Blog Question Challenge 2025

My feed reader has been brimming with the "Blog Question Challenge" these past couple of months. Which has been great! I always enjoy hearing about why people blog and their workflows for doing it.

The challenge, I think, originated as the Bearblog Question Challenge started by Ava. It soon took a life on its own, and morphed into something more general to get bloggers to write about their blogging. It reached my little corner of the web when Meadow tagged me in is answer a few of days ago.

"About time", I thought, as I'm certainly not one to shy away from blogging about blogging. Plus, as Meadow mentions, it is a fairly low-effort way to get out another post. Since the start of the year I've been a little too busy working on the technical side of things, and have not exactly been diligent with my posting. So let's get to it!

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

A more ambiguous question than it might appear at first glance. Because what does "blogging" even mean in this context? I first started writing online as a teenager in the late nineties. Although we didn't call it blogging at the time, there was an uncanny resemblance. The home page contained updates — or posts, if you'd like — arranged in a reverse-chronological order.

I did this to explore. Technology, computers in particular, had fascinated me for as long as I could remember. When we, at long last, got a dial-up connection at home, I quickly found my way to local IRC channels to connect with like-minded people. Many of them had their own homepages. It piqued my curiosity about how one would go about making one of these.

Not long after, my first website was live.

To make a long story a little less long, this eventually resulted in me starting a website called Zelda Universe. It consumed me for a few years. I spent as much time as I could trying to make it a great resource for information and a welcoming community for people who enjoyed playing the Legend of Zelda games. ¹ Much of the content I published on this site would probably fall under the definition of "blogging" a couple of years later, as regular updates was the best way to keep people coming back to the site.

In 2005 I decided to move on from Zelda Universe. I needed a new online home. I registered the .com of my name and, with blogging being all the range right around then, I decided to join in. Twenty years ago, on 12 April 2005, I published my first proper blog post.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

That first iteration of my blog ran on Wordpress. As did all the subsequent iterations of the blog in the nineteen and a half years that followed. Sometime last year, however, I decided it was time for a change. With learning as my primary goal (and durability and portability of the content I create as the secondary aim) I set out to create a custom static site generator.

Other motivational factors were freedom and control. Having full control of the software that creates this website lets me tailor both process and functionality to my preferences. I quite like that. It gives me the feeling that anything is possible with this website, which in turn makes it a more inspiring playground.

The process for publishing content is quite simple. I just open up a text editor, write the content and mark it up in markdown (or plain HTML, if I'm so inclined) and save the content to a specific directory. I need to add a couple of details at the top, so the document template looks like this:

Title of the content
====================

TYPE: Post 
DATE: 29 February 2028
TAGS: #ILikeTags #For #Organising #Stuff

--

The actual post goes here.

In actual practice, just typing out all this feels a bit too much like work to me. So, doing my best to imitate a real computer engineer, I've spent hours setting up various Shortcuts that save me seconds every time I want to create a new entry.

In fairness, some of those Shorcuts are actually quite handy sometimes. Like when I'm reading something I want to share on the blog, I just copy the part of want to quote, run the shortcut and voila! I have a fully prepared text document with date, quote and a link to the source. All I need to do is add commentary and save the file for publishing.

Same when I want to share a picture from my phone. I just run the shortcut, select the image I want to share, and then the photo is downsized, compressed, saved to the right spot and a document prepared with all the right info and references is opened. Add a comment and save to publish!

Under the hood this all works by placing the relevant files (content and images) in a specific directory on my cloud storage space. My "home server" (a re-purposed old Macbook Pro from 2012) monitors this directory. When new content is discovered it triggers my site generator to create the new html files in my site directory, and regenerates the front page, archives and feed files.

Another Python script monitors the website directory. When new or changed files appear, this script uploads these to the host of my site, a virtual machine that I rent from OpenBSD.amsterdam. (I wrote about that particular choice here.)

On the face of it, I guess it's a pretty convoluted setup. But it is entirely my own design, and I quite like it. The best part is that when something inevitably fails, I've so far never had any problems figuring it why. And it's always entirely fixable.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Absolutely! Although this particular site always ran on Wordpress, I've tested out dozens of other platforms through both work and other projects throughout the years.

Apart from manually updating the html documents, the first "automated" solution I ever used resided in the CGI-bin called "News-CGI" or some such. Since then I've tried and blogged with, in no particular order, Movable Type, Mambo (which eventually became Joomla), PHP-Nuke, Drupal, Optimizely (née Episerver) and Webflow. I'm probably forgetting as many as I've listed.

