. I went through them one by one, like republished them as micro blog posts in my site, wrote alt texts for all of them. So they’re like accessible, wrote titles for all of them. So they’re proper posts. Took me a couple of weeks. And then—

Bob Dunn:
Just 2 weeks?

Simon Kraft:
No, no, no. My whole life is run on to-do lists. So I had like a repeating task, like do 10 Instagram posts today. And I went through all of them over 3 or 4 weeks. And because that was such a fun process, I did the same thing with all my old tweets. You can download all your tweets if you leave that hellscape of a website at some point. It’s a great experience, can recommend it. And import them into WordPress with a bit of magic. So I imported them also into my microblog custom post type and sorted through them. And I deleted, I don’t know, 5K. And I kept 300 in the end because turns out I was a bit of a jerk on Twitter and I didn’t care for that anymore. So I populated all of that stuff into my site. And now I can just when I feel like it, write a bit of a note kind of micro post on my site, and that took all the pressure off of my shoulders to write proper blog posts. So now I do the thing we all are supposed to do if you go to WordCamps, write about the WordCamp when you go to WordCamp. I have a new book coming up. It’s in German. No one of your listeners will care for it, but I will write about that as well. So it’s quite personal. It’s about stuff that happens to me. It’s mostly WordPressy stuff. It’s going to be a bit more product stuff going forward. But yeah, that’s the stuff I do on that blog.

Bob Dunn:
Very cool. I love it. You know, it occurred to me, one of the things I wanted to ask you when you were talking about your new, you know, logo or your new— for your site.

Simon Kraft:
Envelope dude.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. Yeah. So what we’re looking at right now is you made the decision to have somebody do this. You didn’t go in and play around with it yourself, or you didn’t go in and have AI, hey, AI, can you do whatever? Was it part of that journey you were having that you thought, I need a human to actually create this like it was meant to be? You know what I mean? Was there something that just drew you to, I’ve got to— this time I’m going to do this and I’m going to have somebody do it for me?

Simon Kraft:
First of all, I didn’t do it myself because I’m crap at designing stuff. I have really strong opinions about how stuff should look. But I’m so bad implementing them myself. And that’s really painful. I cannot recommend.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, okay. That is, that’s not.

Simon Kraft:
So that was out of the question and not a chance. And I mean, that artist is someone I’ve followed for some time. I literally in my message to them was like, longtime fan, first-time caller. So that was the human touch I was really, really looking forward to. And just throwing at AI, I don’t think AI has a place in art, so to say. That’s something, if we automate all the things, art maybe shouldn’t be where we start with it.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, right.

Simon Kraft:
Let’s go for taxes first, and then we can talk about art in a couple of hundred years. Thank you very much. So I think that was the only way I could have I could have gone to get something like that.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, yeah. I, in our business before I even got into WordPress, we had a marketing design business for 17 years. And that’s what was one of my specialties was doing logos. I’m not really a good artist, but I was able to digitally work on, and that back then it was, you know, it took some time and you would do these month-long projects with some company that wants a logo and you would get easily 5 figures for it and stuff.

Simon Kraft:
What kind of software did you use for that?

Bob Dunn:
I used— so this was in the era of desktop publishing and I probably used Illustrator or whatever it was before. Was there something before Illustrator? But it was very fine-tuning. I mean, you would, you know, yeah, it wasn’t just, okay, I’m going to put these 3 parts together. So I did that for a long time till you could— a lot of people could go online and get something for fairly cheap at these, like I said, the bogo.com or something. That probably exists.

Simon Kraft:
Bogo.com.

Bob Dunn:
And yeah. And so I decided like late around 2000, Well, it was actually 2010 when we closed down that business. A couple years before that, I decided I’m not doing logos anymore ’cause it’s just not worth it because most companies are gonna go that route. I kind of lost that skill as time went by because I wasn’t doing it that much. I do my own things, but it got worse and worse, everything I did. And it was like, oh my God, you know, this is horrifying.

Simon Kraft:
Yeah.

Bob Dunn:
Since I’ve been doing more artwork with the podcast, doing podcast covers and like that, because I do a lot of different stuff, I’ve been using Canva, which I like because I do have some control. I can pull elements in and create my own. Sometimes it takes longer because I’m trying to get exactly what is in my brain. I’m not probably quite as picky as you, but I’m— or else I would be way behind right now.

Simon Kraft:
Story of my life.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, exactly. But let’s see, what direction do we want to go with all this? Do you want to talk a bit about all the plugins? I mean, was it like, I need this, I build it, I need this, I build it, I need this, I build it?

