The Blogging Chain Letter Questionnaire (2025 edition)
A fun chain letter has been making the rounds1. I haven't been tagged, but doing one on spec seems a good idea. Gotta prevent the unending torment of stepping on Lego bricks every night.
So, here we go:
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Blogs weren't a thing when I started adventuring on the web. It was The Olden Times. Blogs hadn't evolved from the primordial ooze of hand coded pages yet.
A college buddy showed me Mosaicx and View Sourcex my freshman year. I was enthralled. And, I was a photographer.
I used to carry a camera everywhere. If I was awake, I had one on me. These were the days of film. Phones didn't have screens, much less cameras. Instagram was more than a decade away. Getting photos to folks involved darkroomsx, chemicals, and paper coated with silver gelatinx.
I loved making prints, but the process and materials were limiting when it came to distribution. I realized the web was the perfect place to publish my work the instant I saw it. Figuring out how to do that is what got me started.
Okay, but why did you actually start blogging in the first place?
I discovered Kevin Kelly's Cool Tools site4 sometime around 2005. A fun little blog site that shows off tools of various types that do interesting things. I really liked the idea and the blog format piqued my interest. Enough so that I decided to give it a tryx.
I'd had my site since the '90s, but hadn't posted anything other than photos before the switch. It took no time at all to realize I liked writing as well. Something I never would have discovered without the site to act as an outlet.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
I did the silly thing everyone says you shouldn't do. I built my own site builder (aka static site generatorx).
It's called Neopoligenx. It's open-source if you want to play with it, but right now it's designed specifically for my site.
There are three reasons I decided to do my own thing:
- I got tired of things breaking because some random dependency changed
- I got tired of switching frameworks
- I wanted to do more with plain-text files than markdown offers without resorting to HTML directly
Dependencies
Scene 1: Visiting relatives over Christmas. Alan finds a typo on his site (which he hasn't touched in two months).
Opens file, fixes typo, saves file, deploys the site.
Total time: 27 seconds
Scene 2: Holiday Party Montage. Drinks, music, good times being had by all.
Scene 3: Some time later... Alan checks the site on his phone to confirm the typo is fixed... It's not.
Scene 4: Hacking montage. Back at his computer, Alan checks the logs. Deploy failed... WTF?
hack, hack, hack... Alan tries different things... none of them work... hack, hack, hack... finally changes some random config option... the site deploys
Total time: 1 hour, 18 minutes
Scene 5: Close-up of Alan. Bloodshot eyes. Face illuminated solely by the glow of the monitor:
Fuck.
That.
Frameworks
My site is 25 years old. I've run it with hand coded HTML, Perl scripts, stand alone PHP files, various LAMPx stacks, Wordpress, Ruby on Rails, Jekyll, Hugo, Gatsby, Next.js, and probably some other stuff I've forgotten about.
When I think about the next 25 years, I don't want to spend it jumping frameworks. It's generally considered silly to make your own site builder. I agree with that for the most part. That said, thinking about all the time I've spent migrating content between frameworks, it's a lot easier to justify the time spent making a personal site builder that does what I want and won't change out from under me.
Replacing Markdown
If conventional wisdom is that you shouldn't make your own site builder, it's ten times more so that you shouldn't make your own file format. And, yet...
I love using plain-text files for my content. I'd been using Markdownx for that purpose for over a decade. It's great, as far as it goes. It just doesn't go far enough for me.
A simple example is adding classes to headings for styling. Markdown doesn't have a way to do thatextensions. I thought about making a Markdown extension to add the features I use most often. It felt like fighting uphillxkcd. Instead, I opted to design a new format with advanced features built in from the start.
Nesting sections, custom attributes, alternate section templates, code blocks that both render and show their source... I added a bunch of stuff. The format itself is called Neopolitan (which goes with the Neopoligen site builder). There's mode details in this post on Why I Built Neopoligen if you're interested.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Sure have.
In addition to the various tech mentioned in the Frameworks section above, I used Blogger and BlogSpot briefly when I was first experimenting with the blog format. (I also used GeoCities way back, but that was before switching to a blog format)
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
I have a collection of notes and software I call my Grimoiregrimoire. Pretty much everything that's not project source code goes in there. The files are written in my Neopolitan format. Each one includes a metadata section like:
-- metadata
-- created: 2025-04-04T12:22:31-04:00
-- id: 2v/gu/v0/tq
-- template: post
-- status: draftI keep an instance of my Neopoigen site builder running. When it sees a file with a status of draft or published it generates the corresponding page based on the defined template and serves it on a local webserver.
Each file's metadata has an id field with a unique ID. It's what's used to generate the output file path and URL by default. I can override it, but rarely do.
Neovim
I'm currently using Neovimneovim to make and edit files. The main interface to my Grimoire is a little pluginneogrimoire I wrote with a single text field that lets me either search for notes or make new ones.
The text field starts out as a search box. Adding a period at the end makes a new file instead of searching. This let's me get to any note or make a new one with minimal key strokes.
When everything looks good locally, I commit the changes to the site's repo. That, in turn, triggers a deployment. (The process would work with dev branches but for what I'm doing it's not worth the overhead.)
Rending And Executing HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Code Blocks
Demos that don't work frustrate the hell out of me. Especially when you copy/paste code from an example and you either get a different result or it just fails completely.
