Blog questions challenge

This chain letter-esque post has been doing the rounds, and in the spirit of trying to rebuild my blogging muscle I thought what better to blog about than blogging? This post is a bit of a love letter to having your own place on the web, no matter how simple.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

When I first started answering this, my brain jumped to my first ‘proper’ blog, which I started in 2011. As the blog post says:

My professional background and a lot of my interests are heavily web/tech-related, so that’s the kind of realm we’re looking at. I’ll hopefully be putting up topics of interest to the developer community, which may cover reviews of books, information from events and conferences, and I’ll be sharing the source code from any useful developments I get around to outside of work.

At the time I was part of the ColdFusion community and was very inspired by people like Ben Nadel (special link with a terrible photo of younger me in the header), Raymond Camden, and Matt Gifford who did a lot of sharing online, and I think I wanted to emulate them. I’d also applied to be an Adobe Community Professional, and to my delight had been accepted, so the start of my blog was intended to tie into that too.

But actually, this wasn’t the real start of my blogging story.

As far as I can tell, I actually started my first blog ten years earlier, back in 2001, as part of a personal site dedicated to teenage angst. I was 16, had friends on message boards online, and all the cool kids (nerds) had their own websites. So partly because I also wanted to have a place to show off my sparkly paint shop pro brush images, and definitely because I wanted a place to vent all of my passive aggressive rantings about people at school and my woe-is-me lack of love life, I learnt how to make a blog.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

The very first platform was FrontPage, a WYSIWYG HTML editor. I genuinely have no idea how I even came across it, but it was probably recommended by someone. As you can see from the above, I was hosting on a site called envy.nu.

After that I dabbled with the dangerous world of editing directly into my web hosting’s input field (I think I was with Homestead or similar by then), and at some point moved over into a basic text editor to at least save the files locally even if I still pasted it in. Possibly the default Windows text editor initially. I think at some point I discovered FTP and upgraded to something with a bit more functionality, but it was still text editor all the way.

When I started my more ‘professional’ blog I think I chose BlogCFC, which was an open source ColdFusion project originally started by the above mentioned Ray Camden. I was primarily a CF developer at work, one of the community professionals, and I was able to use some cheap or free hosting. I can’t remember exactly how it worked, but I don’t think it had a proper CMS. A redesign post from 2012 mentioned that I was using “HTML5, CSS3, jQuery, ColdFusion 9, Sass, Photoshop and Git”.

At some point between then and 2014 I moved to Wordpress, which I believe was prompted by a few things: my hosting was either not free any more or more expensive, I wasn’t working with ColdFusion by then, and I wanted some more experience with Wordpress. In what would become the bane of my life to untangle later, I’d also started a business site for my company, which was still basically just me blogging about work stuff, but for the purpose of lead generation when I worked for myself. This was originally Wordpress too.

At some point I seem to have moved them both over to Hugo, which is where they/it has remained. But honestly this period was all very messy as I’d ported content between the two and back, and to this day there’s still some debt there 😬

Not strictly a blog as such, but I’ve also dabbled with 11ty for my Small Reviews site, which is lovely to work with.

As things stand, I chose my ‘platform’ because it’s simple and free. I don’t have a high traffic or volume site, so basic plans are all I need. I write locally in VSCode, push to Github, which is picked up with a Netlify integration. I do also have some nice to have customisations that make me happy, like the VS Code Pets extension in my editor, and a snazzy theme for my command line, which I tweeted but never blogged about it seems, because even after all this time I second guess myself about inviting the inevitable harassment with some types of posts 😒

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

I’m writing this post in the Notes app on my Mac, because old habits for text editors die hard it seems. I’ve gone through ‘proper’ writing apps, like Bear, for a while, but this is what’s stuck. I don’t even really know why.

