Answering the blog questions challenge

Naz tagged me in a blog meme, and honestly? I haven't done a blog-related meme in over 20 years and this one is navel-gazing and feels so retro I'm on board.

Hilariously, I only found out I was tagged via my Mastodon mentions, because our blogging tools are such that in 2025 there's no way to track referrers and see that he tagged me natively on his own blog.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

The first time I noticed blogs and what they were was on a web design list run by Steve Champeon. A few of my favorite designers, like Peter Merholz, Jason Kottke, and Cameron Barrett had little .sig files at the end of their emails and there was a URL and it wasn't just a portfolio like most web designers had, it was a personal site filled with things they liked, their thoughts, images they found, just everything going on with them that gave you a great picture of who they were as people. I felt instantly connected to these strangers in a way web pages in 1998 never did before.

Most of the early websites from the 1990s barely revealed anything about whoever was writing it. I remember struggling with that myself on my very first website, then I added a curated links page thinking "I bet some stranger will get a pretty good idea of who I am from this collection of ten links" which is laughable, but that was personal expression online in 1995.

The first time I saw blogs I was like—hold up—this is great and I want one too. The first one I built became MetaFilter but soon after I made my own personal one that ran on haughey.com.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?

I'm currently using the hosted version of Ghost Pro because I don't want to maintain my own software stack any more. It's kind of the best of what's available right now, but I wish it did a lot more things well.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

lol. When I found blogs in 1998, the only people doing them were web designers and developers because you had to write your own software to manage it. I did the same, building my first big database-backend website and CMS front-end to build a blogging engine for MetaFilter. Then I copied the code to make my own personal blog and ran that for half a year.

I switched to Blogger.com right before I got hired by them, and used that for a year before going to a new personal CMS I wrote after I left the team. A year later, Ben and Mena gave me a beta copy of Movable Type, and I used that for the next five or six years, pushing that as far as I could.

Around this time I decided to finally trust hosted platforms, so I went to TypePad for a few years before moving to Wordpress for about ten years. I dabbled in Medium too, and though it's great, it doesn't ever feel like home.

About a year ago, I moved everything off Wordpress and Medium onto Ghost, which is where I am now.

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

Blog posts usually start in a bullet point list on my phone's Notes app. There's a "Blog Ideas" note with a bunch of titles and whenever something pops into my head I dump it there, then revisit when I'm at a desk.

I mostly write posts in the Ghost new post page UI using a desktop browser, unless something is super involved, then it goes into Google Docs first.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Mostly it's when I get a stick in my craw. Something feels off or not right about something and I need to write about it. Or it's something that's been simmering for a good long while but something breaks in me and I have to let it out.

It always feels good to get things down on paper to lay out my thinking and hopefully make it clear to anyone reading why I believe what I do.

Other times, it's pure spite. Like I'll get so annoyed by basic software functionality that I'll lay into it the company on all the ways they are doing things badly here. Don't discount the power of spite.

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

I mostly treat my blog as lightly edited, trying to just get a brain dump onto the site, but in the past few years I've enjoyed editing things down for length and clarity. I'll re-read things a dozen times, sleep overnight and edit the next morning. I try to get no typos in posts now that they get emailed out immediately, but pretty much every single post on Ghost for the last year has had half a dozen typos in the email that I end up fixing later.

My drafts folder is mostly a mirror of my Apple Notes app. Just titles sitting there, knowing they're gonna be big projects and I'm waiting for something to snap and make me finish them.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Anything I find interesting. So sometimes that's technology, sometimes, that's sports, sometimes it's just photos. I like personal blogs that are a menagerie of curious items the host likes and there's not much more to it than that. Basically whatever captures my fancy that day is what I'm writing here.

Who are you writing for?

For myself mostly, to get my thinking out about something, or I'm doing it to share things with friends.

When I think about other readers, my hope is to help them out somehow. So sometimes, I might write up a post to share my journey and research on a thing that took a long time to learn and what things I learned from it so that if someone googles the same subject and sees I laid out how I approached it, they can save some time themselves by heeding my advice.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

I probably like the ones that sat in my head for years before I wrote them down. This one about writing on a marketing team that doesn't insult your audience with industry jargon and press release garbage is something I said at work often for years and gave talks about before I finally wrote it down here.

I recently found a draft I started ten years ago, on what it's like to get braces as an adult. I should really finish that.

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

I'm not 100% happy with Ghost. I prefer static sites like the way Movable Type worked because it gave visitors a much faster experience, but then all the static blog projects are self-hosted and most rely on Markdown for writing.

Personally, I dislike using Markdown. I know what the goal is, but I've written HTML for 30 years now and it's something I'm fluent in. Writing in Markdown feels like I have to write like a robot to try and save time but I waste time translating what I really want to do into Markdown.

It's like when the Palm Pilot came out and handwriting recognition wasn't great so the Palm Pilot made you learn "graffiti" which was a simplified version of writing letters out and it slowed me down so much more than normal note-taking, so I quickly gave it up.

And before you come at me with pitchforks, tell me how you insert an image into a Markdown document that links somewhere else. Can you do that from memory? I have to look it up every time and that slowdown is why I don't use it regularly.

So I guess I want a hosted blog platform that spits out static files but doesn't require markdown docs on a filesystem. Until then, I'll probably stay on Ghost and futz with my templates since I'm never really happy with the design options.

Who else do you want to tag?

Reading other blog posts answering these same questions, I was surprised to see people I've read for a long time who I thought were in the first batch of bloggers talk about how they felt like Johnny-come-latelys because they didn't start blogging until 2003 or so.

So let's tag some more classic early days people. I would love to hear Jessamyn West talk about all the ways blogging has evolved over her time doing it. I'd also like to know how Tina Roth Eisenberg approaches doing Swiss Miss these days.