Blog Questions Challenge

Posted 2 days ago

So this challenge has been making the rounds with several people that I follow on RSS or Bluesky. It is like a good ol’-fashioned memetic chain letter. I didn’t get tagged by anyone specifically, but Jeremy Keith did say “You. Yes you.” at the bottom of his post. So I accept the challenge.

I wrote a similar article last year, Blogging and Me, in which I answered interview questions from People and Blogs. I reused some of that article for this challenge. But mostly new and original content.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I had read about personal blogs in a book around 2002. My first experiment was blogging was by keeping a log on a static site. It was called “Webmaster’s Log” and I kept a running list of things I was learning each month or talk about new resources or functionality that I had added to the site.

I started blogging on the Blogger platform in February 2005. Later, I moved those posts over to this domain in April when I set up this WordPress site. Most of my first posts were lists of what I was reading. I also wrote a short poem, Who am I?

One day at work, I was sharing something that I had learned in the area of web development with a colleague and he encouraged me to blog about it.

I have always enjoyed learning. And I equally enjoy connecting others with helpful resources. If you knew me in person, I would probably tell you something that I learned in one of the many books that I am reading.

I decided to focus on sharing help­ful resources, soft­ware, and other websites that I have ben­e­fited from in my per­sonal and pro­fes­sional life. I also cre­ated the site to be a “sand­box” so that I could play around with dif­fer­ent design and devel­op­ment ideas.

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

I am currently using WordPress as my blogging platform. As I mentioned above, I started using WordPress in April 2005. I chose it because it was really easy to get up and going. My original theme was one that I modified from another theme to fit my needs. Most of what I learned about WordPress in those early days was a result of tinkering around on this site and finding solutions to problems that I wanted to solve.

I had also learned a little bit of PHP for some of the other sites I had built in my job so WordPress was a very comfortable environment for me to work in. I liked that WordPress did not dictate how I wrote my HTML, CSS, or JavaScript. There was a lot of functionality baked in or I could find plugins. I think the WordPress community was also a factor in me staying with it for so long. I could easily find answers to questions I had or plugins or other resources I needed.

What started as a solution for my personal needs and tinkering soon became a go-to solution in my everyday work as a developer.

I did blog on the Blogger platform early on. Ease of use was the draw there. I didn’t have set anything up and it was easy to customize the “theme.”

I explored TextPattern at one point but but never took it for a test drive. I worked with Drupal for a couple of years when I worked for a small agency for three months and then a publishing company for two years. After that, I worked with ExpressionEngine for a little over a year when I worked for a small boutique agency, Easy Designs. I got interested in Craft CMS in 2015 because it came out of the ExpressionEngine community.

One of the things I liked about ExpressionEngine is that it was a bit more robust than WordPress but had a much more elegant interface than Drupal. It felt like it took the best from both of those worlds. Craft felt the same way but was much easier to pick up than ExpressionEngine. I worked with Craft for a couple of years before focusing on WordPress again for the last 11 years. I recently reaquainted myself with Craft and have thought about moving from WordPress to Craft in the future.

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

Most of my posts I write directly in WordPress on the server. There are times when I will start a post in Evernote instead of in WordPress. There are also posts that I will begin to gather links and other related ideas in Evernote as I spend a longer time allowing the idea to come to fruition. The posts that I start in other places like Evernote or Obsidian (these days) are usually ones that are just a spark of an idea and I am not ready to fill it all out yet.

I find it easier just to work directly in WordPress because eventually I will have to move the content into it. I like working with the Gutenburg editor and I can even work on a post on my phone. I did that for the first time last Spring while visiting Budapest.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I have an idea that I want to bring into being. One of the primary results that I want to achieve in life is to realize concepts or turn ideas into projects. Blogging is one of the ways that I have found to achieve that result. I tend to be most inspired when I have an idea that plants itself and I start thinking about. Sometimes those ideas come into reality within minutes or hours of the idea. Other times those ideas are bouncing around in my head for a much longer time.

In Your Career, Be a Maverick or a Riker bounced around in my head for about six months before I wrote about it. Think like a front-end developer took five years from original idea to published post.

To be honest, I think I feel most inspired to write when I can’t write. I will have an idea when I am taking a shower in the morning and though I would like to sit down and start writing, I need to focus on the work that I am getting paid to do. Or I will have an idea when I am driving, either when I am around town or when I am taking a road trip to Nashville or Murray, Kentucky,

I have found that writing comes muc easier these days as I have approached writing as a habit. Writing weeknotes has helped. Over a year ago, I set the challenge for myself to post something every day. One of the payoffs of that experience is that I am constantly thinking of ideas to write about because I am more intentional. I am still reaping the benefits of that experience even though I slowed down to a stop for several months this past year.

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

Most of my posts are published pretty immediately. There are times I will wait to publish something the next day so I can put fresh eyes to it before it comes into being. If something does simmer as a draft, it will either be abandoned or else simmer for less than a week.

I went through a time where I was more concerned about what I was writing. I was thinking more about the audience and if it was interesting to them or would be reposted on social media. But then I made a conscious decision that my primary audience was me. It gave me a lot of freedom to just write something up and hit publish. It is better to get something out there than to have it never see the light of day. Besides, I can always go back and edit or change it later. That’s the benefit of publishing on the Web.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

There is no way that I can pick only one. I have been writing for 20 years now. I will list several of my favorites. Twenty favorites for twenty years.

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

I have been toying with the idea of moving from WordPress to Craft CMS. I have been working on a project right now but my intention was mostly to reacquaint myself with Craft but also learn a skill that might be needed in the future. With all the drama surrounding WordPress right now, there will probably be some business opportunities to migrate sites from WordPress to Craft. The Craft team has already created solutions to easily migrate.

I just implemented a redesign of the site about a year ago so no plans to redesign it anytime soon. I could see making incremental changes to the site over time.

Next?

I would like to hear from Stu Robson or Nate Dillon because I know that both of them blog and have read my blog in the past. Beyond that, I will issue the challenge to anyone reading this. Be sure to let me know if you write your own post. Leave a comment or mention me on Bluesky.

By the way, I used a new trick that I learned last week. I linked to text fragments in this article. I used Chrome to copy the links. Find out more about linking to text fragments from this Frontend Master’s article (you no longer need an anchor).

Others who have accepted the challenge

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