Blog Questions Challenge 2025

title: Blog Questions Challenge 2025
published: 2025-02-18
tags: blogging

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I’m picking up the challenge from Jason Braganza. If you haven’t, go visit his blog and subscribe to the newsletter ;)

Jason’s Blog

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

That’s been the first question I asked myself when starting this blog. It was part of the DGPLUG #summertraining and I kind of started without actually knowing what to do with it. But I did want to have my own little corner in cyberspace.

Why another blog?

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

I have a home server running vim in a tmux session. The articles are written as gemtext as I have decided that my gemlog should be the source of truth for my blog. I’ve written some little bash scripts to convert everything to html and atom feed as well, but I’m actually not very motivated anymore to care for website design. Gemtext is the simplest markup language I know and to keep it simple makes the most sense to me.

Gemtext

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I started writing on wordpress.com; without running my own server it has been the most accessible platform to me. When moving to my own infrastructure I used Lektor, a static website generator framework written in Python. It has been quite nice and powerful, but in the end I wanted to get rid of the extra dependencies and simplify even more.

Lektor

4. How do you write your posts?

Rarely. If I write, I just write. Basically the same way I would talk. There were a very few posts when I did some research because I wanted to make it a useful and comprehensive source for future look-ups, but in most cases I’m simply too lazy. I don’t spend much time on structure or thinking about how to guide the reader through my thoughts, it’s just for me and anyone who cares.

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Always in situations when I don’t have the time to write, never when I do have the time. Maybe there’s something wrong with me.

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

Yes, mostly. I do have a couple of posts that I didn’t publish immediately, so they are still not published. I find it hard to re-iterate my own writing, so I try to avoid it by publishing immediately :)

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

The post I was looking up myself most often is the PostgreSQL migration thing. It was a good idea to write that down ;)

Postgres migration between multiple instances

8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I just did a major refactoring of the system, basically doing everying manually now. It forces me to keep things simple, because I think it should be simple to write and publish a text online. I also hope to have lowered the threshold for me to start writing new posts. So piloting the current system, it is.