Blog question challenge

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’m drawn to blogging because it makes me happy on several levels. I love sharing what I’ve learned. I love entertaining people and spreading joy. I love having a collection of the topics I was interested in at various points in my life. I love being able to practice honing my writing skills. And I love having a place on the internet that is completely my own.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I built my own Ruby on Rails app to handle it. I chose it because I wanted to get better at writing Rails apps.

I’ve had a personal website since 1998. It’s had many iterations and name changes and designs. I miss building websites for fun. So I’m doing it again because hey, it’s still fun as hell to do cool things with these computers of ours.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Oh yeah. At first, it was all handwritten HTML, but I’ve tried a few different content management systems like Movable Type, LiveJournal, and Wordpress.

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

My longer form pieces are often written in TextMate. I’ll launch a locally-running version of my site and test out formatting and whatnot before I copy and paste it into my production site.

My monthly observation posts are mostly a collection of my daily journalistic entries. Around the first day of the month, I’ll slowly re-read what I wrote about the previous month and edit the interesting nuggets down into something coherent.

For my link posts, I use a custom iPhone Shortcut. When I navigate to a URL in Safari that I wanna share here, my shortcut will grab whatever is in the <title>, then grab the URL sans any UTM or tracking params, then drop whatever I may have highlighted into a Markdown quote in a text field. I then type up my thoughts and hit publish.

This approach works great for me because there is almost zero friction to post. It only sucks when I accidentally close out of the text field, or when I write something substantially long¹. I also have to remember to navigate to the article to add tags. I should probably add that into the Shortcut process at some point.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’m the most inspired to write whenever my thoughts begin to run away. Writing forces me to grab hold of a single thread of my swirling inner dialogue and crystalize it.

When I got laid off last year, I decided to force myself to journal every single night. I didn’t lay any other parameters: I didn’t give myself any word counts or topics or agendas. Simply write.

Now that I have a journaling habit, I find that I write my thoughts down often throughout the day. I’m inspired to write whenever I make myself laugh, or whenever I feel a light bulb go off in my head, or whenever I need a break from my negative self talk.

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

Short link posts are almost always published immediately. Longer posts will simmer for a day or two before I eventually force myself to publish. I am pretty diligent about editing things a day or two after that, as well. For this post, I’m gonna publish it as soon as I’m done here.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I don’t have a favorite. Every single post I’ve made on here makes me cringe when I read it back, even if it’s only 24 hours later.

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

I plan to keep writing. I should probably upgrade the Rails engine here soon.

I also have this idea of building a “garden” here. I came across the idea of a personal site being more like a garden, and I am really vibing with that sentiment. The first step for me is to build this cool 8-bit landscape entirely in vanilla CSS, HTML, and JS. From there, I’d like to have some self-composed, optimistic lo-fi playing in the background. As one sits in the scene, various phrases and quotes will fade in and out of view.²

I mentioned my journaling habit above, and I think another goal of mine for the year is to keep up the monthly observation posts. Writing down my thoughts is helpful, and getting a bit of distance from those thoughts gives me a fresh perspective of them.

Passing the torch

Despite seeing my own site show up in my feed on other people’s sites, I still feel like nobody ever reads this blog. So I’ll admit I felt incredibly dorky writing this post because it reminds me of how these sorts of things used to be hella prevalent back on the web when I was growing up.

But also: isn’t the point of doing these things to have fun and learn how other people approach a hobby that you’re interested in? These “challenges” serve as a collective bonding moment, an opportunity to collectively reflect on why we like this loose-knit community of goofy misfits who know what an RSS feed is.

So here’s how I’ll pass the torch: if you’ve seen these kinds of posts pop up in your own feeds these past couple weeks, copy this and do it yourself and shoot me a note when you’re done. I guarantee you’ll get at least one other person here who will be interested in your stories! 🙋‍♂️