Blog questions challenge

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My wonderful friend Anh tagged me to participate in the blog questions challenge. Here we go!

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

The first nine posts on my blog were all about programming, and mostly about JavaScript.

I like sharing what I’m working on and what I’ve learned, and I really like talking about programming.

I’ve experimented with writing about other topics (including recipes), but didn’t really find my groove with writing about more personal topics (life, grief) or fun topics (video game reviews) until 2024.

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 Eleventy! It’s been very stable and reliable, plus I always have Node.js set up on every computer.

Previously this blog has used Jekyll, Hugo, and a handful of other technologies, including an ill-fated rewrite in Astro, which I wrote about.

The two oldest blog posts on this site, Squiggle: a JS language and JS gotchas with this and new were originally posted on Medium.

Before this website I had a Blogger blog about a programming language I made as my senior project for college.

Also, some of my blog posts were written and posted on cohost originally.

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 primarily write posts as Markdown directly in Visual Studio Code. I could probably write a whole post about what I don’t like about Markdown, but it gets the job done, and few other systems are simple and perform syntax highlighting, which turns out to be one of the harder requirements of my blogging software.

I’ve used Hemingway on a few posts, but it’s pretty basic, and I think that it had an overall negative effect on my writing. I don’t mind making things simpler, but I became addicted to getting a “perfect score” in my writing, which then felt like not my writing when I was finished.

I made a script that resizes images and converts them to WebP to make my site load faster, especially as I start to use more images in my posts. For video clips, I tend to record them with Windows Game Bar or Steam Game Recording, then trim them with LosslessCut and compress them with Handbrake.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Whenever inspiration takes hold of me? Total sidestep of an answer. I guess I do often pull out my laptop in the evening for some writing. Sometimes I sit on the couch while Ash plays video games, other times I lie in bed with headphones on listening to music.

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

I’ve been getting better about publishing sooner. Perfection is the enemy of done, and nobody can read my blog posts if they’re not published. The return on investment for editing is pretty minimal in most cases, so I’m trying to do it less.

Sometimes I put things in the drafts folder first because I don’t think I’ll finish them in one sitting, but I worry about the “just let it simmer” and then it’s been in there for months problem. I also use my drafts folder as a container for ideas I want to blog about, but haven’t actually written any content yet.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

• Blog post I cried the most writing

• Blog post I’ve linked the most people to

• Blog post I’d like more maladjusted weirdos to read

• Blog post I learned the most writing

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

Honestly I hope I’m not going to unwisely try another blogging platform in the near future. I usually regret it. I’ve also added many features in the past that I’ve removed. Eleventy is very DIY, and most blogging platform features like tags and stuff just don’t seem worth the effort for me.

My main concern is making everything look nice and encouraging myself to actually put more kinds of stuff on here. My recent minimalist color scheme redesign was in service of making more weird pages, which I haven’t made a ton of progress on yet, but I’m still going. I’m very happy with the current look, and would like to keep things in the realm of evolution, not redesign.

If I add a big new feature, I think it would be a theme selector. I love making themes, and I think it would excite people to pick a theme from a gallery. I’ve received many kind words about my 1bit-ui and 2bit-ui sites for allowing that.

In terms of refinement I want to do next, I’d like to continue refining images on my site. My biggest issue is I want the ability to choose a target “size” for each image I put on the page. Just scaling it to fit the page width looks really bad for certain images, especially square and vertical ones.

Who’s next?

I’d love to see responses from Damien, Tati, Tulip, Millie, and Tyler. But no pressure if you don’t want to!