I was nominated by Adam Newbold to take part in the Blog Question challenge this past weekend. It’s been busy so I’m just now getting a chance to sit down and breathe and type something up. I hope you all enjoy! And I’ll figure out some people to nominate to do it as well on Mastodon!
Table of Contents
Open Table of Contents
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I know people blog for lots of different reasons. For me it’s to learn and be creative. It exercises “muscles” I know I need to exercise in a pretty fun way. I’ve never been focused on building an audience or influence but instead write to process the world, process life and feelings and maybe be a little bit creative in a world that’s often discourages it. I’ve jumped around blogs a lot to learn about different technologies, coding languages, the ends and out of different platforms and the like. It all makes blogging a pretty fun and meaningful experience (for me).
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?
Currently I have this blog and another which uses Astro as the underlying tech. I’m doing that because I’ve always scoffed at the notion of learning javascript and decided one day that maybe I should figure it out a bit more.
I have a photoblog also using Ghost and chose it because it’s a lovely platform that’s easy to use. It’s more of a feature-rich CMS (a la Wordpress) but just feels nice to use.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Yes. A lot.
My first blog used Mambo hosted in my student space as a university student. This was early 2000s. I’ve also self-hosted Wordpress and Pelican.
Like a wild man, I also built 3 crude blogging apps that I used for varying periods of time:
- One as a Flash app because I was just completely ridiculous I think.
- One as a PHP app because why not?
- One as a Ruby on Rails app because RoR was the cool new kid on the block.
2010 to 2024 was the years of SaaS. I used Posterous (but it died), Posthaven (which is still around and cool), Svbtle (I actually love the simplicity of this one), Squarespace, Micro.Blog (never felt like I fit in which is probably explained by recent events), weblog.lol, scribbles and BearBlog.
I can’t speak highly enough about Bear; I’d still be there if I didn’t want deeper ownership of the blogging process. It’s the first thing I’d recommend for anyone getting into blogging today.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
On this site, right now, it’s this post on thankfulness. I need to be reminded of these things every day right now.
On my other personal blog, this post about accountability stands out. A second would be this piece on choosing peace.
I do have a third site I don’t talk about much here which is a compilation of old faith-based writings I’ve done. A lot of the work there was focused on exploring ways of decolonizing theological (specifically missiological) structures. There are a number of pieces (like this and this). It is heavy on the “faith-based” side of things so if you click, don’t be surprised at Jesus-y language.
Any future plans for the blog?
I need to get the RSS feed to include full content on this site. That’s the most pressing priority.
I’ve also considered remaking it in 11ty so that might happen? I’m not sure though. For now - I’m happy with things as they stand.
Who will participate next?
I will update here and tag people on Mastodon or Bluesky when I figure that out!
UPDATE: I’ve figured it out! I challenge Meadow @ https://meadow.cafe!
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