P&B: Georgie Cooke

This is the 50th edition of People and Blogs, the series where I ask interesting people to talk about themselves and their blogs. Today we have Georgie Cooke and her blog, hey.georgie.nu

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

I’m Georgie and I was born and reside in Sydney, Australia. I grew up in the ’burbs, which was something I despised until I moved to a spot closer to the city, and there’s a certain nostalgia that Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs evokes about my childhood that no other album or song has done to date.

My first experience using a computer was when I was probably about four years old, watching my dad type commands into MS-DOS to launch games. When I couldn’t figure out how to load King’s Quest, I would just type dir and press spacebar dozens of times for amusement until my dad came to my aid. These days, I work as a software engineer and I fell into this line of work after teaching myself how to code and build websites, then trying to find data entry jobs, but realising there were actually jobs for building websites.

I’ve competed in two powerlifting competitions (placing third and second), I used to be a concert photographer and a ballerina, I like hiking, and I am passionate about expressing myself through my style and what I wear. One might describe my style as containing deliberate elements of juxtaposition, and a blend of 80s, 90s, punk, and grunge. I am a 90s kid, pretty much, but my interests and knowledge of pop culture give people the impression that I’m an older millennial than I actually am. I also still get ID’d, and it now amuses me since I’m old enough to appreciate it. I’ll take what I can get.

What's the story behind your blog?

After playing Neopets in the early 2000s and then getting my account banned because I was transferring items and neopoints to myself from a secondary account, I started blogging on LiveJournal. My website was on a free hosting site, and was my playground for practicing coding and graphic design. I was writing about pretty inane stuff on LiveJournal, and my website was reserved for updates about graphics, trivia and other miscellanea I was adding to my website.

Since I had been writing in a physical diary for most of my childhood and early adolescence, writing stuff online seemed like a fair transition. It was also easier for me to let my friends read my diary if it was on a website they could visit.

After LiveJournal, I blogged on MSN Spaces for a while. My blog was called “Consolation in a Jar”, because I thought the visual of a jar was cute (think those jars full of hand-made paper stars) and also because I was going through a difficult time with severe depression.

I forget what my website’s name was when I first created it, but I settled on the name “Out The Window”. I am pretty sure it came from the Linkin Park song “In The End”. I started blogging about my school life and hobbies, and more emotional posts found their home on Consolation in a Jar.

In 2008 I registered my first domain name, Heartdrops.org. This is the URL at which I gained a lot of notoriety, fame, what have you. MSN Spaces had shut down, and I chose not to save all of the painful posts I’d published. Heartdrops became my main blog, and would be that way for four years. Facebook took off around this time, and I continued to strongly hold the opinion that friends could contact me via phone number or—quite literally—my website that I’d had years before social media.

I started a few other blogs for different creative projects, like photoblogging, letters to friends, and scans of doodling and drawing on paper. I went through a couple of cycles of starting new blogs for specific topics, then pulling them all back into my main blog. Now I like to have everything in the one place and feel free to use my space to write about any topic I want.

I’d been using georgie.nu as a “domain collective”—a website to showcase all of my domains and projects—for three years before I decided to name rename Heartdrops to “Hey Georgie” and use the URL. I was working on an exciting, bold WordPress theme that was a departure from my usual design style, and didn’t suit the name Heartdrops. I started to feel like the name was juvenile and reminded me too much of a difficult time in my life.

My blog has been called Hey Georgie for the past 12 years now. I feel like it suits my personality more accurately. The name just comes from the greeting of “hey” or “hello”, but one of my favourite local bands is called Hey Geronimo as well. I know I must have sounded like a hypocrite when I renamed my blog because I used to diss people who had their name in their website name. I said so much shit online in my youth. But damn, have I learned. I have learned a lot.

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

In my early years of blogging (from the mid to late 2000s), I would just sit at my computer or laptop and write any time I wanted a blog post to happen, or if I had an idea, I would try to write the blog post as soon as possible. My ideas mostly revolved around funny stories from my childhood, or experiences in my day to day as a suburban kid being in the heart of the city for university and social events. I would usually write a 500-word post in 30 minutes or so. I didn’t proofread. It was a combination of being a little bit cocky and confident in my writing skills and speed, and an obsession with posting something every two days. I just wanted to write the blog post and be done, and took pride in having something new to share.

