Oh, I've been tagged in a thing!

Apparently there is a "blog questions challenge" going around, where I'm to answer 7 questions about my blog. And Sage has tagged me in it!

As such I will now be answering these 7 questions

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Ooh, this one really depends on whether you mean this blog or blogs in general. If we go back far enough the answer is "because it's the thing you do, since social media hasn't really been invented yet" but let's address this one. Originally I set this blog up basically to have somewhere personal to post that was separate from social media and all the attached troubles. So like the vibes always have just a bit of a feeling of "writing whatever I want and maybe it's uncomfortably personal" but that's sort of what I need. So I guess I started because having a space I can just write whatever has helped me feel better, and having it away from established social media platforms tends to feel better for me. But it sort of had a second wind when Cohost shut down and I felt like I needed a place for the good posts, and there was a bit of a "hey look I have a blog, follow my RSS feed" trend in the final month of that site.

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

I'm using Publii! Basically it's a standalone desktop application that functions as a static site generator, so I'm not having to worry about anything complicated server-side. I find having a nice rich text editor helpful to write in, and having it basically be a desktop application and not needing anything to run on my web server aside from just hosting some files appeals to me philosophically.

Oh boy, platforms I've used before. Immediately before setting this site up I'd been maintaining a neocities page, which had a blog section that was essentially just all hand-edited in HTML. I kept this going for a fair bit but ultimately it's a bit too frictiony for what I want to do, and also that site sort of felt a bit baggage in terms of like how I'd presented myself there. I'd also previously done sort of an anime-themed blog that ran on Wordpress, and my current assessment of platforms like that is they are "a hassle" and feel way too overkill for what I want to do. Many years ago I'd also had a couple of blogger/blogspot blogs, going back many years.

Also, are zines a blog? My Decker e-zines feel somewhat blog-adjacent at least.

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

Publii essentially just runs as a local piece of software that gives me a rich text editing tool with all the usual niceties. To push things live I basically just hit an "upload" button and it syncs everything onto my server. One problem I've had writing posts directly into it is that if you're not careful with saving they can be lost, but since then I've tried to be more careful.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Tricky question. Most of my "oh god I have a feeling I need to get down" energy goes towards a zine. So I guess here is more for the "I need to do something timely", whether it's just a longer sadpost or some comment on a recent thing. Or if I wanna just plug something else I've done like a zine or a game, that's the easy post. In terms of really nutting down and getting a proper post out often it's "I wanna say something really specific about a special interest".

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

Immediate, immediate! I'm not editing this shit, haha.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Probably I'll have to go with one of my more serious posts, let's say one of my posts about Tetris Forever or maybe this one about Lucasarts games.

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

No concrete plans. I have idly thought about a redesign, since this is based on an old version of a default theme, but I don't really wanna change the look. I have thought that adding more "website" type stuff, like more pages and menus and such could be handy, like maybe pages about specific projects, beyond just the "about me" and links page type stuff. And with other social media becoming more and more hostile, maybe I do wanna share stuff here more. So I guess the plan is "use it more, in more different ways".

Anyway, that's the answers. Please get in touch and say hi if you wanna talk about any of this stuff.