Internet flâneur · Built Pagecord
I’ve seen a lot of musicals over the years. I saw Waitress this evening and it’s a good one. I absolutely love Carrie Hope Fletcher, and her performance of She Used To Be Mine brought the house down.
https://open.spotify.com/track/7CBrUf50mf2IqcRZla38by?si=ODGT1eKqQZyMYODgtmQ8Tg
It’s on tour across the UK for the rest of the year. Check it out if you can, even if you don’t think you like musicals because maybe you actually do.
I’m not sure how Róisín Machine passed me by in 2020. I suppose a global pandemic didn’t help, did it? Either way, I’m utterly delighted to have come across it recently while digging in the virtual crates. It’s a modern electropop dream.
I love the idea of Record Store Day but I no longer have a turntable, cassette deck or CD player despite the hundreds of vinyl records going mouldy in my garage (wanna buy them?).
These days I want less stuff, not more. You’ll understand when you’re in your fifties.
I love to buy albums digitally on Bandcamp and Subvert (or Qobuz/7digital/Juno if it’s a major label) after using Spotify to try-before-you-buy, but it’s an underwhelming experience. Wouldn’t it be great if there was a way to do this in a physical store, where the retailer gets a cut of my digital purchase like they do with vinyl?
Indie record stores are so great, especially my local, but there’s no reason for me to go in and bother them because I won’t be buying anything. I feel like a fraud! I’d love to be able browse the music physically like everyone else, chatting to the staff, listening to stuff and getting recommendations, but rather than bagging the vinyl I’d like to pay them for a FLAC download that gets delivered to my inbox. To make it more of an event and add a physical dimension, maybe they could offer me a postcard version of the cover art too? That would be a nice keepsake.
As far as I know, this experience doesn’t exist, which is such a shame. Could we make it happen? Technically speaking, it’s entirely possible. I mean, Bandcamp and others already do it, but an equivalent system would have to be made for independent stores to get their cut as well as the tech provider.
I suppose you can think of it as an iTunes / Bookshop.org mash-up but one that’s integrated into physical stores. The store needs to get their 20% (or whatever) so perhaps they pay an annual SaaS fee (and probably a cut of the cut) to the software company who runs the system. There’s a workable model in there somewhere I’m sure.
As always, the tech isn’t the hard bit. You’d have to get all the major and minor labels on board as well, which Jobs and Ek have proved to require Herculean salesmanship and major concessions. It already seems insurmountable, and I’m probably kidding myself, but this isn’t streaming – it’s a physical retailer flogging high-price, high-margin digital recordings. There’s a lot more dosh in that for labels and artists alike over the streaming situation.
It’s unlikely, and something of a small niche (for now), but I think there’s something in this. We need independent, community music stores (like book stores, life without them is worse) but the world also needs fewer physical things. At the same time people are becoming increasingly fed up with smartphones, and Gen Z (as well as Tony Fadell) are calling for the return of the iPod.
I’m calling it. It’s time to make digital downloads cool again, and physical record stores need to be at the forefront.
I’d love to help solve this problem, so on the off chance you happen to know some major label execs, please introduce me!
I set out to make a photo zine of my favourite 2025 work, but it grew arms and legs and now it's a book. I love it!
I wrote more about it on my photography blog if you're interested.
As a fan of the Pets since watching them play West End Girls on Top of the Pops, then getting Please on vinyl in 1986, having the chance to see them play an intimate show at the Electric Ballroom in Camden was a #lifegoals moment last night.
For these five Obscure shows, they’re only playing B-sides and album tracks. I’m more of an old school 1980s PSB fan, so it was a total delight to hear three tracks from Please, a couple from Actually as well as Introspective and Behaviour.
They’ve still got that mystery and effortless cool about them. Living legends and national treasures.
Here’s the full set list courtesy of setlist.fm:
Encore:
I made a Spotify playlist of the set, with the exception of the final encore which I think is a new, unreleased song.
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2tzauyogcysgWOhZs5MR7X?si=dLoPq88_Se6BAG7dvKDIpw&pi=Bs9ldljERIK8F
I commonly hear people claim that "blogging is dead" but I disagree. Yes, short-form video is eating the world and our attention spans have taken a direct hit, but long-form blogging is alive and well. The growth of the small web movement continues, and the rise of Substack is another case in point, but it's not all good news. There are too many forces pulling us away from focusing on the writing.
Substack has been a major force in the blogging resurgence. It has generally been a good internet citizen (technically speaking, not necessarily from a content moderation point of view depending on your political view) – it supports RSS, and when viewing posts the only pop up is a single "subscribe" box that's easily dismissed. It offers a clean UI on all platforms and it's easy to use, so I'm told. Yet it's becoming clear they're trying to increase 'engagement' by turning it into yet another social media site, so the inevitable enshittification appears to be already in full swing. More distractions, less writing.
We can get a glimpse of the future of Substack by looking at how this has played out with VC-fuelled publishing platforms in the past. Like Substack, Medium began as a free and simple way to publish long-form writing online (it was created by Twitter co-founder Evan Willams). Medium offered a nice editor and published pages were minimal and largely distraction free. It is backed by heavyweight VCs and has raised $163 million to date, yet despite having 1 million members (paying $50/yr) it's still barely profitable and those VCs are going to want their unicorn exit somehow, soon enough. So, of course, the platform has become increasingly user-hostile as the dark patterns have arrived, such as jailing content through forced registration, paywalls, incessant nagging through pop-ups and ditching support for custom domains. Profits are likely up, but the reader experience has been bludgeoned. Enshittification, again.
