Blog Questions Challenge

FYI Luke link also goes to Jon’s blog

@adactio Awesome, thank you. And it did the trick for me: now I want to write more. 🙌

@adactio 😱!

Glad you did - I love reading about the nuts and bolts.

Last week (ish) one of those old-style memetic chain letter thingies started appearing in a few of my RSS follows, namely Jon, Jeremy, Rachel and Ethan. And seen as Jeremy passed the challenge along to anyone who read his post, I guess that includes me.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I honestly have no idea, and my first post from January 2003 certainly doesn’t offer any clues…

There is no ‘ideal’ for this site, I have no idea what it will become, or what it’ll turn into, but hey! That’s the Interweb for you.

(“Interweb”… oh dear)

If I try and think back, I had the domain, I knew having your own space online was important, so if I was to read anything into past-me’s words, it would be that i wanted to build something, I just wasn’t sure what at the time. And a blog seemed like the perfect way to start experimenting.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I’ve been on Wagtail in combination with various other Django packages for nearly two years now. This post explains more of the rational behind the move, but what I can tell you looking back is that I’m very happy I did it. Wagtail and Django, plus the associated ecosystem have been absolutely rock-solid, and I love tinkering on this site.

The main components are:

• Wagtail for CMS, structure and navigation
• django-ditto for mirroring my content from other sites
• django-wm for handling webmentions

I’ve run the full gamut of other platforms. I started out with flat files and server-side includes, then I built a small blogging engine in Perl, then another in PHP, there were a couple of other open source PHP tools, then Drupal for a while, then Perch Runway, and now I’m here.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

It depends. I’m currently writing this in Bear.app, my go-to long form note-taker. I practically live in Markdown text notes, so it makes sense to me. Wagtail offers me a lot of structure when putting a post together if I want it, but most of the time I just blurt out a bunch of Markdown, paste it in and move on.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Never. I really struggle with writing. I challenged myself to keeping weeknotes last year, and it was an uphill battle. My aim was to post each Sunday, I usually managed to do it by the Wednesday, I think my worst was a Thursday.

(To be slightly less harsh on myself, I was also doing a 365 photo challenge the same year, so that might have been a bit of a stupid plan.)

The irony is, when current-me doesn’t post, it’s future-me who has to deal with it. Large gaps in the posting record make me wonder what was going on at that time.

So I’m going to try and be better.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Usually I publish immeadiately, spot a bunch of mistakes, and then re-edit furiously for the next 10 minutes.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I’m quite fond of a post from 2017 talking about my relationship to Oxford, music, and a venue called The Cellar (including bonus photo of super young me!).

I’ve been posting an end of year list each year for over a decade, of favourite albums and films, and more recently books and games. They’re always fun to look back on.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

A redesign is always on the cards. As Ethan wisely wrote, let a website be a worry stone, and fuck knows we have a lot to worry about these days. There’s always some kind of tinkering going on behind the scenes. At some point you look around and the tinkering has scattered bits of HTML and CSS everywhere and it all looks different. I guess that’s a redesign?

I have a bunch of cleaning up to do in the back-end.

I’ve moved my bookmarks from Pinboard to Rainddrop, so I need to write some code for django-ditto to add support for that.

My tags are a mess, not a suprise after journeying through so many platforms… I mean, look at the state of this, all the tags that contain “web”:

'world-wide-web',
'web-development',
'web',
'web-design',
'open-web',
'indieweb',
'web development',
'web design',
'world wide web',
'worldwideweb',
'webdesign',
'indiewebcamp',
'webdevelopment'

So I need to do something about that!

I want to integrate my last.fm account a little more tightly, maybe a “now playing” widget of some kind. Andy has a great one in the footer of his site.

Next?

To steal Jeremy’s idea. If you’re reading this you should write one of these. It’s fun to look back.

And if you’ve never written a blog post, you should. It’s fun to start.

I remember seeing something very similar doing the rounds on that site we used to use called “Twitter”, possibly back in 2007. Anyway, fast forward a full grown adult and it’s making the rounds, except this time instead of looking dough eyed from afar, that lovely man Stuart tagged me (though arguably Jeremy also tagged everyone in his post too).

So here’s my hat in the ring.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’d had a couple of false starts with blogging. Once in 2004 during a 3 month sabbatical in Whistler, Canada to keep friends & family up to date with my activities. That last 3 weeks (on Google’s blogger platform - no idea if it still exists).

