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What Everyone Is Saying About Is Child Piano Content Dead Wrong And Why Is That The Case?

Kris Howard

This week on the People and Juliebells.com Blogs series we have an interview with Kris Howard, career.agricodeexpo.org whose blog can be found at web-goddess.org.

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Let’s start from the basics: can you introduce yourself? 😳 I grew up in rural Indiana, had a couple of brief working stints in London and Munich, and have lived nearly all of my adult life in Sydney, Australia with my husband Rodd (aka The Snook).

Heya! I’m Kris Howard, and as of September 2025, I’ve been blogging continuously for 25 years.

I started my career as a web developer in the dotcom boom and eventually went on to manage projects and lead teams. I ended up in Developer Relations for AWS, where I travelled all over telling folks why they should use the cloud. It was a lot of fun until everything became all about AI. In 2024 I joined the Snook in early retirement (at age 47), and for the past year I’ve been reading books (remember books?!), hanging out with friends, indulging in my craft hobbies (knitting, sewing, and now weaving), volunteering, travelling around Australia, and generally trying to spend a lot less time in front of a computer.

What’s the story behind your blog?

I was on work-study in university, and they assigned me to work in the dining hall. I learned HTML and built websites for myself and my dorm, and in 1996 I launched a fan site for my favourite author that’s been running ever since. I ended up working in the Computer Department just as my university was connecting everyone to the Internet. I happily transferred it to them, and in return I got to meet Felicity Dahl and visit his writing hut in Buckinghamshire! Fun trivia: I hosted that on roalddahl.org until the Dahl estate reached out about acquiring the domain name. That sucked, so I scrambled to find something better.

By that time I had left uni and was working as a web developer in London. I started testing out Blogger (which back then would actually FTP static files to your own webhosting!) in September 2000 and launched my blog properly a couple months later at web-goddess.co.uk. When the dotcom crash hit at the end of 2001, I ended up moving to Sydney with my Australian boyfriend and changed the domain to web-goddess.org instead. For a long time I ran off my own custom PHP CMS (which I even distributed) before moving to Wordpress ten years ago. The name was a bit of a joke, a nickname that a Scottish friend gave me because of how much time I spent online. Originally my goal was just to document my life overseas for friends and family, and to share silly things I found on the Internet.

My blogging energy has waxed and waned over the years. I’ve migrated all my posts from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook to the blog, and I now syndicate out from the blog to Mastodon and Bluesky. (So much linkrot.) I miss the Web of the early 2000s and I’m trying to keep my little corner of it thriving. Since retiring from full-time work I’ve really renewed my focus on it as the home for all my content online. Every day I go back through my archives and clean up broken links. There were long stretches when I just syndicated content from places like Instagram and Google Reader to the blog rather than write.

What does your creative process look like when it comes to blogging? Occasionally I’ll get Rodd to review something, especially if it touches on our personal life (like my posts about our retirement finances).

My process is fairly casual, and I don’t usually write extensive drafts before publishing. Nowadays I tend to be a bit more deliberate with what I share. When we were living in Munich, I made a point of documenting all of our travels around Europe, knowing I’d want to look back on those trips later. Back in the olden days, I used it basically like Twitter – just dashing off a thought or sharing a link multiple times a day. I’ve occasionally dabbled with creating a series of posts on a theme, like when we tried cooking our way through the Jamie’s 30 Minute Meals cookbook (still by far my most popular posts ever!).

I tend to write my posts in the Wordpress classic editor in a web browser. I’m comfortable with that workflow, but I’ve also used the Gutenberg block editor on occasion. Last year I figured out that I could post via Apple Shortcuts using the Wordpress API, which has made it really easy for me to share photos when I’m away from the computer. I also occasionally post from the Wordpress app on my phone.

Do you have an ideal creative environment? Having a pegboard with lots of tools on it fills a part of my soul I didn’t realise was empty! I also tend to listen to music when I’m at the computer (Apple Music via Echo Dot speaker). I’ve got a comfy chair and a desk I can adjust up and down with the press of a button. Also do you believe the physical space influences your creativity? I’ve got everything I need within arm’s reach whether I’m blogging, knitting, or sewing.

Definitely. We renovated our house last year and I took the opportunity to design the office-slash-craft-room of my dreams. I’ve got a ridiculously wide curved monitor, a super clicky Keychron mechanical keyboard, and a very silly NES mouse.