My process is very different these days. I’ve not only matured, but the blog posts I write are less stream-of-consciousness and centre around a specific topic. They take a bit more time because I care about them reading well and being well structured. My writing has matured the same way I’ve matured as a person.

I stopped having the freedom to just drop everything and write as soon as an idea came to mind, so I keep a list of ideas instead. I don’t have as many ideas as I used to. When I think about why, I think it’s that I don’t enjoy writing about the mundanities of life the way that I did as an adolescent. (I promise my life is not boring... haha.) My interest in writing about certain topics also waned. Any time I’m in the mood, I’ll take one of those ideas and just start writing something until I get stuck, then I leave the draft there and come back to it later. Some of those drafts never see the light of day because I give up on the idea, while others are eventually worked on and published. In the past, I had the mentality of a completist and anything I worked on was published, even if I thought it sucked. I still don’t proofread too meticulously, and sometimes I even do it after I’ve published a post, because I am so comfortable with my writing that there will usually only be some small typos. If the topic is a really delicate one, I might ask a couple of close friends to proofread it.

I used to use an app called Bear to help me focus while I was writing. Now I just write most of my posts directly in my WordPress installation or in the Notes app on my iPhone or MacBook. I can’t remember why I abandoned Bear, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it had something to do with paying for features that I refused to pay for.

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

My physical space really influences my ability to write and put a blog post together. I value my noise-cancelling headphones and a bit of stoner rock or hard rock or metal. It’s music that’s energetic enough because of the beat, and I like having the lyrics present, but they don’t feel distracting because the vocals are rough. I also need to be physically comfortable, but this doesn’t necessarily mean I need to be in an armchair in a library. I like cafes, and often work from them, but I can’t write while sitting in a cafe unless it’s during a quieter time of the day and the cafe doesn’t play pop music loudly for ambiance. I can write whilst sitting on a park bench, even if the bench isn’t like a sofa, but maybe there aren’t many people around and the weather is pleasant. I can write from my phone on public transport, as long as I have a long enough journey and am seated by the window.

Oddly enough, I’ve found that I can write better and am more forced to focus during periods of being “in transit”, like sitting in an airport lounge, being on a long-distance ferry, or waiting at a cafe for a friend to arrive because I’m early for our date. It might be because there is a definite end to the time I’m in that place—compared to sitting at home with an entire afternoon ahead of me and falling into procrastination. It is entirely possible that the “forced deadline” created by being in those temporary situations is beneficial for me because of my neurodivergent brain. If I’m at home, I just won’t make a deadline to write a post by, but in some of the scenarios I described, I have no choice.

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

I register most of my domains with NameCheap (I have one on Name.com). Before I could afford to pay for my own hosting, I had a friend who set me up on her shared hosting. I bought my own plan at NameCheap after about a decade of her generously letting me use some of her space for free.

I use self-hosted WordPress. I take pride in the fact that I’ve coded my theme myself—it’s not compatible with new features of WordPress and I don’t try to make it that way, as it’s mostly just an outlet for my coding creativity. I remember the days when I had the time, inspiration, and energy to code and update a new theme every two weeks. If I remember correctly, my current theme has been there since 2018, which is a personal record for me. I’m not sure what changed (apart from the obvious, like having more responsibilities in life and already doing coding as part of my day job, etc.). I think I just focused more on the idea of “branding” and simplicity, and that led me to build something that I was happy with long-term.

I know WordPress has an interesting (if not slightly poor) reputation, but I’ve just used it ever since I had my own domain name in the late 00’s, and I decided to stick with it. I’ve had many conversations with friends about why I never converted to a static site generator, or why I don’t do it now. I put too much emphasis on comments and having a comments section, and didn’t want them to be owned by a third-party service. A friend even joked that he’d build something custom for me, but my needs made him give up. Hahah. I have well over 1,500 blog posts and 26,000 comments. The thought of migrating them was not only a tricky problem to solve, but at some point converting them made the possibility of a sunk cost fallacy inevitable. I debated just removing the comment functionality entirely, given that most readers either don’t leave comments, or reach out to me through email or social media to share their thoughts. With the rise of social media-type trolling comments and inauthentic AI-generated ones, perhaps this could be a reason to no longer care about blog post comments...

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

I’m not sure that I would do anything too differently, because I’ve owned a blog for so long and the things I would do differently have already been applied, or weren’t too hard to change on an existing blog. For example, the renaming of my blog from Heartdrops to Hey Georgie was pretty straightforward.