After getting back to the UK, whilst I was working full time in London (and travelling back home to Brighton), I decided that I would start my own business, and that like any good web based business, developer thingy person, I should have a blog. Literally as simple as that.

Since I had no one to write for, and nothing to say, I started just writing little movie reviews of films I’d seen at the cinema and little notes that I thought were interesting things happening on the web (technically this was my first blog post on remysharp.com even though I back-posted one to before then).

Simultaneously at around the same time, I was blogging on leftlogic.com which had a handful of high traffic posts (like my Microformats bookmarklet), that eventually I brought some of the posts across to this blog (I should really move the rest in one day).

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Today my blog is a custom rolled static site generator (SSG) written in JavaScript. It’s on github if you want a peek. Because the site is entirely static (with some dynamic content either regenerated on build or if I run an offline command), it means I host my site on Netlify (thanks Netlify folks).

Before that I was running my blog on a SSG called Harp, and this was hosted on Heroku. It based a lot of the inspiration for my own code (along with 11ty, though I didn’t use it for my personal blog).

Before that, and originally, it was WordPress. Mostly because I could get started on the blogging side rather than get too bogged down in how comments and pingbacks work. I’ve literally no idea where that was hosted, but I moved away from WordPress when I’d hit my limit of viagra adverts being injected into various vulnerabilities that WordPress so kindly hosted for me.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

As markdown in whatever editor I happen to be using at the time. I’m writing this in VS Code, and if I’m at my desktop machine, it’s likely the “editor” I’ll use.

If I’m on my phone (and I’ve written a lot of posts on my phone, on a treadmill), it’ll be iA Writer for Android.

I don’t have any fancy formatting, and I’ve gotten the sense that for a lot of the bloggers who’ve written similar posts, they’re in the same boat.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

There’s two distinct times:

When there’s an immediate trigger in front of me. This could be a technical problem that I thought would be useful to write up (so that I can search my own blog for the solution), or if there’s some opinion on the web that I strongly want to leap on and have my say in (yes, though I won’t admit it, I suspect I love the sound of my own words, I mean, look how long this post is already).

Those posts tend to be easier to write.

The other time is when I’m either in bed trying to sleep, or in bed trying not to get up, or driving and my brain is on idle. I find myself wanting to write about much more nuanced subjects, like for instance: how AI might affect the coders jobs and how that might impact children today. But inevitably they’re subjects that I’m not confident to articulate and I pontificate instead (“articulate” and “pontificate” in a single blog post, 13 year old Rem would be proud, and slightly grossed out).

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Always immediately after. Otherwise they go to die a slow death in my drafts - which I should really just go ahead and rename to purgatory.

The problem I now face having run my blog for 19 years (so far!), is that I don’t tend to fart out posts as quickly. Ironically I’ve written about why I don’t write and what blocks me in particular. The thing that slows me down (a lot) is needing to make sure I’m being as technically accurate as possible. Checking for bugs or misunderstandings, which then leads to rabbit holes, which, quite a few times, leads to purgatory (sorry, “permanent draft”).

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I’m not entirely sure I have one. I’m very proud of my series on JS Bin (originally a single blog post at over well over 5,000 words, I was advised to break it up!). My series of posts when we returned to CERN to build the World Wide Web browser was fun too.

I’m also fairly keen on my post on you’re paying to speak - because I still feel strongly about it and it’s still relevant (and did kick off some good discussion).

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I’m regularly thinking on the backend of the blog, making slight build speed improvements, or having to fix or add some little thing. I briefly thought about adding a section on the games I’m playing and completing, but it turns out I’m pretty crap at games, so the list quickly ended at three games and hit the bin.

In short: no.

Next?

Although I love you, my dear reader, very much, I’m going to tag a few people who’s blogs pop into my head. The first is Ana Rodrigues. Next would be the lovely Jake Archibald who, if he does blog on this one will be off brand from the mega technical posts! Finally, Charlie O’Hara (aka Whale Coiner and all kinds of other names) - I’m sure Charlie’s had multiple blogs, but not sure enough to bet on it, so it’ll be nice to (hopefully) read her history on this too.

There’s lots more people that I’d love to read their history, but I think it would be rude to snag them all for my own. Definitely looking forward to reading more of these posts from people.

Blog Questions Challenge