Those blog questions everyone's doing

I like these little question things, like a chain letter. Remember when those used to be a physical thing you forwarded on? Now I feel old.

Why Did You Start Blogging In The First Place?

It was right around when I was starting to teach myself to make websites. I wanted to make something dynamic and a blog was just the thing that made sense at the time. I didn't know anything about sessions, or authentication or anything like that, so that site got hacked pretty hard early-on, and everything just snowballed from there.

I just checked Wayback Machine and that was 21 years ago.

What Platform Are You Using The Manage Your Blog, And Why Do You Use It?

Currently using Craft CMS, which I switched to because we use it at work and I like to have something to install new updates to first just to do a little preliminary trust check.

There's lots to like about Craft, but it is a little on the slow side sometimes. Running it headless helps - the frontend runs on Astro on Cloudflare, and uses Craft's GraphQL API to build pages.

Have You Blogged On Other Platforms Before?

Livejournal, WordPress, a few of my own self-built platforms, WordPress again.

How Do You Write Your Posts?

I mostly write them directly into the Craft UI. Part of the reason for using Craft in the first place was so I could easily blog from my phone, and I write nearly all of my posts on my phone now. The last platform I used made was not good for that.

I'll occasionally draft in iA Writer if something's longer-form (like this, right now), but that's pretty rare.

When Do You Feel Most Inspired To Write?

When things aren't going great. I think a lot when I'm down, and the more I think, the more things fall out of my head like that.

Do You Normally Publish Immediately After Writing, Or Do You Let It Simmer?

Yeah straight away. I mostly just publish, then read on the site, then fix any obvious errors then walk away. The more I let things simmer, the more I lose interest in them.

What’s Your Favourite Post On Your Blog?

There's 2,341 posts on this blog, including this one, spanning nearly 17 years. It's impossible to pick a favourite! I do still occasionally have a look at some of the older ones and I'm surprised by how little I hate them. In general, I'm quite proud of this site. There's probably some absolute clangers in here that I need to delete.

Any Future Plans For the Blog?

Just keep writing it; I don't have any goals. I've been thinking about what would be an effective way to preserve it after I'm dead, and I'm not even sure if that's worth doing anyway. More as just a technical exercise than anything. I don't like the idea that I spent all these years doing this and everything's just gone, but I guess that's death.