I got tagged by a fellow Blaugustian to answer some questions about blogging, so why not?
My very first blogging efforts were back in high school, on LiveJournal, Xanga, and the like, and I’m reasonably sure I mostly did it because my friends were doing it. It was some combination of journal/diary and blog, and I don’t remember much of it, beyond that it was probably what we eventually ended up using social media for, once that was a thing.
I’ve written a post about my current blogging setup that’s still pretty accurate, with the only meaningful difference being that I now deploy in a container on a Hetzner server I manage via Coolify Cloud. This will be changing in the future, but I’m not entirely sure when, so the post remains an accurate writeup as of now.
In the past I’ve used LiveJournal, Xanga, Blogger, WordPress, Jekyll, and a variety of homebrewed solutions.
Currently I write in Obsidian, then copy the note into my site’s repo, commit, and push. I thought about automating that a bit, but with the other plans I have to rework how the site is made, I don’t know if it will be useful for long enough to be worth the effort.
Prior to (re)starting with Obsidian a few weeks ago, I was writing my posts directly in the repo, using my preferred coding editor Helix, and before it Kakoune, and before that Vim/Neovim. Somewhere in there I experimented with Drafts and Ulysses as well.
Always at the most inconvenient times, somehow! It really varies, but often I think about it when I have to do something else I’d rather avoid.
It depends. Longer posts usually get a bit of brewing time, but the shorter stuff doesn’t necessarily. And sometimes that even changes—my post about not overly prioritizing hindsight at one’s deathbed has sat in my drafts forever as a few bullet points, and I got tired of waiting for the mythical enormous pile of time and energy to write a mythically life changing post, and just wrote out what I had on my mind, edited it for a bit, and published.
Blaugust has imposed quite a bit of pressure with the daily cadence, and I started by writing and publishing on the same day, just to keep up. Over the past week I’ve started writing the night before and publishing in the morning, and that’s proven helpful, so I’m trying to do a little more of it. For example, I’m writing this post on Sunday, August 17th, with the goal of publishing it two days later.
Keeping this to Blaugust participants who opted into such shenanigans, I’m tagging JCProbably and axxuy, should they choose to accept. But also anyone reading this, should they feel so inclined!
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