It's only a matter of time before we see the same happen with Substack. VCs gotta get paid, and they'll do whatever it takes to get that return – customers be damned. It's now describing itself as "a new media app that connects you with the creators, ideas, and communities you care about most". A befuddling word salad that essentially means they're now a social media company. As John Gruber says, "consider Substack last, not first". Yup.
These products are first and foremost about building an audience, not about quality writing. They offer the blogging basics and they do it well, of course, but their focus is on recommendation algorithms and viral loops that overwhelm you with new content to get you to 'engage' more because this is how they make money. You choose Substack (or Medium) because it's everywhere and you're led to believe it's a great home for your writing which will get you more "distribution" from the flywheel effect. I'd argue that, on the contrary, you're actually putting yourself at the behest of an algorithm, competing with slop, and being overwhelmed with unnecessary distractions. Some blogs will undoubtably benefit, but it's more likely that a blog will get lost in the noise than go viral. Your readers will eventually disengage as the pop-ups, ads and tracking makes all your hard work unreadable. You'll give up writing, your blog will go stale and that's a real shame.
Much of this is what drives me to run my own publishing/blogging platform, Pagecord (the home of this blog). A big draw for me is undoubtably the technical challenge of it all which this old CTO really enjoys, not gonna lie, but I love writing, blogging and my perfect platform didn't exist so I thought I'd try and create it.
In many ways Pagecord is similar to other popular indie products, but its core tenets are:
Pagecord does have an "audience" feature that allows readers to subscribe to blogs by email, but this is to make it easy for readers to follow blogs, which is still harder than it should be for non-techies who don't know about RSS. It also has theme customisation options (colours, fonts, even custom CSS) which you could argue distracts people from writing, but this is a feature people really love – they want to customise their home on the web, not be forced to live in a design monoculture where every blog looks the same. It's important we do what we can to escape the age of average.
I understand that distribution matters. It's more rewarding when you're not screaming into the void, but distribution is possible with a standalone website when you're writing quality content and your blog is SEO-friendly. People will shared that content, search engines (and, yes, AI) will find it. If your writing isn't good, no Substack or Medium algorithm will save you.
So the old cliche still rings true – focus on your writing. Don't overthink it. Forget about distribution, building an audience, your follower count. Unless you're trying to monetise your blog (totally legit reason) it doesn't matter. It's just another distraction in your head, in a world that's drowning in them.
Don't think you have to use big tech to have writing success. Choose a platform where you’re not the product, one that gets out of your way rather than demands your attention. Write what you want to write about, not what you think others want to read, and certainly not what you think the algorithm will like.
xinfluencer /ˈzɪnflʊənsə/ (ZIN-floo-en-ser)
noun
Loudmouth, right-leaning tech influencers who shitpost on X for cash.
“My feed is just posts from lifemaxxing xinfluencers shitposting about beef, lifting, MRR and cottage cheese”
Etymology: Mid 2020s. From X (formerly Twitter) + influencer (n.), one who monetises the performance of having opinions.
See also: manosphere, griftosphere, engagement farming, main character syndrome.
Watching the Artemis II launch last night was a blast from the past.
NASA launches were a big part of my youth. I remember the big TV being wheeled into the classroom for the first Space Shuttle mission, the shock of watching the Challenger disaster, actually standing on Cocoa Beach at sunrise watching Columbia launch on STS-109 with my own eyes, then seeing the awful news when she never made it home.
I love that NASA move slowly, more cautiously and more expensively, with far less glam, than SpaceX. Flying to the moon is an incredible technological feat even in 2026, yet the Artemis program feels old fashioned somehow. NASA do things as they’ve always been done. Tried and trusted. I mean, Artemis II for all its grandeur is made of Space Shuttle spares! Some people may shake their head in disbelief but I think that’s just wonderful.
Nostalgia is at play here, I know, but it’s also genuinely refreshing to step away from the relentless push of private space companies (and private tech companies in general, I guess), even just for a short while.
You don’t always need to move fast and break things blow things up. Breathing room is undervalued.
Links of note, unearthed from web surfing over the last few weeks.
This is so on point 😂😭
In The 49MB Webpage, Shubham Bose describes how the New York Times website downloads 49MB of data across 422 (!) network requests. For one page! This is crazy to an old timer like me, but it’s the norm for most. We don’t have to live like this!
John Gruber has done a much better job than I ever could in his write up about why this is so, and why it’s so bad for the survival of the web. Be sure to read it.
I’ve been in this game since the web was hatched and while there’s a lot of nostalgia at play, I admit, I really believe we need to bring all these good bits of ye olde web back. People maintaining simple sites, writing for the joy, to share and teach, rather than writing as bait for traffic, engagement and clicks.
Pagecord is my way of helping to push us back towards that philosophy. Simple sites that load fast, where a 49KB webpage is on the large side. Sites where people are writing for the joy, without ads, with little clickbait. A platform that’s open source, self-hostable, where you own the content (and, soon, host the masters).
There’s a lot of work to do yet, no doubt. There are still many imperfections, but the course is clear and we’re heading in the right direction.