Beep Boop
I saw Jasper posting about the blog questions challenge and I liked the idea so I'm joining in.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
In the very, very first place it was because it sounded fun, and I'd tried to keep diaries and journals before and never maintained it. Maybe this time when it's got some fun technology to play with I'd keep it up? So no, the first couple of attempts at a blog never lasted. I set the standard too high, too much like a diary with an expectation of writing every day.
The first blog that I did maintain, and it turns out that I did post on it every day, was my photoblog. This was in the very early days of phones having cameras in them and it seemed pretty exciting so I got one, a GX10i. A friend and colleague who also had one started a site posting a photo taken with it every day, so I asked if she minded if I nicked the idea (she was fine with it) so I started with that. The photos were so small: 120×160px, barely even thumbnails by today's standards, and heavily compressed. The camera lens and sensor were… not great. But! Because it was so restrictive you had to find subjects that worked, simple high contrast scenes and bright colours.
I upgraded phones so over the years the photos got larger, clearer and sharper. For a while, especially towards the end, they got more boring. It started to feel like a chore. I carried on taking loads of photos and still do, but it’s just not for posting daily. I’m glad I did the photoblog though, it taught me a lot about photography and about seeing and looking. I do still get excited by ‘low quality’ cameras though, it brings back some of the joy of those early days.
The photoblog is still up, but it's in static HTML now. Some of the posts have got mangled somehow and showing on the wrong days, one day I need to go in and sort them out.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why?
I use Kirby CMS. I picked it because someone I knew retweeted a post by Bastian about it (this was years ago, before twitter went fully to shit). I liked that it was static files with no database. The amount of time I’ve spent trying to get a database working and then fretting about the passwords and so on, I wanted to be away from all that. Kirby is PHP too, which I kind of knew at the time. I’ve not kept up with it so I have struggled with some aspects of using Kirby. You can just run Kirby as it is (and there are themes you can install) but I want my site set up a certain way, so that needs some coding. The Kirby forums are very good, but sometimes I get the impression I’m asking questions so basic the answer is “maybe you shouldn’t be doing this”. I’m determined to keep at it though, and thankfully friends have been very helpful when my coding knowledge ran out.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I have used, not quite in order:
- Plain HTML (self hosted and commercially hosted)
- Geocities
- Movable Type
- Expression Engine
- Wordpress
- Blogger
- Medium
- KirbyCMS
Some of those were for work/clients so not my personal blogging, but they were used as blogs.
I have a soft spot for Movable Type, it was nicely designed and felt like a cosy, friendly writing tool just for me. Expression Engine I used for my own site as well as commercially. We built some big complex sites with it! 5-language customer-facing blogs for a variety of games. That was fun.
How do you write your posts?
I usually write them directly into the Kirby Panel. For a while there was an intermittent bug where the compose window would refresh at some random point and you’d lose everything you hadn’t specifically saved. I’m glad that got fixed. I used to write posts in Sublime Text while that was going on.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
That’s pretty random, but it’s often an idea for a header illustration or a colour scheme. I can always write something, but it’s the visuals that come first.
Do you publish immediately after writing?
I usually leave it a bit because I know I’ll think of something else to add to it. I often find my own writing style to be aggravating, either too wordy or too many commas or just plain pompous so I like to come back to it after a few hours and smooth it all out. I might go too much the other way and end up too casual but I’d rather that than sound like a prig.
What's your favourite post on your blog?
Any of the big process ones! Maybe these:
Any future plans for your blog?
I’d like to do more drawings for it, maybe some irregular web comic type things. I occasionally think about doing a separate photoblog again, but I think maintaining just the one site is enough. I like the idea that this is a folder stuffed with notes, photos and souvenirs, not neat, not categorised, just a pile of stuff I’ve put together. Also I like that the layout is very basic, I could have made something like this at almost any point of the web’s existence. It might have been done with tables in the early days, but it would look similar and work the same.
So there will be changes, but probably not huge ones and I don’t have specific plans.