Blog questions challenge

I was tagged by Jon Hicks and it seems like as good a time as any to return to ye olde blogge days, so here’s my answers.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I had some personal notes on an older incarnation of this site, and when blogging became a thing, I realized those notes were pretty much what people were calling a blog. So it really evolved from there.

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

Like Jon, I started with Moveable Type. I then built myself a blog in Classic ASP with VBScript and moved everything to it. At some point I moved it all to WordPress, then to my own product Perch, and it’s now back on WordPress. Why WordPress? I wanted to move it, after selling Perch, and it was trivial to write a converter from Perch to WordPress, so that was the easiest option that didn’t lose stuff. This means that my blog software has followed my personal coding language journey of Perl, to Classic ASP, to PHP. I’ve most recently been learning Python, so maybe that will be its next incarnation.

I’m not a fan of file-based systems, I am baffled when I see people reinventing things that databases solved perfectly well back in the late 90s, but I’ll save that rant for another post.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’m not someone who expects or requires inspiration or motivation. These days my job involves a lot of writing, much of it is just stuff that needs to be done, and isn’t going to wait until I feel inspired. That said, I often write entire posts, documents, and talks in my head while out running. I can come home, grab a coffee, and write 2000 words or so. I’m not sure I’d call it inspiration. It’s more that the act of getting away from my keyboard allows me to connect things up and formulate a solid piece.

I don’t post here as much, mostly due to a lack of time. You’ll find a lot of my writing over on web.dev and developer.chrome.com though. As I’m part of Chrome Developer Relations, there’s a balance to make between posting on my own site about the web platform, and putting that content on one of our sites. If I feel the content fits one of those platforms I’d post it there first.

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

I usually leave things long enough to be able to read it with fresh eyes and with my editor hat on. A few hours of doing something else is usually enough. Self-editing is never perfect, my lovely writing team at work catch enough of my typos to know that, but a bit of distance helps to catch the worst problems.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

There’s a post about turnip lanterns that picks up traffic every halloween. I like the fact I’ve documented various things here, such as my work on CSS grid layout. I’m fond of this post from 2011 about lucky breaks and saying yes to things. I’m still amazed at the career I’ve ended up with, and I’m still learning interesting things and writing about them, I don’t think I’ll ever stop.

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

I might move off WordPress. Other than it being easy to move to, another reason I went with WordPress is that there are lots of good quality templates available. I’m not a designer, and while I can write the CSS to implement a design, I can’t come up with something that looks reasonable to implement. That’s really the main blocker for moving platforms.

I’d like to write more about some of the non-tech stuff that I do. My daughter suggested I set up an Instagram for my dressmaking and DIY projects, but I’m not sure I really want to do that at this point in history. However, the nice thing about Instagram is the fact you can set up multiple accounts for various things, and speak to the people interested in them. You can build a completely different audience with each of these, and it’s easy for people to find those accounts. The primarily web developer audience of this blog are going to be less interested in me sharing a cool dressmaking pattern I got from an indie designer on Etsy, than a targeted Instagram account audience. Back in the pre-social media days, blogs did serve that purpose, but I don’t think we’re going back there.