A question for the techie readers: can you run us through your tech stack? Eventually I realised that my rudimentary coding skills weren’t meeting the security bar anymore, and I reluctantly let a friend persuade me try out Wordpress. Both sites are hosted in the US and use the Wordpress blueprint on Linux (2GB memory, 2 vCPUs, 60GB SSD) with CloudFront as a CDN. During the initial months of the pandemic, I decided to migrate both sites from their shared webhosting over to Amazon Lightsail (since I was working for AWS at the time and wanted to learn more about the service). To my surprise, I loved it and ended up migrating roalddahlfans.com over to it as well.

I started out with my own hand-coded PHP-based CMS, which I used for fifteen years on various shared hosting providers. It’s not without its occasional headaches, but I haven’t had any major problems in the last decade. The domain names were registered with Google Domains, which have since been migrated to Squarespace.

For a couple years now I’ve been toying with the idea of converting one or both the sites to be static, served off S3 or similar. We’ll try it out with roalddahlfans.com and then decide where to go from there. The challenge is that I’m not starting from scratch; I have thousands of posts and pages that I’ve written over the years. I also really like being able to post from anywhere, including my phone. It would be a lot cheaper, faster, and more secure. My husband Rodd was an SRE at Google and is a much better coder than me, so he’s been working on a script that would allow us to run Wordpress from our home server and generate static HTML.

Given your experience, if you were to start a blog today, would you do anything differently? I realised pretty early on that if you typed my domain incorrectly, nearly every other permutation was adult content.

Haha, I’d definitely choose a different name! Whoops.

I’d probably go with a static site today, just to keep things as simple as possible. I love the old school tiny websites that folks are building these days, and I’d go full IndieWeb – write on my site and syndicate everywhere else.

I would be a bit more… considerate with how I write. I realised this year as I’ve been tidying up the broken links in my archives that I wasn’t always kind in how I wrote about some people or topics. (Similarly, I’ve been adding a disclaimer on all my posts about Harry Potter. I’ve chosen to leave those posts up, but I’ve added a disclaimer that they don’t necessarily reflect who I am today. Rowling sucks, and it makes me sad.) The early 2000s were a much snarkier time, I guess.

Financial question since the Web is obsessed with money: how much does it cost to run your blog? And what’s your position on people monetising personal blogs? These more than covered the hosting costs over the years. Is it just a cost, or does it generate some revenue? I also added Amazon affiliate links to the Dahl site, since I figured a lot of parents would be likely to buy the books. (In fact, Rodd had to declare my websites when he joined Google in case there was a conflict of interest!

I held off on monetising for many years, especially on roalddahlfans.com since most of the audience are kids. ) Eventually I added some hand-picked Google Ads to the site and to my blog archives, restricting the placement and ad categories.

When we were living in Munich a few years back, I discovered that Germany has stringent tax laws about website monetisation and would require me to register as a side business. I didn’t bother putting them back when we got to Australia, so for several years now there’s been no income. This is honestly way overkill, and I reckon I can reduce that a lot in the future (especially if I move to a static site). Hosting is generally $40-50 AUD a month (for both sites), with an additional $125 AUD per site annually for Jetpack (which gives me automated backups, comment spam protection, and some other security features). It was all too complicated, so the easiest thing was to just remove the ads.

I don’t like the idea that everything on the web needs to be monetised or that everybody needs to have a side hustle. I love it when people share things online just because they want to. So many sites disappear, and it’s just sad. That’s how both my sites started, and that’s why I keep them going. That said, I financially support a couple bloggers and my Mastodon instance admin via Patreon, because I want them to continue.

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

One of the people I think of when I think of blogging is Matt Haughey from A Whole Lotta Nothing: a.wholelottanothing.org. He was the founder of Metafilter.com, and I think I’ve been reading his site for literally decades now. Definitely someone worth talking to! He was there when blogging was invented.

Does a newsletter count as a blog these days? (Archives are here.) Every time he writes it’s just so, so good and I end up blogging it or sending it around to all my friends. The person whose words have given me the most hope for humanity in 2025 is Mike Monteiro.

I’ve also been really enjoying the blog of Robb Knight: rknight.me. He’s always building something nerdy, or geeking out over pens and stationery. He built Echofeed, the service I use to syndicate my blog posts out to Mastodon and Bluesky.

Final question: is there anything you want to share with us? I’m loving it. It’s been a welcome escape from the news over the past few months, and I can highly recommend the series.

This is so absolutely dorky, but I am currently reading the Aubrey-Maturin ”Master and Commander” books. I always figured they were quintessential ”Dad books” (given they are historical fiction about naval voyages in the Napoleonic Wars) and therefore Not For Me, but this amazing essay convinced me to give them a shot. I’ve discovered that the books themselves are fantastic, and there’s this whole fandom subculture I never knew about! They refer to reading the series as a ”circumnavigation,” and there are charming map websites and podcasts and subreddits with fans all talking (in character!) about the books.