Blogging Questions Challenge

I was tagged to complete this challenge (modern day chain-letter?) by Sally Lait. I haven’t posted in a while and I write blog posts often, so it was a nice excuse to sit and think about some of the questions.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

World of Warcraft played a big part. Back then I was heavily into the game and made a number of friends from it, some of whom I still chat to fairly regularly!

I can’t remember much on the specifics of content from back then, but checking some stuff on the way back machine I found a snapshot of a blog page of mine from 2013 listing categories and post counts in them:

• Code (4)
• Cooking (3)
• Personal (6)
• Rants (2)
• Tech (4)
• Work (1)
• WoW (7)

So while there weren’t many posts on there, the 2 top categories were “WoW” with 7 posts and “Personal” with 6.

I clearly had some interest in writing about code outside of work with 4 posts in the “Code” category. Back then my job wasn’t enjoyable (there’s only so much CMS and eCommerce site skinning you can do before you get bored out of your mind) so any advancements I made in my abilities or furthering my skills were done outside of work.

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

I’m using Hugo, a static site generator for this site, with the Hugo blog awesome theme. I’ve added some of my own customisations to the theme for things like a banner for posts older than 1 year explaining that information may be out of date. I run it on Netlify, and it builds the site on every commit pushed to my main branch. I chose it because I wanted something a bit simpler than a full CMS. Where if needed I could just throw generated files into an S3 bucket (or equivalent) and have it work.

I’ve used WordPress before, my very first blog was WordPress and I don’t have any of the content from it as I never thought to migrate it to new platforms (as evidenced by my need to use the way back machine in the previous question). I guess I never really cared about preserving anything back then.

I’ve previously used Bolt as well, it was okay, unremarkable really.

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

I just open my IDE (I use PhpStorm because it’s what I have installed as a PHP dev anyway) and edit the markdown files!

Nothing fancy there :)

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I’m sporadic and inconsistent with writing. But whatever I do write about it’s usually something that I’m passionate about.

For example last year I only wrote 2 blog posts. That said, both were related to photography in some way, one about my camera gear, and another about my photo editing workflow in Lightroom using a NAS.

2024 was the year that photography gripped me and helped with a void of joy in my life. So I wrote a little about them.

But in the past I’ve used blogs as a way to document things while working through something or with a problem I’m having. ‘Blogumentation’ is the term and it’s very useful. I’ve often come across other folks blogs when searching for a solution to something.

I’ve had some posts that have taken days (weeks? months?) to write, and others that I’ve written in no time at all and published straight away.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Possibly my post about home energy monitoring. It’s got lots of details on what I do with my home automation system and how the graphs are set up. It’s still a fairly popular post and I’ve had messages from people thanking me for the detail I go into in it as they’ve used it themselves.

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

No real plans. I just want things stable and as-they-are for this site really.

I’d like to say I’ll write more this year, but my creative energy goes into photography these days. So I’ll use this post as a place to show a few photos from a shoot I did last year at TankSpace instead (go check out my photography Instagram account!)

Who’s next?

Go on then Adam, give it a go!