Blog Questions Challenge

I was very kindly nominated by MacDara to do the blog questions challenge. I don’t know who started this trend, but doesn’t it feel good to have these things back? A good old-fashioned blog challenge! Doesn’t it remind of you what blogging/the internet used to be like?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’ve been on the internet since about 1996 and was always fairly plugged into internet culture. Everyone had their geocities pages or their tilde pages (iol.ie/~stuff was me!) focusing on their various fascinations. But then around 1999-2000, there was a noticabable change in the culture. People like Kottke and Dooce (RIP) started writing things that were more personal. And you had had Slashdot and Kuro5hin bringing in places where whole communities could contribute. And that felt really new and revolutionary. The internet was becoming more of a community. So I made a Livejournal account for personal stuff and made a lot of great friends there. I also had enough PHP knowledge to bash together a custom CMS to host a community blog for my friends on the worst domain would could imagine - fuckcuntandbollocks.com (the content of this is pretty much exactly what you’re imaginging, but all I can say is that we were young and trying to be edgelords and I’m sorry).

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

Jaypers, it might be easier to list the platrforms I haven’t tried. I’ve gone from Livejournal to Wordpress, to Tumblr, to Moveable Type, to Textpattern back to Wordpress, to Jekyll, to Wordpress, to Hugo, back to Wordpress, then back to Hugo, which is where we are now. I’ve mostly tried to carry my content with me across all these platforms, so this blog is about 2,000 markdown files of varying consistency, depending on how various export tools work (Tumblr’s export system suuuuuucks). I like the convenience of Wordpress but hate the fact that I’m running exposed PHP (and possibly a MySQL server) on the internet. I also don’t love Matt Mullenweg’s recent very public meltdown and it makes me fear for the future of that project.

In general, I much prefer the idea of static site generators because my content is all written in plain text (markdown) and stored in a git repository, so my disaster recovery strategy is just “re-clone my repo, rebuild and push to a new site”. And of all the static site generators I’ve tried, Hugo is the only one that can handle this volume of content with reasonable build-times.

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

It depends! If it’s a link, I have a bash script that will `curl` all the metadata on that link for me and create the `.md` file for me and open it in vscode. I have similar scripts for video posts and books for my /reading section. For posts like this, I use org-mode. I have a dedicated `Blog Posts` section in my `notes.org` file and I do most of the initial work on it there.

When it’s in a half-decent state, I export it as a Hugo file to my site’s repo, and then I’ll refine it using vscode, using the local `hugo server` command to give the once-over for obvious stylistic mistakes. I also have a few evergreen posts, like my /uses page, that only live in my org file and gets exported whenever I change them.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I have a full-time job and two small children. Between those things, I don’t know if there’s much room for lofty things like “inspiration”. If something catches my eye and I feel like I have something to contribute, I need to get the writing out of me there and then or I’ll start second-guessing everything I want to say. Maybe this isn’t a good thing?

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

I try not to let things sit in drafts. See what I just said about needing to get the writing out of me? I’ve had one post sitting in draft here since 2019 because I wanted to work on it more. But I’ve sort of lost interest in the topic, so it’s just going to sit there forever. Drafts are no good for me. So I usually publish immediately and forget about it until the post loads in my RSS reader (I follow my own blog in my RSS reader, is that conceited?) and it’s usually then that I spot any grammatical or technical mistakes and I’ll go back and fix them.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

This the $64,000 question, right? I think I’m writing about the things that interest me, which is mostly just commentary around pop culture and tech. But also I find myself holding back on actually writing substantially about anything. This is about 50% imposter syndrome (“who cares what I have to say about this topic?”) and about 30% tall poppy syndrome and then 20% not wanting to attract the spotlight so as to protect my own privacy/peace. Recently this has also been joined with not wanting to publish anything because it’s all just getting slurped up as AI training data.

But I also think this is changing over the last couple of years? Has anyone else noticed this shift? Since the death of Facebook, there’s been more of a desire to return to classical blogging. I mean, this prompt is a great example of this shift. People are owning their own internet again and I love it. So recently, that’s been the thing I’m interested in writing about: how the internet is maybe getting better and how we can contribute to this?

Who are you writing for?

Myself. As I mention on my /about page, I’ve done my best to remove any code that can track visitors to this page. I also don’t look at the access logs for this host. So there could be a thousand people reading this. There could be no-one. I’ll never know. And I prefer it this way. The more I feel like someone is actually reading this, the more reluctant I am to actually publish anything (or rather, there are a couple of people in my mind that I’m not writing for. Little haters both real and imaginary. Every word I publish on here is written knowing there’s a good chance it’ll be taken by those people and used for snarky back-biting and I’m writing it in spite of them - feels good, man).

I feel like this audience-ignorance lets me be a slightly more authentic me? When I first started writing here, I was writing as if I was part of the larger tech blogosphere and I cringe when I look back over everything I wrote at that time. It sounds so false, so not me. I’ve landed on a more neutral-sounding tone now. It’s still not the way I actually talk (IRL, I swear like a sailor) but this a pretty good, slightly-more-professional approcimation of me.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Okay so this is cheating a little but this little jaunt down memory lane has reminded me of the time for fuckcuntandbollocks.com that myself and my friend Puppy Boylan came up with an idea for a whole Dan Aykroyd-themed restaurant featuring dishes that were puns on his filmography, like “The Blues Burger” and “Driving Miss Egg Mayonnaisey”. It’s not the best thing I’ve ever written but the week we spent thinking of these stupid jokes is one of my happiest and most cherished memories.

More recently, it’s the really personal posts that I’m most proud of. I don’t often speak publicly about my life or (goodness!) my feelings. I tend to play my cards close to my chest. But I’ve let my guard down now and then, for example, talking about using nostalgia to self-sooth in the middle of a global pandemic, or to talk about how having my own children has made me more pro-choice in the referendum to repeal the 8th amendment. Writing like that doesn’t come naturally to me and I’m proud of myself for finally saying those things out loud.

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

I’ve been quietly working away for the past month or two. Tidying things up in the backend here. Tweaking the design there. And as I said before, I want to get better at publishing my stuff here before the anywhere else. I want to turn this place into my actual digital home, rather than having accounts strewn around a half-dozen walled gardens.

(Except for my Tumblr. I love Tumblr so much and I’ll never stop using that service but I’m never integrating that shit again.)

Tag ’em

I’d like to keep it local to Ireland, so I nominate Kevin!