Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I had long periods of time where I was honestly kind of isolated and it was a way of going through the motions of socializing pre-social media. I really did meet a lot of interesting people through having a blog and through Flickr before people’s attention got captured by more hermetic platforms.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I had a hand edited html “news” page in the 90’s that was hosted on the FringeWare server, then when that went away I was on Blogger for a while, then a self-hosted WordPress blog on DreamHost. Some Wordpress plugin or another I was using got compromised and I switched to a Jekyll static site hosted on a digital ocean droplet in 2015 and i’ve been tinkering with that ever since. I know Jekyll isn’t fashionable any more, but I’m used to templating using Liquid and i’ve gotten this site to do some odd and interesting things through tinkering.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
On the desktop I have an Alfred shortcut that opens a new markdown file with frontmatter in an editor called Byword and then a Hazel script conforms the the file name so I don’t have to bother remembering what dating convention the names use. On the iPad I have a shortcut that opens a new post in Editorial with the appropriate frontmatter. Either way the post file gets saved to Dropbox, where my Jekyll build folder lives, which syncs to Dropbox cli for Linux on the server droplet. The reason I am doing this weird sync method is that back in the day, IFTTT had nice workflows to write text to Dropbox, triggered by other services, so I made actions to automatically blog YouTube likes and Pocket favorites, and I still use them. I know I should probably ditch all these commercial services now and write my own scripts with rsync etc, but it’s at the very bottom of a long list of things I’d like to do and it’s all still working right now.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
When I’m drunk? When I’m either stuck on a project problem or i’ve made a breakthrough? I don’t post in the way that makes for a good blog- I don’t do well considered long form writing thinking that anyone else will read it. I write notes to myself and some quality of having them be public keeps me motivated to keep up the habit. I also have private notes that I keep in Obdidian and sometimes those notes will ‘graduate’ from a private thought to a public one. For more than a few years now I have been really reticent to post anything personal. I just imagine a different audience now than ten or twelve years ago- the “audience now” is almost all either bots or bad actors and I don’t really feel like being vulnerable with a machine.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Publish immediately, sometimes when it’s just a link, then go back and add notes, then posts tend to get grouped together into “projects” which are a Jekyll page that tracks posts, image galleries, videos, bibliographies, game prototypes and processing sketches. Most of the stuff on my main page are surfaced projects.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I don’t think I have one! My favorite pieces of writing are usually pdf’s attached to projects, not individual posts.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I’ve considered moving to 11ty, but my site is huge and complex and it would be an ordeal. My current project was to try to make multiple tumblr-style image blogs with their own rss feeds that I can add to just by dropping images in a directory and it’s… mostly working. I’ll polish it later.
