No one ever tags me for these things, so I decided to just go ahead and answer the Micro.blog Question Challenge put forth by Robert Birming.

Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I’ve had a personal web site since 1994. I wrote what I consider my first blog entry in 1998 and was active throughout the original wave of blogging, right up until the late 2010s. At a certain point, I got kind of fed up with what the web had become and got tired of having Wordpress plugins getting compromised and ruining my site, so I stepped away from things.

Last year, I decided it was time to come back, inspired by the personal/indie/slow/etc. web resurgence.

When it comes down to it, I like to have a place online that I own and maintain that doesn’t have any expectations tied to it. I don’t worry about traffic or promotion beyond an occasional link that I’ll post to Mastodon. It’s just a project I’m happy to have to futz around with when I need something positive to focus on.

Why did you choose Micro.blog?

After taking my Wordpress site down a few years back, I moved to a really simple model where my site consisted of only a single static page. That did the trick for a bit, but when I decided I wanted to bring my site back in some way, I knew a few things:

  1. I didn’t want to host it myself and have to deal with keeping plugins up-to-date.
  2. I wanted something that loaded quickly, so a static site generator was a consideration.
  3. Writing was going to be the primary focus of the site.
  4. Simplicity was key, but I did want some flexibility to be able to add code, tweak templates, etc.

I looked at Bear, Pika, and some other similar services, but ultimately decided that Micro.blog balanced simplicity and flexibility in the right way for me.

I may not really use it as it’s intended (as, you know, a microblogging platform) but it is still working really well for me after almost a year.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Heck yeah, especially in the early days I was trying out a bunch:

  • Pitas
  • Blogger
  • s9y
  • Moveable Type
  • Typepad
  • Wordpress

Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

I write in Joplin first, which uses Markdown as a base. It allows me to write in the WYSIWYG editor but easily toggle to tweak Markdown or, when I’m ready to post, copy it.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I feel most inspired when something that I’m working on is exciting me and I want to share it. It can be something small (I just repaired my old cassette Walkman from the 90s last week and I’ll probably write about that) or something more carefully researched like posts I wrote back in February about Lipoprotein(a) and Aphantasia. I’ve been writing a fair bit about personal archiving recently, too.

Sometimes I just feel like writing a music review, so I’ve started posting reviews of my 100 favorite albums in my digital garden.

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

I can take a while with my drafts. I decided with this incarnation of my site, I wasn’t going to rush anything or publish just because I felt like I’m supposed to. I’ve also gotten a bit more critical about my writing, so I’m trying to take a few reads over it once it’s done to tweak/edit/polish the post before it goes out.

Your favorite post on your blog?

My most popular post ever was one from 23 years ago where I wrote about a visit to the Maury Povich Show and hundreds upon hundreds of people started to think that I was Maury. Ah, the early days of blogging. (This post is not currently on my site, but I’ve been working on bringing it back along with almost 700 comments. There’s just a lot of PII that I need to block out.)

My favorite post of the last year, though, is probably the one where I celebrate five years of watching movies every week with college friends.

Any future plans for your blog?

At this point, I’m just going to keep writing.