Once I’m mostly happy with it, I transfer it into VSCode, create a new file, finish any little tweaks and add in images etc. I don’t feel the need at all for a CMS nowadays. I left Wordpress because of the convolution and bloat; I felt like I wanted more direct control. A static site generator is perfect for what I need, and I like having everything in a file system.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There’s two sides to this. I get ideas fairly regularly. These go into my Google Keep. I also feel inspired whenever I see an opportunity – for example if I get approached to write a piece for a publication I respect, or if I can see a clear need to help someone. Many of my posts have come from wanting to create a reference that I can share with others.

However putting the ideas and general inspiration slighly aside, the motivation to sit down and write is the challenge at the moment. Historically I’d have just jumped in and started throwing ideas down, but with free time and energy both in a very different place nowadays, it doesn’t easily translate through to me wanting to open up my laptop. Hence only two posts last year.

I’m currently writing this on a Sunday in between waiting for pots of water to boil to remove impurities from pork ribs and cook bak kut teh, and it’s been a pretty chilled day so I have some brain power left in the tank.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

That question framing assumes I can write in one sitting, which is incredibly optimistic. Hahaha, no, my drafts simmer in varying degrees of completeness, until I can get to a place where I’m done. Once it’s done, I tend to publish pretty quickly because I will have sat with it way too long to get to that point.

The exception tends to be my year end posts, which have an extra layer of complexity from wanting to go back through all my photos and smush them together.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

This is a tough one. I’ve just spent a bit of time going back through, and there’s inevitably huge amounts of cringe. My writing style at the start is so formal and awkward – clearly emulating what I thought a tech blog with some credibility should be. My favourite posts are from more recent (ish) times, and fall in to three categories.

Personal ones

If I had to lose all but a few posts, I’d most treasure my year end series (most recent post). I write these first and foremost for my future self, and I always enjoy looking back over them. Second would be my Learning Japanese series (N3 | N4 | N5) for similar reasons that they capture a moment in life.

The useful ones

I’d say this is the category that I currently have most of a backlog around, and I will definitely try to do more of. They’re the pieces of content that I share to people I work with again and again and again, and which pop up every now and again in the group chat of “haha, someone shared your blog post at work today”. A bit embarrassing, but also lovely that they still help people. Some example:

• Semantic calendar emoji/calendar defrags
• Areas to think about when introducing a progression framework

And then there’s the deep dives

These are the ones that I’d really sat down and thought about. Some of them have fallen into living on the ‘work blog’ and I forget about them, but I think they stand up as well-considered in their own right.

• Thinking about permissions
• Designing for 10 years time
• A practical guide to PWAs

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Writing this has made me realise that I still haven’t finished or merged in my work on building out a search. It’s ridiculous, I started it here, added the feature into my reviews site a while ago, and never finished this one because I need to do the styling and that means grappling with my design self-loathing. That’s the main goal. I should probably just push out the unstyled version if nothing else.

Other plans:

I guess I should actually make sure the RSTS posts don’t get lost. Possibly migrate them in and set up redirects? But some are more company-y than others, so I’m still not sure on this.

I’m perpetually embarrassed by some of the janky code on this site. The CSS was from a time where concepts like grid were around but my implementation is inelegant and things have matured even more since then. So there’s always a bit of a motivation there. I like the essence of the design, but I feel it could be refined a lot as some bits I’ve never really liked. Also I really love other people’s theme switchers. So that’s all to say that there’s definitely a redesign on the horizon, but I’m putting that off because a) the design part is my least favourite part, and b) I’ll be confronted with whether I want to switch over to 11ty. Which will be easy if I do, but it’s still another barrier when everything is working pretty well at the moment. So hey, it’ll realistically probably be a couple more years at least.

Who’s next?

At the time of writing this I don’t think any of the below have done this, or have publicly shunned the idea of doing it. But I may have missed something. So no pressure, but I’d love to hear from: Sophie, Matt, Paul. Plus anyone else who hasn’t yet got involved! Use this as an excuse to do some writing, like I am ☺️