For example, I can do this in a note:
-- html
-- template: show
<button class="custom-button" data-count="0">
Count: 0
</button>
-- css
-- template: show
.custom-button {
color: red;
font-weight: 900;
}
-- javascript
-- template: show
const el = document.querySelector(
'.custom-button'
)
el.addEventListener('click', function (event) {
this.dataset.count =
parseInt(this.dataset.count, 10) + 1
this.innerHTML = `Count: ${this.dataset.count}`
})Which outputs:
HTML
Count: 0
Output
CSS
}JavaScript
const el = document.
el.Of course, showing the source blocks isn't required. I can simply add HTML, CSS, and JavaScript to the pages without showing the code.
Executing Code Blocks In Other Languages
I write code in other languages too. To make sure those examples work as expected, I built a feature into my Grimoire that allows me to execute code written in other languages and capture its output directly in a file. For example, this snippet of rust code produces was executed via a hotkey to output the results directly below it.
fn main() {
println!("Hello, Rust");
}Hello, RustWhen do you feel most inspired to write?
I wouldn't generally use the word "inspired" to describe what kicks off a writing session.
A large portion of the pages on my site are "working-in-public" style pages where I'm trying to figure something out. They consist of the simplest snippet of code I can make that does the thing I'm trying to accomplish. Those pages are simply part of the way that I work. They're little more than notes that just happen to end up as posts on the site.
Writing Prose
"Inspired" is a grand and weighty word. I've made posts on all kinds of topics in the twenty years this site has been a blog. I wouldn't use inspired to describe the impetus behind more than a few.
Sure, I've been struck by ideas woven from lightning. Fingers moved by the force of a Muse to bang out something I had to write.
The Clicky Sound comes to mind.
That's what I think of when I think of the word "inspired".
That feeling is super rare, though. Mostly, my starting point is little more than a scrap of idea. Some thought that's been bouncing around my head. Percolating until it has bubbled up enough I decide to do something with it.
Or, like this post, it's seeing something interesting and thinking it would be fun to try.
Said another way: Writing is a decision for me. An internal choice to do a thing I want to do. Not an external force acting on me though divine intervention.
As for when I'm most likely to make the decision, it's usually when I've had plenty of sleep.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I tend to work on a piece until it's ready to go. When I've got the first version in a good place I generally walk away from it for a bit (at least a few minutes, maybe a few hours, depending) then give it one more pass with fresh eyes before hitting publish.
The process of getting the first version out can take a few days. I think of the post as being a draft during that time. The distinction I'd make is that it's an active draft (compared to something I've fully put aside for a while).
Once it's out, I usually take a look at it over the next day or so. There's usually a few minor edits for polish. Once or twice I've ended up with full on rewrites.
It's rare that I go back to something I've put aside for more than a day or two. That's mostly because I kinda forget about them. I've got plans to add a feature to my Grimoire to pull drafts from the back-burner to see about finishing them up. That plan is on the back-burner itself though.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
Code snippets get most of my attention these days. I've been under a mild bipolar depression for the past little bit. That hugely narrows what I write about and tends to lead to not writing at all for extended periods.
As I'm coming out of it, my mind is opening back up and writing in general is an appealing idea again. My thinking at this point is to write more general posts (like this one). Maybe some journal type stuff as well.
Who are you writing for?
Primarily, myself.
The code notes I make are first and foremost for me. They're there to figure things out and document them for future me. I try to write them for a secondary audience of anyone looking to solve the same problem though. Making things as concise as possible.
Most of my prose writing is for largely for myself as well. But, it's also for anyone who might find whatever the topic is interesting.
Increasingly, I'm interested in putting thing out into the world that are made by a human and outside of a social networks. Just adding tonnage that's on personal websites as a way to encourage more folks to do the same. Either as a continuation of an existing site or as inspiration to start a new one.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I've made somewhere north of 2,000 posts here. Combine that with the fact that I don't tend to categorize thing by favorites or bests makes this a hard one to answer. That said:
The Clicky Sound takes first prize.
A close second is How To Grow Your Digital Garden With Sub-Domains
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I'm in the middle(?) of refactoring my site builder. Got delayed by the depression. As I come out of it the idea of getting things fixed up is becoming something I can get my head around.
Once the core work is done (e.g. getting images and video embeds working again) the next thing will be to add an RSS feed again. I'm more than a little embarrassed that I haven't had one working for the past few years.
As for the platform. The goal is to ride my engine for as long as I have a website. That goes double for the file format I'm using for the content. If all goes to plan I've made it extensible enough that I can adapt to the future without having to migrate to anything else.
Tag Other Folks
I'm breaking the chain.
Well, I wasn't actually on the chain to begin with. So, technically, I'm not breaking it.
I also don't know any other folks who have blogs well enough to tag them.
That said, if you're reading this the dreaded stepping on Lego curse might just be headed your way if you don't make your own version of this post.
Footnotes
One of the many places I've seen folks do the questions.
One of the first browsers. And, more importantly, the first one to show images on the same page as text (instead of in a separate window)
The behind-the-scenes way to look at the HTML (and JavaScript and CSS) that make up a web page.
The first language I really learned. It was like gaining a super power.
Start in 2000 as an email list, then a blog in 2003, Cool Tools was one of my daily stops in the early days of the web. A wonderful, curated collection of various types of tools (hand tools, software, even books and the like).
The one that started it all. At least, in the blog format.