I've also published blog posts on platforms like Livejournal, Blogger, Tumbler and Medium. And I have, of course, also been active on every "microblogging" platform under the sun that popped up in the wake of Twitter in the second half of the noughts.

Lastly, a couple of my more popular blogs back in the day actually ran on dedicated forum software like vBulletin and phpBB. I always liked the idea of community-centred websites, and combining a topical blog with a forum seemed like a no-brainer back then. In some ways, seeing where the giant "social" platforms (data farms) brought us, it still does.

How do you write your posts?

A thousand times in my head, before, eventually — if I get around to it — I sit down and try to put it into writing.

Or, at least, that's what happens if I don't follow a fairly strict regimen for writing.

Last year I had two decent streaks where I managed to stay structured in my approach. And it worked. The more consistent I am in my writing, the easier it becomes to take the thoughts flying around in my head and turn them into coherent thoughts.

And yet, despite knowing that I need this structure, I've fallen off the horse twice over the past year. My days are fairly hectic. In the hierarchy of priorities, writing is often the one thing that does make the list for which I struggle to find the right slot.

Last year I tried getting up very early and get my writing in before the rest of the house wakes up. This worked very well for writing. Less so for everything else in my life. Going to bed nearly the same time as the kids is fine during weekdays. Sacrificing that grown-up quality time during weekends and vacations took a toll.

So I gave it up.

Meaning that, as it stands, I write haphazardly and whenever I have both the time and "feel" like it. Which is far from as often as I'd like. But I still haven't given up on finding the approach that works with everything else.

In terms of tools and setup, everything is rigged to counteract my tendency to get distracted. I frequently get lost in my own mind, never mind everything that pulls away my attention on my main laptop. To that end, I do all my writing on a dedicated laptop. It's an old 11" Macbook Air that I "inherited" from my wife. It run Mac OS X 10.8 "Mountain Lion" and can't even connect to the internet because OS certificates have expired and stuff.

Absolutely perfect, in other words!

All my writing is done in plain text with Markdown formatting. My favourite text editor is Sublime Text and I use it for everything I write.

Everything I write goes in a folder, "Writing". Once I finish or abandon an idea I move the document to a sub-folder, "Archive". The result is a bunch of drafts at the root of the "Writing" folder. I try to stay under ten drafts at all times. Sometimes that folder will escalates out of control, though.

On the technical side, all of my documents live in the cloud. However, my writing laptop is way too old to support any cloud syncing tool. (And there's that whole certificates thing, too.) I've solved that by using my other old Macbook that runs as a "home server" that I mentioned earlier as a gateway to all of my data. For good measure, I just also have a Bash script that uses rsync that runs every minute and pulls my writing folder to the local drive of my writing laptop.

Just in case, you know.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

The time I tried to pick up smoking. It's an homage to a friend I miss disguised as a story about myself. I want to write more stories like this.

I also like Grief is a boulder. It's deeply personal, an also the only thing I've written where there's conscious meaning behind the aesthetic presentation of words. (It works best if your viewport is at least 505 pixels wide.)

Honourable mentions to Exorcising algorithms for a healthy dose of nostalgia and Minimum viable consistency which expresses a philosophy towards life that I try to live by every single day.

Lastly, there aren't many highlights in the deep archives. But I did enjoy reading my To Do List from 2008 as a reminder of some of the things I hoped to do in the years that followed. I never did get around to getting that particular blog going, nor returning my Macbook for repairs. It was nice seeing that I'm not too far off with regards to some of the more significant points, though.

Any future plans for the blog?

Write more.

My primary motivation for keeping this blog going is to create a lasting archive of who I am and used to be. To document what I do and what I think and care about. Primarily for my own benefit, but also for my children. So that if they one day decide they want to know about who their father was, they can read what's written here and, hopefully, feel that they know their father a little better.

I also have some technical things I want to implement in my setup. After finally getting my Reading log back up, I want to do something similar for my exercise log. A self-made, self-hosted Strava alternative.

When that is in place, the final thing on my "want to do list" is to create a blogroll page. One that's automatically generated from my RSS subscriptions.

But before working on any of those things, I want to get back to writing again. With the limited free time at my disposal, any technical project inevitably consumes my time for writing.

Who will participate next?

That's easy. I nominate Fabian and Yaidel.