Blog Questions Challenge 2025
Sat 11 January 2025
I came across this set of questions from hyde (a.k.a. Lazy Bear)'s blog, and immediately loved it. It reminds me a bit of the kind of overly personal* questions that got passed between friends on facebook circa 2008, and email circa 2000.
* They didn't feel overly personal at the time, but looking back, with the lens of privacy, they were terrible ;)
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Settle in for my Internet-historical TED talk, because it can't be helped. ;)
Way back when I started blogging, it wasn't called blogging yet. It was called "having a website." I'm comfortable drawing a line of equivalence between the two, because I no longer have a personal website other than my blog itself. It fulfills the job role that a personal website had in 1997, so I'm going to count my very first website (from 1997-8) as my first blog. In addition, it had some vaguely blog-like features, as I would gradually add to it, and have something akin to an archives page, all in hand-written html.
So, I started "blogging" in the late nineties... because it was there!! The internet was new and cool, and it was amazing to have a permanent place to put my thoughts. Sadly, the wayback machine doesn't have an archive of my old blog, and my own copy seems long lost. But I had random snippets of poetry and stories from the internet on there, along with some pictures of myself (ha, it was a very different time) and my dogs (yes, I was actually a dog person in the 90s!)
I started blogging in earnest in the early 2000s, using blogger dot com with a custom domain. The Wayback machine has a single snapshot of it from March 2002, which I will NOT be sharing, haha. It actually contained a webcam page (oh, the early 2000s were so adorable!) from my cubicle at work and a total of eleven posts, all from late 2001. Of course, that includes my reaction to 9/11, which was certainly... visceral, Ramboish, and immature.
I started blogging again in late 2007 and made about 40 posts in the next ten years, the bulk of them being within a couple years after I had started. This blog was on Wordpress dot com, and was chiefly of a religious nature. I look back on it from time to time, and reminisce about the incredibly idealistic person I was back then.
With the encouragement of great Fedifriends like Kev and Amin, I started blogging again here on rldane.space in early 2023. Kev initially hosted a wordpress vps for me, but I soon switched over to hosting with NearlyFreeSpeech and using an SSG (Static Site Generator), which takes us to the next question:
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why did you choose it?
I'm not exactly sure how I found it or settled on it, but I use the Python-powered Pelican SSG. I think I tried Hugo first, as it's often highly recommended, but the first step is to set up a git repo for your blog, and I just didn't feel like going about it in that way.
I found a website that hosts all of the popular Pelican themes, and picked one that looked nice, and yielded a fairly small (data-wise) website. The format is basically just simple markdown, which I already loved and have been using for all of my personal writing since early 2019. I especially loved not having to use a website for editing, writing, or management of my blog. It all happens on the terminal, which I'm plenty comfortable with.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Already mostly answered in my hilariously unavoidable history section in Answer 1, but to recap:
- 1997 - Hand-crafted html
- 2001 - Blogger dot com
- 2007 - Wordpress dot com
- 2023 - Friend-hosted wordpress.org instance, then Pelican-built static website
How do you write your posts?
Most posts start their life in neovim on my Thinkpad X200t running OpenBSD. The markdown files get synced between all of my systems using syncthing. Technically, my blog posts start their life as a bullet point in a Simplenote note. I keep a list of blog post ideas on there so I can add to it easily on any of my computers or even my phone on the go. I find that having a pool of post ideas and posting regularly helps keep the ground for new posts quite fertile, as does using an RSS reader to read friends' posts and glean ideas from them (like this one!!) I used to keep a WIP folder of draft posts, but I found that half-finished posts were harder to complete than just single-line blog post ideas, for some reason.
I use a shell script I wrote called blogme (inspired by my tootme script) that auto-populates the blog post header with my post title, date, and commonly-used tags (which I manually prune before publishing each post). It just opens $EDITOR (always neovim in my case) with an instructional header, takes the very first line as the title, and generates the markdown file once you leave the editor, and tells you where it was saved.
