Because Ben asked…
These questions were originally posed by Ava for folks using Bear Blog.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Seemed like a good idea at the time.
I wrote the first post on this blog before I even had a blog, so I guess I made the blog to have somewhere to put that. One thing lead to another and, well, time makes fools of us all.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
Eleventy, hosted at NearlyFreeSpeech.net.
I think I chose Eleventy because everyone around me was talking about it. So far, so good.
NearlyFreeSpeech.net is an inexpensive shared-hosting provider, which is more than adequate for a small personal site like this. It gives me way more flexibility (PHP, Python, limited access to Apache) and zero lock-in compared to a lot of the free static hosts like Netlify or CloudFlare.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Not blogged, no.
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 keep two local copies of my website on my computers: one for doing development (in ~/Code/) and one for writing (in ~/Documents/). This way I don’t accidentally commit a new post to a branch containing something like a redesign (which has happened, and is annoying). Just because you can juggle multiple branches in Git, doesn’t mean you have to.
I’ve set up the writing copy as an Obsidian vault, which is where I do the writing. I use the Templater plugin for filling in my front matter, and the Git plugin to sync the writing directly from Obsidian.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Not very often, I guess, considering the large number of unfinished drafts (30, at time of writing) and the irregular publishing schedule on the site. Ideas come to me all the time, but ideas are cheap; the inspiration to finish writing about any of those ideas is pretty rare and I am not a disciplined writer.
I am more likely to finish and publish something on a technical topic like creating stable IDs for your feed, but I think that has less to do with inspiration and more to do with having the confidence to write about those kinds of topics, which makes it easier to finish them.
Do you publish immediately, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
It Depends.
If I’m sharing something someone else wrote, or something funny my kid said (the kinds of things that used to end up on Social Media), I publish right away. Everything else I try to put aside for a couple of days after I ‘finish’ writing so that I can come back with a little bit of distance and re-evaluate it. Even odds that after a few days I decide not to publish it.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
Urbanism, transportation, interactive and generative art, labor issues, privacy issues.
Since I have no expertise in any of these topics, I often end up publishing about web development and Eleventy instead. This is not ideal.
It’s not that I don’t like writing about the web — if I didn’t, I wouldn’t write about it. I just don’t want this to be a developer blog. And yet…
For whom are you writing?
I don’t know, and maybe that’s a problem?
I must enjoy writing, because I keep doing it. I suppose that means I’m writing for myself (maybe that’s the problem).
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
Any future plans for your blog?
Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Too many plans. Because apparently getting a life is so scary I can’t stop thinking about all the work I want to do on a website nobody asked me to build.
I am in the midst of a redesign — boy I’d love to stop redesigning this website. I’d like to incorporate my photos into this site. I’d like to get back to making art and start sharing that here, too (thinking about Jared Tarbell’s Complexification, or Anders Hoff’s inconvergent). I’d like to add a theme picker and search that don’t rely on JavaScript by generating PHP instead of HTML with Eleventy. I also have a few ideas about how I could make Obsidian a nicer publishing environment for this website.
If they feel like sharing (no obligation), I’d love to read Hollie’s, Alex’s, and Thomas’s answers to these questions.