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! 🙋‍♂️

I’m slowly introducing exercise back into my routine.

A few days ago, I unceremoniously added a feature to the front page of this blog which tracks the number of consecutive days that I did 100 sit ups.

It’s been hard, private work. There was a day last week I took the bus downtown, and I found myself needing to brace before we rounded a corner. Otherwise, my core throbbed.

I’m also adding running back to my routine. I’ve done a 4 mile loop every other day for a few weeks now. I’m still slow (9:10 pace?), and I’m still having to ice my knees at night.

But boy, I sure do feel grateful for the ability to get out there and pound the pavement!

A third thing I’ve been working on is my writing. I’ve been experimenting with blogging monthly recaps of my thoughts and whatnot that I collect in my journal, which feels useful to me, but not specifically the end game.

I’d love to turn all this writing into something useful. Like writing lyrics or poems.

I came across this article in my Instapaper queue, and it is helping me work through some of the reasons I like both of those parts of me.

I didn’t get a specific pull quote from this article because it feels like one of those articles you need to enjoy in its entirety.

Matt Might wrote some shell scripts back in 2010 to identify and correct a few bad writing habits.

Simon Willison took these scripts and used Claude to build a tool that does the same, but within a web browser.

I could see taking this concept and baking it into my publish system for this blog. I am very interested in becoming a stronger writer, and having something like my own Rubocop would be annoyingly useful.

Friends, I encourage you to publish more, indirectly meaning you should write more and then share it.

It’d be best to publish your work in some evergreen space where you control the domain and URL. Then publish on masto-sky-formerly-known-as-linked-don and any place you share and comment on.

You don’t have to change the world with every post. You might publish a quick thought or two that helps encourage someone else to try something new, listen to a new song, or binge-watch a new series.

It’s a real gift to see my friends post stuff online. Go post more!

Many of these kinds of retrospectives contain graphs of views over time or the most popular posts; but I’m not showing it to you because I can’t—I don’t keep any statistics whatsoever.

I don’t really care—and I don’t want to care—about how many readers I have or what posts are and aren’t popular. I worry that if I add statistics to the blog it’ll change from an activity I perform for the activity’s sake, to an exercise in hunting clicks where I write for others instead of for myself.

If I were chasing views I would certainly not have continued to blog for as long as I have, and I’d have missed out on the many benefits I’ve gotten from the blog.

I couldn’t agree more with this sentiment.

I do thoroughly enjoy when people reach out and tell me they read the blog, but I don’t share things here for the social clout.

I share things on here because the act of curating thoughts through the writing process brings me so much joy and clarity.

I’ve been meaning to write something longer form on here for a while, but all my good long thoughts have been sent to Monkey Wrench.

But this post made me reflect on my own blogging journey. I started blogging in a LiveJournal at some point in the early 2000s. I bought my own domain and moved my thoughts over there in 2004. I blogged from a pseudonym starting in 2006 up through college. I bought this domain while sitting in a TV production class my senior year of college and started a fresh blog.

It’s been a while since I burned the stack to the ground and started fresh, but ever since I started building websites for a living, it stopped being fun to do it in my free time.

If you’re a painter, you’re still allowed to paint landscapes. Singers are still allowed to sing about love. And heck — I’m betting the first time your critic learned about this particular topic, he wasn’t standing atop Mount Sinai. Knowledge transfer is a vital human activity, and it’s all about synthesizing, refining, and incrementally expanding on what’s been said before.

Here’s a short list of posts I’ve been wanting to write but have chickened out every time I start a draft:

• How I’ve organized my Plex music library
• How to pick the perfect karaoke song
• Ways you can move out of the corporate world and into the startup world
• Why I stopped reading the news and quit social media
• How to avoid clickbait articles

Maybe I should force myself to write one of these and publish it with little self-editing.

I made a concerted effort to write more this year. I’ve journaled roughly 98% of the days this year, and I’ve published something on this blog just as much. I even started a newsletter.

I’ve learned a lot about myself thanks to all of this writing. I didn’t realize how much a daily blogging challenge would reveal about my musical tastes. I wouldn’t have been able to identify my feelings without yelling at a journal until my voice became hoarse.

Best of all, writing is proving to be an effective way for me to share what I’ve learned with others. Feeling useful helps beat back the depression demons.

I encourage anyone reading this to write down whatever you’ve been interested in lately and post it somewhere. Share it with me so I can learn with you!

But I will share the Google Analytics graph below that I pulled tonight — mostly because it makes me happy and maybe it will inspire some of you to stick with it. Remember, the flatline you see early on in 2006 is basically what things looked like from 2004 until that point.

Inspiring post from MG Siegler. Be sure to check that graph out.

Wait, you guys don't think I'm lame, do you?