I hadn’t checked my notifications on X.com in a while. When I did yesterday, I found Pradx had tagged me in a blog post called “a challenge of blog questions” in March. The point is to answer a short list of questions about my blogging history, then tag other bloggers to carry the enterprise forward. With thanks to Pradx, here goes.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I started blogging for two reasons in 2008. I started writing itself when I realised it helps me clarify my thoughts, then I started publishing my writing on the web so I could share those thoughts with my friends in different parts of the world. My blog soon gave me a kind of third space on the internet, a separate world I could escape to as I laboured through four years of engineering school, which I didn’t like at the time.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I’ve blogged on Xanga, Blogspot, Typed, Movable Type, various static site generators, Svbtle, Geocities, Grav, October, Mataroa, Ghost, and WordPress. And I’ve always found myself returning to WordPress, which — despite its flaws — allows me to have just the kind of blog I’d like to in terms of look, feel, spirit, and community. The last two are particularly important. Ghost comes a close second to WordPress but it’s too magaziney. The options to host Ghost are also (relatively) more expensive.
Earlier this year, Matt Mullenweg of Automattic tested my support for WordPress.com with his words and actions vis-à-vis his vendetta against WP Engine but the sentiments and conversations in the wider WordPress community encouraged me to keep going.
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 used to love WordPress’s Calypso interface and its WYSIWYG editor both on desktop and mobile and used to use that to compose posts. But then WordPress ‘upgraded’ to the blocks-based Gutenberg interface, which made composing a jerky, clunky, glitchy process. At that point I tried a combination of different local editors, including Visual Studio Code, iA Writer, and Obsidian.md. Each editor provided an idiosyncratic environment: e.g. VS Code seemed like a good environment in which to compose technical posts, Obsidian (with its dark UI) for angry/moody ones, and iA writer for opinionated ones with long sentences and complex thoughts.
Then about three years ago I discovered MarsEdit and have been using it for all kinds of posts since. I particularly appreciate its old-school-like interface, that it’s built to work with WordPress, and the fact that it maintains an offline archive of all the posts on the blog.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I’ve answered this question before in conversations with friends and every time my answer has prompted them to wonder if I’m lying or mocking them.
When I feel most inspired to write is not in my control. I’ve been writing for so long that it’s become a part of the way I think. If I have a thought and I’m not able to articulate it clearly in writing, it’s a sign for me that the thought is still inchoate. In this paradigm, whenever I have a fully formed thought that I think could help someone else think about or through something, I enter a half-trance-like state, where my entire brain is seized of the need to write and I’m only conscious enough to open MarsEdit and start typing.
In these circumstance my ability to multi-task even minor activities, like typing with one hand while sipping from a mug of tea in the other, vanishes.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
That depends on what I’m writing about. When I draft posts in the ‘Op-eds’ or ‘Science’ categories, I’m usually more clear-headed and confident about my post’s contents, and publish as soon as the post is ready. For ‘Analysis’ and ‘Scicomm’ posts, however, I distract myself for about 30 minutes after finishing a draft and read it again to make sure there aren’t any holes in my arguments.
I also have a few friends who peer-review my posts if I’m not sure I’ve articulated myself well or if I’m not able to think through the soundness of my own arguments by myself (usually because I suspect there’s something I don’t know). Four of the most frequent reviewers are Thomas Manuel, Srividya Tadepalli, Mahima Jain, and Chitralekha Manohar.
In all these cases, however, I do read the post a couple times more after it’s finished to fix grammar and clumsy sentence constructions.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
No such thing. 🙂
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I’m not keen on major redesigns. There are too many WordPress themes available off the shelf and for free these days. I change my blog’s theme depending on my mood. I don’t think it makes a difference to whether or how people read my posts. I think those that have been reading will continue to read. The text is paramount.
I don’t see myself moving to another platform either. If anything, I might move from WordPress.com to a self-hosted setup in future but it’s not something I’m thinking of right now.
I am currently in the process of removing duplicated posts in the archives — at last count I spotted about 20. Many posts are also missing images I’d added at the time of publishing, mostly because they were associated with a domain that I no longer use. I need to fix that.
A few years ago I lost around 120 posts after someone managed to hack my account when the blog was hosted with a provider of cPanel hosting services. I maintain a long-term backup of all my posts on a Backblaze dump. I’m still in the process of identifying which posts I lost and retrieving them from the archive.
So yeah, focusing on this clean-up right now.
Who’s next?
This is embarrassing: I only know a few other bloggers. I stopped keeping track after many bloggers I’d been following in the early years just stopped at some point. Right now, of those blogs I still follow, Jatan and Pradx have already been nominated for this ‘challenge’. So let me nominate Suvrat Kher and Dhiya Gerber next, both of whom I think will have interesting answers.
Featured image credit: Chris Briggs/Unsplash.