Simon Kraft:
When I explain to people what I do if I’m not doing WordPress stuff, I always say I’m really bad at hobbies. And if I find a hobby that is worth calling a hobby, I’m really good at productizing that at some point. I don’t know what’s wrong with me. We’re all still trying to figure that out.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, I agree. Not with you, with myself. Forget about that.

Simon Kraft:
So that was more or less my approach. I looked at it and was like, oh, it would be cool if I had this or that on my site. Hmm. And then I thought about it for a bit and decided, yeah, I can just make a plugin for it because why not? And I think it started quite harmlessly. Do you remember, or maybe you even use it still, Amazon wishlist, the Amazon wishlist feature?

Bob Dunn:
Mm-hmm.

Simon Kraft:
Where you, Add stuff to your wishlist on Amazon, and I can swoop in and be like, oh, this is a cool book. Yes, I’ll buy it for Bob. And then Amazon sends it to you, and I pay for it, and it gets— it is for other people seeing your wishlist, it’s hidden, but you can still see it is on your wishlist. So the surprise isn’t ruined for you. Well, my birthday was coming up, and the thing is, my family always asks, like, hey, what can we give you? Is there something you would like? And as a very meticulous person, I think we established that already. I’m a madman. I have very, very clear ideas of nice things I would like to have, and they are very specific. So it’s always a big pain to tell people, yes, I would like I don’t know, looking at things around me, a new mouse, but it has to be this specific mouse.

Bob Dunn:
Okay.

Simon Kraft:
So I was like, okay, I need a wishlist. I looked through all the wishlist plugins for WordPress. Turns out they’re all for WooCommerce, which is cool. And I’m sure they’re cool plugins. I had no intention of setting up my own WooCommerce store just to have a wishlist on my website. So I built my own and it works just like the one for Amazon, except that I can throw all the links in there and it can be whatever shop or it even can be like, oh, go to your local whatever market and buy it there. It’s fine. And you can then say, yeah, I bought it and it’s hidden for other users, but I cannot see that. Oh, that’s kind of cool. It’s kind of cool.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah. Yeah, it is. That’s a good idea.

Simon Kraft:
You know, that was my entry drug. Yeah. I don’t even have that public on my website. So let me unlock my computer to actually see what else, because I forgot I forget all this stuff all the time.

Simon Kraft:
The next thing I was using, and that’s not just for my personal site, but I was using a plugin that generates, like, based on the title of the site and some title of the content you’re linking to, a sharing image, like an Open Graph sharing image. The thing that is shown when I send you a link in iMessage or WhatsApp or whatever, or posted on social media. And that plugin broke because it wasn’t maintained anymore. So I built my own. It’s Image Socializer, which I thought was a hilarious name. And it does the same thing in some very clever ways. That’s actually something I will put on GitHub at some point, because I thought it was a really, really fun thing. When I When I say I built plugins for myself, they are like ridiculously polished? Like the interface is really nice? Because I’m such a visual person and I don’t use software if the logo is ugly or the interface is ugly. No matter how good the software might be, I cannot stand it. So as I said, don’t be like me. Don’t be the crazy person. What else did I do? Oh, there is in the world of indie web and like self-hosted sites, a trend called slash pages. And you know slash pages, Bob, because you have probably do have a slash about.

Bob Dunn:
Oh yeah, okay.

Simon Kraft:
Or slash contact or stuff like that. And there is a really cool website. I think it is slashpages.net. And on /pages.net is like a list of a lot of semi-standardized kinds of slash pages. Like some people have a /calendar thing where they list dates where they do stuff, or a /carry to list out the everyday carry items they just have with them at all times. Something you might get a kick out of is a /changelog.

Bob Dunn:
Oh yeah.

Simon Kraft:
For your listeners in America, a /chipotle page where you can just list your standard order. If someone orders food, you can just send them there like, yeah, get that for me. That’s what I want. So there’s a lot of fun ideas. And one of these slash pages is a /now page. And the idea behind a /now page is that you explain to people what you’re doing right now. I’m recording a podcast today from 10 to 11, but like you would tell a friend, like, oh yeah, I’m currently working on this project and it’s the summer break, so I’m a bit light on new episodes and I record this kind of thing for Channel 4 from time to time. Also, I’m planning our big vacation to Aruba. I don’t know, stuff like that. And I had one of those pages on my site since the beginning of 2025, when I started like that whole journey of madness with my website. I’m so bad at keeping it up to date. So I did the only logical thing and built a plugin for it.

Bob Dunn:
And what does it do?

Simon Kraft:
The plugin is the ultimate content routing machine. It can ingest content from everywhere. Can be custom post types on my own site, can be RSS feeds. I can import stuff from third-party platforms like Letterboxd or Goodreads and funnel them all into my own site and display them through block editor blocks in different places as kind of a log, like chronologically. I have a bit of a card style where I display different, like these are the 3 books I read last. I will not go into details on the books I read, by the way. Just an example.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah.

