Blog questions challenge

Last week, Jeremy Keith tagged me to take part in the Blog Questions Challenge … well, not me per se, but everyone who has read his blog post on the subject, where he did follow suit after being tagged. The goal is to answer a particular set of questions.

So let me get right to it.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I’ve been tinkering with websites since forever, and already in those early days I created pages that looked like blog posts about my personal life. Alas, these sites I’ve had in the late ’90s no longer exist, and even though I eventually got paid to make websites, in the first decade of the ongoing millenium I myself had no public-facing site to speak of.

It was more than 5000 days ago when I figured CSSence would be a good user name for someone who is very fond of Cascading Style Sheets, and I’ve pondered the idea of creating an online magazine, where I would write one article per month. I did start in January 2011, but I only managed to write seven long-form articles, meaning things already came to a halt after July.

I pretty much found myself in a similar situation as Max Böck, in the sense that I would find excuses to not write more. Thus, the site remained in a dormant state until 2015, when something ignited the spark again.

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

I started on WordPress, but early on it was clear that I wanted to be in full control of the styling, without the limitations of a WordPress theme. I already had my own domain and webspace, only to have my initial deployment followed by years of “coming soon”.

My desire to be in control of the styling came at the expense of something rather important: I had no proper workflow to get the actual content out.

This changed with the aforementioned spark, I got back to blogging by writing on medium.com. Oh the irony, it took another place out of my control to get affairs on my own site in order. I started with my own lightweight solution, that I later replaced with the Metalsmith static site generator. Around that time I switched to publishing on my own site first. I even kept medium.com as a syndication target for a little while.

I got to the point where I was finally in control of everything. Not only did my site become my IndieWeb hub, I’ve also replaced MetalSmith with a static site generator I wrote myself.

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

Writing my own static site generator resulted in moving away from Markdown, nowadays all my pages are raw HTML files, which are part of the same GitHub repository as the hand-rolled generator.

So I write everything in the IDE, which currently happens to be VSCode, but I’m working on a simple HTML form (that is going to be part of the site), that enables me to create new blog posts faster, and even amend existing posts.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

An idea may errupt at any time, but sometimes it’s as simple as stumbling upon an issue that needs investigation. Down the rabbit hole I go.

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

Immediately. I blog about HTML, CSS and sometimes even JS. In the fast-paced world of web development, staying in draft makes little sense. The only reason something doesn’t get out immediately is because real life gets in the way. And there is more real life than ever, as my family keeps growing. Currently the household consists of (in order of appearance): Wife, dog, husband, child #1, child #2, and most recently child #3.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

It’s always the one that I’m working on, i.e. the one that I’ll publish next.

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

Jeremy wrote that he likes making little incremental changes. So do I. In the early days, doing a complete overhaul was appealing, but today my site has over 300 pages. Luckily the markup I have in place is versatile, this allows me to simply add a new theme and make it available on my Settings page, which is a different approach to redesigning in the open. At some point it may make sense to make such an added theme the new default. But keeping the old themes around allows me to grow my own CSS Zen Garden.

Next?

On the one hand I’d like these questions answered by anyone who follows me on social media, but on the other hand I have a very specific request: If you aren’t a blogger already, why not start in 2025? Go ahead and create a blog, and then take part in the Blog Questions Challenge. By doing so you already have your first blog post.