From the Ted Audio Collective, this is Design Matters.

I'm Debbie Melman here with an archival episode of The Podcast.

Last week we heard that Heather Armstrong passed away.

She was only 47 years old and I want to express my deepest condolences to her family.

Heather Armstrong was one of the world's very first bloggers.

She started her website, Duce.com in 2001 and pioneered a new genre of online writing.

It was Frank, Funny, Asurbic and Real.

She quickly became one of the most popular writers on the internet,

so much so the New York Times appointed her Queen of the Mommy Bloggers.

But Heather was more than that, as Liz Lens wrote in her op-ed in The Washington Post last week.

If she'd been a man, she'd be a humorist and a memoirist, but she was a woman, so she was a mommy blogger.

Heather joined me on Design Matters way back in 2011 and she was quintessentially Heather, utterly unafraid of telling it like it is.

In recent years, along with her writing a candid book about her brutal battle with depression, Heather suffered from alcoholism.

Most recently, she perplexed her readers and fans with troubling posts about her stand on trans rights,

and I had to rethink my perspective of her writing at the time.

I didn't know Heather before our interview in 2011, but I met her five years later at the website conference in New Zealand, where we were both speaking.

We had dinner one evening with Cindy Gallup and sat overlooking the stunning Wellington landscape.

At the time, Heather was rethinking her business and what she wanted in the future.

She seemed hopeful and inspired by what was possible.

I want to honor Heather's legacy by replaying our episode from 2011.

Among many other things, we talked about depression and suicide, so please be forewarned.

Blogging is only about 13 years old, but already it seems like it's been around forever.

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