Blog Questions Challenge

I started blogging when I felt like there was a lot I either wanted to talk about, or continued to talk about, and thought it might be nice to just have a spot I could refer back to. A sort of "I've already given this spiel before, if you're interested in what I have to say here you go". I do also like talking about tech, and teaching people things, so this felt like a good way to do that. I also felt I wasn't really using my website much anymore, and this would be a way to do more with it. Previously it was largely just a resume for when I did videography and photography, but I'm not really in that space much anymore.

This blog is currently hosted on Neocities. I originally hosted on Wordpress, and only decided to move away when Wordpress announced they were going to start using blogs to train their Ai. I wanted to move to another website builder, since at the time I didn't know HTML and CSS enough to make a site, but everything else was more expensive than I would've liked, especially since the site was now more of a hobby than a resume. Neocities is affordable, and so I switched there and learned HTML/CSS. I spoke about the transfer here if you're interested.

Sort of. A lot of people considered Cohost to be a microblogging site, and I tried to talk on there a lot and enjoyed the vibes of the site. I also really enjoyed when things like this would go around, and getting to see everyone's responses. Outside of that, I was on Tumblr a bit, and of course blogged on Wordpress, though I don't really think that's what this question is getting at lol.

I use Visual Studio Code for writing my posts. I basically keep a copy of my site locally on my computer, and then when things are ready copy/ paste them over to Neocities. I do this largely for backup reasons - if Neocities ever suddenly disappeared I could just put my files somewhere else and I'd be good to go. My dekstop is backed up automatically with Backblaze, so if my computer ever died I'd have that backup as well as the backup on Neocities.

For a bit I started to code the site on Notepad++, but fortunately I had a coding friend pretty early on go "no, you're going to use Visual Studio Code", and honestly it's made my life so much easier.

As for exactly my process, I keep templates for each category I post into. The templates have default heading stuff, but I'll change the social media sharing info per post. Once I copy a template, I rename it to be relevant to whatever post I'm making. From there, I'll type out the post in HTML and preview it once I'm done typing. Once I'm happy with how it looks, I'll add links to the new post on relevant pages (typically Blogs, Archive, and the page for whatever category the blog post belongs to), as well as update how it'll look on mobile in relevant places. Then I update the relevant RSS feeds. I again have a template item and change info as needed. I'll also go through and change any relative links to the full urls for the RSS feeds so it'll load correctly. The whole process takes a while, but it usually ends up being a lot of copy/ pasting.

Usually either right after a big event happens (and so I talk about it on the Life page) or I have strong opinions about something or it's been on my mind for a while. I have a list of potential blog posts to write, but usually what gets me to write one is when I want to get my thoughts out before I forget something. Or, I'm bored.

Pretty much immediately. I usually will proofread whatever I'm about to post, and make any changes that are needed. But largely if I've written something it's going to be posted immediately.

This is a tough one for me. I definitely have some favorite pages - Archive and Updates being the two.

For posts though... the first one that comes to mind is the blog article about Reverse Proxy. That's largely because I refer back to that article a lot myself though.

My next thought would be the Cohost Shutting Down blog article. I think I incorporated a lot of things I've learned while coding the site into that one post, and so I'm pretty happy with how it came out. It also made Michelle cry when she read it, so it must be pretty good.

The last one that comes to mind is the Trash of the Titans review, but that's largely because I like how I did the Q and A part of that post.

Not really at the moment - sort of keep on keeping on. A lot of the updates to this site though have come from me going "oooo that'd be a really cool idea!" and then just sort of trying to make it happen. As I mentioned before, the Archive and Updates pages are really great examples of this.

No, I usually cross post stuff from my blog to social media spaces I'm on, but other than that not really. I've not written long form content on other sites since... Cohost went down (should be read in the same tone as The Acdemy from Phineas and Ferb)

To anyone who wants to do this as well, feel free! Let me know in the comments if you do, I'd love to read more of these!