Blog Questions Challenge 2025
I don't normally do blog challenges, but I got pinged by ~hyde with the call, so here goes:
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I don't remember a specific thing that got me started. My first post talked about students and learning and technology, so it was probably something I heard during a professional development at school. This was my first year teaching and the school was pretty technology-forward, so I was doing a lot of exploring. That early writing is pretty cringy as I read it 15 years later...
My writing really beagin in earnest in 2011 after attending an education technology conference and getting connected to other teachers through social media and blogs.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?
The current version of this site is built with Pelican, a Python static site generator. I've been using this for a little over a year now becuase I moved from a shared hosting provider to a Linode VPS and I needed to cut down on resources. I tried WordPress at first, which is what I had been using for many years, but this new host only has 1GB of RAM and a static site made more sense. I also don't do enough shared writing or management to really necessitate a full CMS.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I had a brief stint of running my site with Jekyll in 2018. I also had it running on Anchor CMS a few years before that. I still miss Anchor.
How do you write your posts?
I have a private git repo that I use to sync posts between machines. Pelican turns Markdown files into HTML when the site is generated. I use Helix to write and git to push to the repo. A pre-receive hook on the server extracts the new files and rebuilds the site on each push.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
It depends a little on the week. I've done some work to make short posts easier to publish and I'm trying to make that more the norm. I tend to think about teaching the most because it's what I spend most of my day doing and I'll often chew on those posts for a couple days before actually starting to type. I don't know that I ever have a "fully finished" idea before publishing because this site works best when I use to to process my thinking rather than "publishing" my thinking.
Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?
I tend to publish right away. If I have a change of heart, do more thinking, or expand my ideas, I'll either edit the post and note the update or I'll just write a followup post. I don't keep drafts around because if it's not enough of an idea to write it out, I don't need to worry about creating a backlog for myself.
From time to time, I will mark a post as "scheduled" to publish at a later date, but that's pretty rare. More of a nice to be able to do than something I reach for.
What's your favorite post on your blog?
Alan Levine asked a very similar question on his blog, asking which post was a contender for best post. I read it in November when he published it and the tab is still open on my phone becuase I will, someday, go back and comment.
I don't really know. Maybe this one?
I think some of my best writing is the life stuff. Not so much the thoughts on schools or tech, but the post about the time I had to fix a bad car problem or the other time I had to fix a car problem.
I don't think I can pick a single best post, but I think I can say, 15 years, in, that my Life category is my favorite collection now.
Any future plans for the blog?
I've got a couple things I'd like to do, like auto posting new articles to other places and making this the first place of sharing rather than jumping to social media. I want to write more about life stuff and tell more stories of living simply.
Who will participate next?
My fedi circle is pretty small still, but I'd like to see a post from Chris, Alan, and Tom mainly becuase I always make sure to read what they write when it pops up in my reader.
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