Simon Kraft:
So that was a lot of fun. It is so pointless. It’s such a pointless plugin, which is exactly what I was going for with this whole project. I just wanted to have fun with it. And the other big plugin that I built is the Personal Profile Builder. Which is maybe the most unhinged plugin of them all. The backstory to that is a couple of years ago, I used a plugin by Alain Schlesser that did something similar. Like if you, like me, travel around, give talks at WordCamps or meetups, sometimes want to have a bit of an event calendar kind of situation where like, oh, these are the gigs I’m going for, for my big Europe tour. And he built a lovely plugin around that that managed all of that. But the problem with that, because I think he didn’t anticipate crazy me coming in, is it was basically like an event plugin. So every event you set up was completely standalone. And what I often do is I have a couple of talks and I give them at different WordCamps, different meetups. So I don’t want to have them like 12 times on my website and Because his plugin in the end didn’t really work for me, I went to the other end of the spectrum and just had like a static page with my talks listed without any dates or anything. And I also didn’t like that. So that’s where my plugin comes in. And it does a bit of a hybrid of both. So if I do, I don’t know, one of my talks is about climate change, very fun topic, can absolutely recommend that one. So I have that. And then it has occurrences. So I can be like, oh yeah, in September 2019, I did that at WordCamp Zurich. And then in February 2020, I did that at WordCamp Glasgow. They all reference back to the main talk. And the main talk can have metadata, like default slides, default recording. But then I have individual links to the different occurrences that I can share at the end of my presentation. That then link to a customized version of that talk where they can switch out links to the slides and links to the recording after it was uploaded to WordPress TV. So I can share you a link to the talk you just saw me doing at WordCamp, and that link will have customized with the slides for that specific WordCamp because my slides change over time and sometimes I customize them for, you know, for Porto or for Zurich.

Bob Dunn:
Actually, what’s amazing about this is this explains why I have been so frustrated with my BobWP blog, which no longer exists. I just took it down because I just wasn’t doing anything. A lot of the stuff I had in it was over years, was a lot of stuff that was needed that just wasn’t. So I kept purging it. And then I would come back with this idea, well, I’m going to do this. And then that would last about 5 minutes or 5 days or something like that. Or I’m going to start a personal podcast, which didn’t last very long. And just explains why I’ve always struggled with my own personal blog because I always wanted to give it some angle. I just, you know, I mean, there’s a few times of, oh, I’m just going to talk about stuff. Well, yeah, one month goes by, a couple months. Oh, I guess I should talk about stuff. And as you were talking about, so yeah, this is very cool because that’s essentially what I need, but at this point, I probably don’t need it because I’m like, okay, I’m not starting over again. It’s over with. But yeah, it’s very cool.

Simon Kraft:
Well, I’m still looking forward for someone to explain that effect the microblog had on my brain to me. Because why does Like this, I think I didn’t spell that out like to the fullest earlier. Having that microblog there helps me write, to write like full-length blog posts as well.

Bob Dunn:
Mm-hmm.

Simon Kraft:
Which does not make sense at all to me. I cannot explain that. And as you know, I’m married to a psychiatrist and that doesn’t help with the explanation.

Bob Dunn:
I asked. Yeah, no, no. I can just imagine that conversation.

Simon Kraft:
So if someone out there knows, please, please let me know.

Bob Dunn:
Yeah, I actually, one of the, I think one of them was kind of microblogging for me for a while. I was doing these very short little, just kind of thoughts, random stuff, something I found. And even then, I think it was, My brain is so focused on what I’m doing now. And I’ve kind of done a lot of these things in the past. I’m kind of at a point in my life where it’s, oh, I don’t know. Do I really want to ramble, keep rambling? And then it would just kind of slow down, slow down a bit more and more. And I thought—

Simon Kraft:
Mm-hmm.

Bob Dunn:
And it wasn’t necessarily who’s reading this, because I didn’t really care. I was just putting it down. But then I thought, yeah, I just, now I’m letting it sit again and stuff. So, but yeah, it’s— Yeah, there’s a certain, you got it in your head what you want something to do or you change. It’s like I said, the pivots I’ve done, I just, I don’t beat myself up over things like, oh, should I do this?

Simon Kraft:
Should I do this?

Bob Dunn:
Okay. Well, this has been fun. I’m glad you shared your open tab with me because I definitely opened some other tabs along the way. And now we have a lot of tabs open, time to shut them down. But, or at least for this show, not necessarily in our heads. So thanks much, Simon. Really enjoyed it.

Simon Kraft:
Thank you for having me, Bob.