The latest thing circulating around people still blogging is the Blog Questions Challenge; Jon did it (and asked if I was) and so have Jeremy and Ethan and a bunch of others, so clearly it is time I should get on board, fractionally late as ever.1
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Some other people I admired were doing it. I think the person I was most influenced by to start doing it was Simon Willison, who is also still at it2, but a whole bunch of people got on board at around that same time, back in the early days when you be a medium-sized fish in a small pool just by participating. Mark Pilgrim springs to mind as well -- that's a good example of having influence, when the "standard format" of permalinks got sort of hashed out collectively to be /2025/02/03/blog-questions-challenge, which a lot of places still adhere to (although it feels faintly quaint, these days).
Interestingly, a lot of the early posts on this site are short two-sentence half-paragraph things, throwaway thoughts, and that all got sucked up by social media... but social media hadn't been invented, back in 2002.
Also interestingly: the second post on this here blog3 was bitching at Mozilla about the Firefox release schedule. Nothing new under the sun.4
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Cor. When it started, this site was being run by Castalian, which was basically "classic ASP but Python instead of VBScript", a thing I built. This is because I was using ASP at work on Windows machines, so that was the model for "dynamic web pages" that I understood, but I wasn't on Windows5 and so I built it myself. No idea if it still works and I very much doubt it since it's old enough to buy all the drinks these days.
After that it was Movable Type for a bit and then, because I'd discovered the idea of funky caching6 it was Vellum, that model (a) in Python and (b) written by me. Then for a while it was "Thort", which was based on CouchDB7, and then it was WordPress, and then in 2014 I switched from WP to a static build based on Pelican, which it still is to this day. Crikey, that was over ten years ago!8 I like static site generators: I even wrote 10 Popular Static Site Generators a few years ago for WebsiteSetup which I think is still pretty good.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
In my text editor, which is Sublime Text. The static setup is here on my machine; I write a post, I type make kryogenix, and it runs a whole little series of scripts which invoke Pelican to build the static HTML for the blog, do a few things that I've added (such as add footnote handling9, make og:image links and images10, and sort of handle webmentions but that's broken at the moment) and then copy it up to my actual website (via git) to be published.
It's all a bit lashed together, to be honest, but this whole website is like that. It is something like an ancient city, such as London or Rome; what this site is mostly built on is the ruins of the previous history of the city. Sometimes the older bits poke through because they're still actually OK, or they never got updated; sometimes they've been replaced with the new shiny. You should see the .htaccess file, which operates a bewildering set of redirects through about six different generations of URLs so all the old links still work.11
When do you feel most inspired to write?
When the muse seizes me. Sometimes that's a lot; sometimes not. I do quite a lot of paid writing as part of my various day jobs for others, and quite a lot of creative writing as part of running a play-by-post D&D campaign, and that sucks up a reasonable amount of the writing energy, but there are things which just demand going on the website. Normally these days it's things where I want them to be a reference of some kind -- maybe of a useful tech thing, or some important thought, or something interesting -- for myself or for others.
Alternatively you might think the answer is "while in the pub, which leads to making random notes in an email to myself from my phone and then writing a blog post when I get home" and while this is not true, it's not not true either. I do not want to do a histogram of posting times from this site because I am worried that I will find that the majority are at, like, 11.15pm.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Always post immediately. I have discovered about myself that, for semi-ephemeral stuff like posts here or projects that I do for fun, that I need to get them done as part of that initial burst of inspiration and energy. If I don't get it done, then my enthusiasm will fade and they will linger half-finished for ever and never get completed. I don't necessarily like this, but I've learned to live with it. If I think of an idea for a post and write a note about it and then don't do it, when I rediscover the note a week later it will not seem anything like as compelling. So posts are mostly written as one long stream-of-consciousness to capitalise on the burning of the creative fire before it gets doused by time or work or everything going on in the world. Carpe diem, I guess.12
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
Maybe It's Cold Outside, or Monkey Island 2, for about the fifth time, or Charles Paget Wade and the Underthing for writing, although each of them have little burrs in the wording that I want to polish when I re-read them. The series of birthday posts have been going on since the beginning, one every year, which probably wins for consistency. For technical stuff, maybe Some thoughts on soonsnap and little big details (now sadly defunct) or The thing and the whole of the thing: on DRM in HTML. I like my own writing, mostly. Arrogant, I know.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Not really at the moment, but, as above, these things tend to arrive in a blizzard of excitement and implementation and then linger forever once done. But right now... it all seems to work OK. Ask me when I get back from the pub.
Next?
Well, I should probably point back at some of the people who inspired me to do this or other things and keep doing so to this day. So Simon, Remy, and Bruce, perhaps!
In my defence, it was my birthday. ↩
although no longer at simon.incutio.com -- what even was Incutio? ↩
I resisted the word "blog" for a long time, calling it a "weblog", and the activity being "weblogging", because "blog" is such an ugly word. Like most of the fights I was picking in the mid 2000s, this also seems faintly antiquated and passé now. Sic transit gloria mundi and all that. ↩
or "nihil sub sole novum", since we're doing Latin quotes today ↩
and Windows's relationship with Python has always been a bit unsteady, although it's better these days now that Microsoft are prepared to acknowledge that other people can have ideas ↩
you write the pages in an online form, but then a server process builds a static HTML version of them; the advanced version of this where pages were only built on request was called "funky caching" back then ↩
if a disinterested observer were to consider this progression, they might unfairly but accurately conclude that whatever this site runs on is basically a half-arsed system I built based on the latest thing I'm interested in, mightn't they? ↩
tempus fugit. OK, I'll stop now. ↩
like this! ↩
an idea I stole shamelessly from Zach Leatherman ↩
Outgoing links are made to continue to work via unrot.link from the excellent Remy Sharp ↩
I was lying about not doing this any more, obviously ↩