So, blogme plops me into a neovim (or editor of your choice) screen that looks like this:
>>>NOTE>>> The very first line of this file will be treated as the title
>>>NOTE>>> of the blog post.
>>>NOTE>>> Any line beginning with ">>>NOTE>>>" will be ignoredThis will be the blog post title, as it's the first line.
They were the best of memes, they were the worst of memes...
As soon as I leave the editor, it creates a file like ~/Documents/writings/blog/pelican/content/2025-01-11-this-will-be-the-blog-post-title-as-its-the-first-line.md that will look like this:
---
Title: This will be the blog post title, as it's the first line.
Date: 2025-01-11 16:40 CST
Category: Entertainment, Ethics, Humor, Life, Philosophy, Prose, QuickPost, Tech, Writing
Tags: 100DaysToOffload, ADHD, Amiga, Beauty, Bible, BSD, Christianity, Computing, Content Warning, Entertainment, Ethics, Federated Services, FOSS (Free and Open Source Software), FreeBSD, Gaming, Hobbies, Humor, Informal post, Language, Life, Linux, Loss, Music, Non-religious post, Non-technical post, PeerTube, Philosophy, Polemic, Productivity, Prose, QuickPost, Retrocomputing, Science Fiction, Social Media, Translation, UNIX, Unix Tips, Video, Writing, WritingMonth
Status: Published
---They were the best of memes, they were the worst of memes...
I have a few more little bespoke shell scripts for my blog: one that does a wordcount on every post, one that gives me my writing month progress, one that gives me my 100 Days to Offload status (links explaining both of those further below), one that auto-generates Category: and Tags: lines for new posts based on the categories and tags used on all previous posts, and a few other very minor bespoke scripts.
After my first pass of writing, I will move to a Linux system if not already on one (so that I can use a full web browser — I won't install a browser onto my writing-dedicated system), and run the needed invoke command(s) to auto-generate the blog post and view them locally on a web browser as I go through my proofreading steps. I then make sure all the outbound weblinks work, double-check my category and tags, proofread again, then invoke publish and write a toot "advertising" the post.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Usually soon after I had written something. If more than three days go without writing a blog post, the well dries up. Another thing that inspires me to write is reading others' blog posts, just like in the case of this one. I wasn't planning on writing today, but seeing Hyde's post made me want to write one.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I do proofread at least a couple times after writing (and for whatever reason, I always proofread in the browser, not the editor. It just seems easier that way). The only time I ever delayed posting something is when it seemed to be a bit of a hot-button topic and there were some impassioned posts recently on the subject. So, I asked a friend who was close to the topic (and to others that had written about it) to read it over for me to make sure I wasn't stepping on anyone's toes.
What is your favorite post on your blog?
Hard to say. I'm particularly proud of my Laptops post, because I absolutely loved crafting the retro-feeling and very space-efficient images for that post (as well as the fact that I was speaking about something I'm passionate about).
All of the posts I wrote about loss were very raw to me, very open and vulnerable.
Joy Will Not Be Contained was an absolute riot to write, and the reaction I got from the community was a thing of beauty.
The posts I write on the subject of faith are often favorites, as they're usually really hot-button subjects, and deeply personal, as well as something I have very passionate and fervent feelings about.
I was also kind of proud of my What is FOSS? post, as it implemented an experimental fractal format to a blog post. Also the series that starts with Don't use what works for you.
Any future plans for your blog?
To take inspiration from the tagline of a tragically controversial and honestly rather oblivious linux youtuber, The Blog Abides. I greatly enjoy writing, and I greatly enjoy the conversation surrounding the posts on the Fediverse. This isn't going away.
I completed my second annual Writing Month last November, and I am working my way towards 100 Days to Offload this year, and making good progress! :)
Who will participate next?
I would like to nominate:
100 Days to Offload 2025 - Day 5
Category: Writing Tagged: 100DaysToOffload Computing Hobbies Non-religious post Productivity Social Media Writing