I’ve seen this challenge making the rounds on a bunch of sites: Ethan Marcotte, Rachel Andrew, Jon Hicks, Lynn Fisher, Naz Hamid, Jeremy Keith, Zach Leatherman, and Matt Haughey. It made me a bit nostalgic, so I thought it would be fun to answer here as well.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

From the late 90s, I just enjoyed writing things and putting them on the web. A journal seemed as good a way to organize them as anything else on my own personal site. I had personal sites hosted first on AOL (probably in 94 or 95) then on Earthlink - the old tilde sites you could get as a free perk from your ISP host at the time. Then I made a couple different sites on Geocities for different topics. I wish I’d been a better archivist but I’m pretty sure all of those are gone. Back then, I was just creating static pages for everything I added.

In college, I had my first CMS-based blog using Greymatter by Noah Grey. I don’t even remember if I had that hosted on a domain or if it was hosted on my university’s student server. I remember posting about an apartment building fire that happened in our neighborhood. My cousin at a different university texted to let me know that she had seen my post about the fire from a friend, and I was blown away.

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

These days, I’m using Craft CMS to manage this site as well as my other (semi-paused) blog, UXcellence. I chose it because it felt like the best combination of a powerful CMS that still let me control the actual output fairly well. I love the way I can build data for my sites the way I want to and that it uses exact HTML templates to output. There’s no unexpected garbage code inserted, and I can shape data based on what I’m putting. (For instance, my media reviews section has fields for title, creator, media type, links, cover art, and reviews.)

Before Craft, I used Ghost briefly for UXcellence (and even made my own theme for it). I used Movable Type pretty extensively for awhile before that. I loved it for many of the same reasons that I now love Craft. As I mentioned earlier, my starting tool was Greymatter. I played around with Wordpress, Textpattern, and Expression Engine a handful of times, but never for any long-term projects.

I’ve recently started playing around with Eleventy for another project, and I really enjoy that. I have some other site ideas that I may also build in Eleventy down the road, though they aren’t blogs per se.

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

For a very brief period when I first started using Movable Type, I would write and post directly in the admin panel. But after losing the majority of several posts that way, I moved to text editors. The editor I use has changed over the years. These days I’m writing in Bear, and before that I was writing in Ulysses. I’ve been eyeing Obsidian out of curiosity, but have yet to make the leap.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I go through lulls and bursts. Sometimes I don’t feel like I have anything to say and other times (like now) I may have multiple ideas brewing in the back of my brain at a given time. As for when during the day, I find I write best first thing in the morning, especially on the weekends. I’ve always been a morning person so I’m always the first up. Those precious moments in the morning where it’s just me are my favorite time to just sit and write or create.

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

Depends on the type of post. For personal posts, I often just publish immediately after. For posts on UXcellence or longer posts on this site, I usually take several days to actually write the whole thing and then sometimes another day or two to reread and edit it.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Oh gosh. I love and hate all of them equally. It’s hard not to look back at some and feel embarrassed about them after the fact. I struggle with feeling like my writing is not as eloquent or evocative as I’d like. For this blog, I really enjoyed doing something a little different and actually documenting a personal creative project: Making a DIY Hatbox Ghost Costume. On UXcellence, I was really proud of the writing I did for a concept that got stuck in my brain: Designing for Motivation - How to Create a Multifaceted Experience. I took the idea of Bartle’s game player types and applied it to making products for people. The post I find I link to most often, though, is We’re All New at This, and That’s OK.

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

I feel like redesigns are always brewing in the back of my brain. I’m hoping to update the CMS to a much more recent version of Craft CMS sometime this year. Along with that, I do want to rethink and redesign how certain parts of the site work. I’ve been itching to play around with theming again (haven’t really done that since the early 2000s).

Who’s next?

Honestly, I’ve never been a fan of the chain forward or foisting responsibility onto someone else without their consent. But I’ll say this - if you’ve read this (or any of the other posts like it) and you ALSO want to share, I would LOVE to see it. Post on your blog (even if you’re creating your very first blog) and share it with me, whether through email or on Mastodon. I’d love to read it!