The ever-so-great-and-interesting Katherine answered some questions about blogging and tagged me to do the same.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
In my late teens the web wouldn’t let me go. My favorite hobby was staying up until 2am reading smart things from smart people so very far away because it felt like an act of rebellion. Hundreds, thousands of people, writing about the web and its potential, about where it should all go next. They were so open and honest! They wrote about love and code, their struggles with their family. They wrote about trying to be better people but failing over and over again.
I was obsessed with ftrain, and devoured everything that Chloe wrote (I still miss her, even though we never met). I read travelogues and private diaries and book reviews, or breakdowns of conferences in distant cities, and I would stay up all night swooning over design blogs like The Mid-Century Modernist.
Blogging was a Great Struggle Machine, a tool to bring brilliant people into my life, and it was through that ritual where we could all be more honest with each other than we might be in person. It was exciting!
My first blog was a Wordpress theme I bought from IA all about web design. It was really embarrassing and that’s me being kind to myself. I had Big Opinions about design that were just annoying regurgitations from other smart folks. But over the years I kept tinkering, eventually making my own website, and that’s where I’ve posted things for the best part of 10 years now.
Through blogging I hope to pay something back to the community that once gave so much to me.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Through blogging I learned about web design and every designer back then argued to own the means of production: own your website! Don’t use a third party blogging platform because it could all be taken down, deleted, or ransacked.
After the Bad WordPress Blog Who Shall Not Be Named, I built a blog in Jekyll before landing on Eleventy which is what I’ve used for years now. I tried other systems like Blot.im but all of them fail where Eleventy thrives. It’s easy to use, easy to customize, and I can tear it all out if I want to try something else. Also, Zach rules.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
Mostly iA Writer on my phone. I’ve tried other editing tools to help organize things but I like a single big folder full of endless notes. That’s tied up to Dropbox so I can turn those scribbles into something more thoughtful eventually.
Once I’ve got it in a good shape I run a macOS shortcut that takes the contents of my clipboard, opens up VS Code, creates a file, and pastes it in there. But gosh if Shortcuts.app isn’t the buggiest, weirdest way to do this and continually breaks which prevents me from wanting to write.
I’ll fix it eventually, I promise.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Early mornings. Coffee in hand. Sitting in a roomful of strangers with the rain outside. That is the perfect writing environment.
But often I feel inspired by other bloggers and web-folk. Just the other day I fell down a wondrous e-hole thanks to maya.land and the bountiful links posted everywhere on her brilliantly strange website. It made me want to make weird websites again.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Immediately. If I don’t get a post out in the second it feels important then I know it’ll languish in drafts forever.
I’ve often looked back on a note though and realized I was too fast though, too quick to post where I was careless with the idea and could’ve expanded on it so much more. Everything I post in /stories typically takes months to write and think about though.
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
Oh, man. Reading old posts now is enjoyable because I don’t remember writing them, it feels like I’m intruding on someone else’s blog at this point. But there’s certainly a style of post that I’m now tired of and try to avoid: any writing about my day job or about code and design or how to build products is so...lame. There’s an anger in those posts that feels wasteful and I often regret writing them.
The best posts are the ones where I overshare about my life, where I let the reader in on a secret I shouldn’t be telling them. So I like this post about moving out of my apartment, I like this one about the sirens back home, I like Blunder or The computer is a feeling, or Church Going (YIKES), or Like Clockwork and Potential and Loss and A Thousand Ships. Oh, oh, I am a poem I am not software, too.
In terms of tone, pacing, visuals, and everything else though — Newsletters has been the high point probably.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I’m endlessly redesigning this guy because it calms me but I think the heat death of the universe will arrive before I bail on Eleventy.
I do feel like my website is too visually cramped at the moment. It’s like reading on a little card or note and I always want to take up all the screen real estate that I can and really show off typographically. So I expect next month I might blow it all up and try again.