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| Date | Location |
|---|---|
| 2025-02-12 18:21 | /blog-questions-2025 |
blog questions challenge 2025
xandra recently participated in the blog questions challenge by ava. xandra tagged me asking if i could participate as well. i have not done one of these meta posts, but having talked a lot about my blog in places that are not my blog, i thought this one would be nice to participate in. thank you xandra!
i wont be tagging any one to participate. i kind of hate signing people up for things (though it is always up to you even if you are asked to participate). but the links i've provided, both of xandra's post and ava's questions linked above this paragraph should be enough to help you make a post for your blog if you'd like!
why did you start blogging in the first place
i knew for awhile i had a lot of things i wanted to say. i was a member of the 32-Bit Cafe for awhile, and they always encouraged blog posting when we had a topic on our mind that might be more on the personal side of things. i liked the idea of casting personal thoughts onto a webpage.
one thing i realized rather quickly was even though i was writing about things personal to me, there may be other people on this planet who have lived a similar enough experience to take value from my posts. at the very least they see someone who is saying "i'm trying. i am doing my best all things considered. i will keep trying"
what platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it
i use weblog.lol for blogging. it is apart of the omg.lol service. i was already using omg.lol for quite some time for other services. i eventually found my way to their members' discord. what i realized was much like the 32-Bit Cafe, i found myself surrounded by good people. The person running omg.lol, Adam, also seemed like a wonderful person at heart. He seemed to care about people deeply that had not walked the same path in life he did, or people that were different all together from him. So i felt i could make a conscious effort to use more of a service that seemed to be made up of and led by good people
have you blogged on other platforms before
my previous blog was hosted on chyrp lite which i ran on my hosting account. chyrp is quite nice and is very lightweight if you are looking for a CMS style blog with a built in editor. i had tweaked the colors of one of the default themes a bit. long term i was planning on learning twig templating to make my own theme, but decided to move over to weblog.lol before i had done that
how do you write your posts?
i write my posts in markdown in visual studio code. i then add and commit them to my git repository for my blog. upon pushing the changes to my github account, a build action adds the post to my blog. weblog.lol has a built in editor if this isn't your type of thing. but sometimes i'm in the mood to mess around with the terminal a little bit and this workflow works well for me at the moment
when do you feel most inspired to write
i actually got a pretty good insight into this when importing my posts from chyrp lite to weblog.lol. i write quite frequently in the late evening early AM hours. in between that there are some early morning and evening posts sprinkled in. overall i'd say i write mostly when i have something to write, and time isn't the biggest factor in this occurring
do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft
i described my writing process for my blog once as "i sit down at the keyboard and blast what my heart feels into the keys" i've stuck to this since starting my blog. i tend to keep blemishes and typos in if they don't completely break the context or the point i'm trying to make. though it would be worth keeping in mind that a typo that makes sense to me, may not make sense to someone else. so i do plan to go through my posts and clean up some typos at some point
what's your favorite post on your blog
this is a tough one honestly. there are some pretty big moments on this blog for me. but i think one of my favorites is actually a rather recent one. what making websites means to me - this post means a lot to me because i think it was a story worth being told. i am quite used to seeing people leaving social media for the personal web, and i'll applaud every one of them for doing so. but that quite simply wasn't my reason. i also cover an important reason i couldn't have a homepage right away, due to it being a core part of self expression in terms of the personal web for me
any future plans for your blog? maybe a redesign, move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
i don't have anything planned at the moment. i'm solidly in my pink era so i think the current theme of my blog is here to stay for a bit. likewise i love the night mode i worked on for it, as the colors represent colors i like seeing during late evening and night time in a city. i'd probably like to explore more of what weblog.lol has to offer in terms setting up different types of pages. i really enjoyed adding an about page to my blog. while i could've done this on chyrp lite, i never did. i think there are probably people who may never see my homepage but might stumble upon my blog, so having an about with a little bit of context about me is a nice addition i think