I’m a bit behind in my RSS feeds and I didn’t realize Susan tagged me to answer a series of questions about my blog. I’ve read dozens of these and to be honest was feeling a little left out, so thanks Susan for including me! (Susan’s one of my favorite bloggers and crafters, be sure to like and subscribe.)

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I published a zine in high school with my best friend Mike. Our zine Wimpkiller was a creative outlet for all the composition notebooks we filled up over a bottomless cups of coffee at IHOP. We’d print out stories on Mike’s computer, chop ‘em up, glue ‘em together, and then scam copies after midnight with the help of the friendly late-shift worker at Kinko’s. I enjoyed that thrill of self-publishing then as much as I do now. It felt like the garage band of writing. You may not be good or ever get famous, but you can brute force some art into the world.

In college blogs became a trend. I created a blog as I graduated from college to chronicle my entry into the corporate world and ended up chronicling my move and life in Japan. It served as a form of catharsis and outward processing as well as keeping my friends and family up to date on my adventures. That blog died after I came back from Japan and had to get a job and start a career.

Meeting Jeffery Zeldman at SXSW was the inspiration for this edition of the blog, if you can believe it. A brief encounter but my key takeaway on how I could become more like my web development heroes was to write more. They write, and writing begets books, and books begets conference talks. It seemed like a template I could follow and I started self-publishing again. Over time, I wrote enough to where I got to write on Jeffrey’s blog and speak at his conference a handful of times. I guess the plan worked out.

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

I started on WordPress but I moved my blog to Jekyll in 2012. I chose Jekyll because I was into Ruby at the time and fighting with WordPress for good performance was exhausting me. I wanted a simpler authoring and development experience. The simplicity of building with markdown files on localhost still resonates with me.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I’ve used Blogger, MovableType, WordPress, and Jekyll. There’s also an ill-fated Eleventy branch on my site that never made it to production. I’m sure Jekyll will implode and I’ll need to find something else, but switching platforms would be a distraction for me at this point without some obvious benefit or process improvement.

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 write my posts in a giant Notion kanban. It’s overkill but it’s my overkill. The organization capabilities and “markdown-like” aspects of Notion made it a good fit over a folder-o’-files. Before publishing, my posts go through a series of pre-publishing rituals. With those processes combined I maintain a level of quality and throughput that I’m happy with.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I find time to write after the kids go to bed. If there’s time during the workday, I may spend a lunch break jotting some thoughts too. My blogging is very work-dependent to the extent that sometimes when I’m productive at work, I’m most productive at blogging. But often, I’m too tired or focusing on other tasks to craft a well-reasoned blog post.

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

Most of my drafts simmer for weeks if not months or years. From time to time I’ll do a one day turnaround on a post and that’s rewarding, but it’s inconsistent. At the time of writing I have 22 active drafts where ”active” means I’ve updated them at least once in the last six months. If I increase the scope to one year, there’s 41 drafts in my kanban.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

I’m a generalist at heart and enjoy writing about technology generally. If you look at my archive it’s pretty rare that two consecutive posts will be thematically similar. I write about specific technologies like CSS but also about game development or the capital-W Web. And of course prototypes, which I’m convinced are the not-so-secret sauce for building great technologies.

One direction I’m slipping towards in my mind is futurism and speculative fiction (e.g. sci-fi). Writing about current technology limits you to existing capitalist and corporate structures. Imagining the future and the potential fallout allows you to think without the confines of “Good because make money” which so much of our discourse is today.

Who are you writing for?

Woof. Good question. 90% of the time I’m writing to get ideas out of my head. Transfiguring ideas into text works wonders for me. I also tend to write for an abstract audience, people who are curious about the web and technology yet crave more from it; a person who considers themselves a technologist, but also factors in morality and other cosmotechnics.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Quick Thoughts on Chips (2023) is up there but I feel like Responsive Deliverables (2013) aka, the “tiny bootstraps” post, is a level of quality, thoughtfulness, and timelessness that I don’t achieve often. I’d like more “timeless” pieces like that, but I don’t exactly know how or if it’s worth trying to bottle that magic.

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

I’m pretty comfortable with my site, but I have a couple changes in mind:

Some of those will happen over the course of a year, some in the dark of night, some never.

Tag ‘em.

What a responsibility to add people to this chain letter! Susan told me if I don’t forward this to 10 people, my grandparents will die! That seems extreme but okay. I’ll tag the following people who I think haven’t written one yet:

Shoot. Only seven. Sorry, memaw and pepaw. Hopefully some unnamed individuals will answer the call.