Blog Questions
• 903 words • ~4 min read ⏲
Since a few weeks the blog question challenge is making rounds, and some days ago Lars-Christians answers popped up in my feed reader and he tagged me to participate as well. So, without further ado, my answers:
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
The idea was brewing in the back of my mind for quite some time. What I had online before I wrote my first post here is best described as a dumping ground for a few slide decks of talks I gave at either some unconference or a local web developer meetup, nothing around it what would otherwise resemble a personal website. Just like the rest of the world I stopped attending in-person events during the early 2020s. I had also collected material in a personal wiki over the years, for my reference and as memory aid mostly, but I considered nothing of it as good enough to be worth putting it online. This left me with the nagging thought, that my notes would deserve a bit of polish. In early 2021 is stumbled over a post from Mike Crittenden: Prove you can write regularly before you think about the tools. In it he gave a great piece of advice: You’re not allowed to care about the tools until you’ve proven you are capable of regular writing.
, and he had embedded Rakhim's Blogging vs. blog setups comic to illustrate his point. I remember that I nearly spilled my coffee over the "weird dude who writes raw HTML". It captures quite well how many folks, including me, rolled websites in the early 2000s. So, circumstances aligned, I thought, tools be damned, I can put something online just as I used to do 20 years prior, sat down, opened VS Code, wrote a few lines of text and a few lines of styles, pushed it to my github pages and said to myself "Let's see how long the impulse will last". It is lasting for more than four years now.
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
I'm not sure if platform is the right term, but the site runs on the most under-powered (and cheapest) VPS I was able to find. The operating system of the server is Ubuntu, which I simply choose out of familiarity. On it I use nginx to serve the static content and reverse-proxy half a dozen nodejs applications that support minor parts of the website, like the random-page redirect and the webmention receiver. The site itself is built with a static site generator that I tailored to my needs (or should I rather say idiosyncracies?). I deploy it simply by copying files via ssh to the server.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I started out on Github pages for deployment of content. But to create the site itself, I always rolled my own to some degree: from writing everything manually, over gradually scripting away some of the repetitive parts (like feed generation), to the current version. It seems I am habitually unable (or perhaps unwilling) to accomodate to other peoples ideas what blogging ought to look like.
How do you write your posts?
Many articles still start in my wiki (a TiddlyWiki instance). Once they've reached a certain point of maturity, I copy them over to a file in VS Code, where I mark them up properly. There are some sections of the site that I edit directly in VS Code, for example the rather recently introduced notes or the now page. For final editing I tend to use a screen-reader on the generated page, because I often become blind and don't see duplicated words or sentences that miss a verb. Hearing the text read out loud by another voice helps with that.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Inspiration is a perishable good, and it comes rarely when I actually have time and energy to actually sit down and write. What helps is a good chunk of uninterrupted time (a rather rare good), being well-rested, or at least well caffeinated. Most of that time is already allocated to non-negotiable duties. What ever I can scrape away in the evening or at the weekend is when I work on shaping muddy thinking into at least halfway coherent sentences and paragraphs.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
It depends, the notes are one-shot mostly, articles rarely. I usually need multiple sittings for one and for editing most often I need an extra session after the writing. When I have a particularly good day, an article might be written and edited in the same session, but that has not happened very often.
What is your favourite post on your blog?
Always the next one of course ;)...
I will read it sparked quite a few connections to and some really great conversations with fellow bloggers. Other than that, I think the write up on my webmention receiver implementation was decent, and I like the literate programming style easter egg.
Any future plans for the blog?
Many ideas, but very few plans. I'm mostly happy with the setup, the only technical aspect I'm actively thinking about is offering more differentiated feeds, for example per topic / category. Apart from that I want to make more use of the system I have.
Who will participate next?
I guess who ever feels like it? But I'll pass the virtual baton over to Dario.