If you asked me to start fresh today, perhaps I really would abandon the whole comment thing—hahaha—and then use it as an opportunity to use something that will let me write blog posts more “simply” with Markdown. That’s probably all I’d really change. These days it’s not uncommon for a blog to have no comments section, but it was just such a huge part of me making friends and connections on the internet pre-social media.

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?

In a year, for domain and hosting, I pay about $80–100 AUD, give or take. The .nu domain is notoriously expensive and costs some $40 a year, but I committed to that when I first got it. Haha. (It’s kind of like the custom licence plate I have for my car; I committed to that several hundred dollar annual payment when I got it, so I keep paying for it because it has sentimental value.) I don’t pay much attention to the actual cost. I just pay for it when it’s due. Even though my frequency of posts don’t suggest this, my blog is my passion project and something I really care about.

I feel very strongly about monetising content in relation to being my authentic self online. The topic first came up for me a while ago, long before social media and living in a world of subscriptions and content creation and ads and things. I first dabbled in sponsored posts and accepting money for links when I only had a job for six hours a week, because I just wanted extra cash. I felt uncomfortable about it though, and I realised that my personal morals were important to me. All my friends were telling me that I should make money from my online space, but it didn’t sound like something I wanted to do. I put a PayPal donate button on my blog and I felt gross, especially after I managed to get more part time jobs. My blog was an outlet for my writing and a place where I put my honest and personal thoughts. It was not a business.

I decided that my blog would always be a space that genuinely represents myself and the things I care about and stand for. I previously accepted payment for certain types of advertisements that I might not agree with today. These days, I accept payment for in-post advertising, and free products in return for honest reviews, but they must be from businesses or companies whose principles I support, or whose products I might actually use.

If other people choose to monetise their blog, I think they have every right to do so. But I will admit that it’s sometimes funny to see advertisements completely unrelated to the blog’s general content. It only bothers me if someone’s blog is littered with ads and content that they obviously paid for. But then I think we are getting into “content creation” territory, which I consider different from people’s personal blogs.

I don’t usually financially support other bloggers. If they have some kind of “buy me a coffee” link, I might buy them a few coffees but it’ll be a once-off. If I get to meet any other bloggers in real life, I am more than happy to buy them a coffee in person. 😊

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

My good friend Pauline at pawlean.com, my friend Jane from lemonandlively.com, Ruben at rubenerd.com, Jem at jemjabella.co.uk. 💙 I’m sure least one of them might be up for an interview, but I’d gladly read an interview with any of them.

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

If you’ve read this far, just, thank you. I think there might be some people reading this who know me from when I was literally fifteen years old, too, which is not only astonishing, but really touching to me that there was something about my writing or about me as a person that made you read my blog in the first place. I’ve always liked writing, and unlike other interests and hobbies, it’s a thing that innately stays with you over time.

I have a podcast called Toast & Roast, a super low budget pod that my friend and I record for fun. It was a mid-pandemic project that has been going for several years, and I think the success of its tenure is to do with the fact that our recording sessions are also the time we chat and catch up. We release episodes weekly. It’s got the same unfiltered vibe that my blog posts have, and we don’t really plan topics. Hopefully we’re the kind of pod you might have playing in the background or just listen to when you don’t feel like paying too much attention. I like to think it’s like eavesdropping on two friends who are just talking shit. But if you’ve ever wanted to put a voice to my face or writing, or whatever… hehe.

You can find me on Instagram at @hey.georgie, where I mostly post outfits and travel pictures. It’s ended up being the platform I use most to interact with internet folk. I joined back when filters were part of the aesthetic, and I think you couldn’t even write a caption? Instagram has continued to be a good way to see what my friends are up to and to message them casually. I was also an early adopter of Twitter and got a lot of value out of it, but it’s no longer the platform it once was. However, you can find me on Mastodon where I don’t mind posting silly thoughts and banter.

Back in 2020, in the early months of the pandemic, I published a poetry collection called “the off switch is broken”, inspired by my experience as a software engineer, growing up on the internet, and what identity means online. It has themes of discomfort and failure, as well as nostalgia and triumph. Although there are pieces of poetry in the depths of my blog, this was something I created with a lot more intent. I hope you consider taking a look, as I think it documents feelings that we all share.

This was the 50th edition of People and Blogs. Hope you enjoyed this interview with Georgie. Make sure to follow her blog (RSS) and get in touch with her if you have any questions.

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