I saw this particular prompt on annie’s blog and decided answering the questions in the prompts was worthwhile.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
This question is hard to answer. My earliest forays into blogging were in my adolescence, in my early teens and a lot of the specifics reasons and motivations are lost to the hazy depths of time. But I can remember a few fragments.
I thought blogging was cool, I spent a lot of time on the internet in my teenage years. Web forums, IRC and blogging. Specifically, as a teenager that was super enthusiastic about computers and technology, I read a lot of tech blogging and bloggers at the time. Sites like Engadget, TechCrunch, Ars Technica, CNET come to mind. Of those Ars Technica is the only one I still read. So I read those tech blogs and wanted to be a blogger of my own and write about technology.
I still think blogging is cool but I tend to not write about technology a lot anymore because my interests have diversified.
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
I use WordPress and have used WordPress for a decade plus now. I use it because I like the interface or at least I am used to it. It is easy to use and it has a vast plugin ecosystem that I can use to make things that I want happen.
I don’t think WordPress is perfect or amazing but over the years I have come to appreciate in many ways its relative simplicity and ease of use features. It is just a PHP web app you can host on a gazillion different web hosts or on a Raspberry Pi in your bedroom and it will work just fine on those. WordPress represents the ideal of the open web to me and that is one of the big reasons I continue to use WordPress.
I also have a music blog on the Ghost platform but I definitely have not developed an affection for Ghost as I did for WordPress. At least not yet. Ghost feels a little too clean, a little too polished. WordPress still has that little of jank around the edges that makes me love it.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Yes I have blogged on a few other platforms before. If my memory serves me correctly my first blog was on the Blogger platform. After that I found WordPress and then I blogged on Tumblr for a good few years. I moved back to WordPress and then converted that site to a Jekyll site. I then decided that static sites generators are too much hassle for blogging and went back to WordPress.
I still maintain that general opinion about static site generators. I have simple websites built on a static site generator (Hugo) but I don’t want to use them for blogging. Just too much process between writing and publishing. I don’t want to think about git when I want to write a blog post.
How do you write your posts?
In the WordPress editor. I don’t like having to use a separate editor than the one my blogging tool already provides. Copying and pasting from a separate editor feels like an unnecessary and unpleasant bit of friction to me. I also happen to generally like the Gutenberg editor that current versions of WordPress ship with and I don’t find it getting in the way of me writing my blog posts with.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Unironically, I get a lot of inspiration while standing under a hot shower and thinking about a particular topic. This sucks but I cannot really write in the shower and nor can I quickly make a note of my thoughts. By the time I get out of the shower and sit down at my desk I have lost the thread of inspiration.
I find that being away from home in general inspires me to write – whether it is getting breakfast at the local cafe, my daily walk, at the library, out getting lunch at a restaurant, on the subway. Being out in the world is a source of inspiration.
People are also a source of inspiration, specifically the art that people create – books, movies, TV shows, music, poetry, blog posts. As a writer, I find reading books and thinking about books I’ve read makes me want to write. Which is perhaps why book reviews are the most common blog post archetype on my blog recently.
Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer?
I let it simmer for a few hours before publishing. I usually like to write my blog posts in the morning and publish them in the afternoon so there is a few hours of the post sitting in my drafts scheduled to be published. I mostly use that time to go over the post and fix any obvious grammatical errors or weird sentence structures that seem to creep up. Sometimes I am prone to dropping a word or two in a sentence and I’m always mildly embarrassed when someone else catches that before I do.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
Do I have to pick one? I’ll pick the post titled These Memories of Ours that I wrote nearly two years ago. I have been thinking about this blog post recently. Not entirely sure why. I do know I want to write more blog posts like that one.
Any future plans for the blog?
Keep on writing for it. I want to grow and improve as a writer and the best way I can think of to do that is to write more.
If you enjoyed reading this post, please support my work directly through Stripe or via Patreon.