My Blogging Origin Story & Other Questions: A Blogging Challenge
Two terribly delightful things happened yesterday in my personal blogosphere.
First, the internet’s own prolific Lou Plummer wrote very kindly on his Linkage blog about HeyDingus. I can’t possibly keep up with all the app reviews, link blasts, and personal blog posts that Lou writes every day — much as I try — but I’m honored to have played a small part in inspiring his journey into blogging.
Second, the ever-thoughtful Kev Quirk invited me via this blog post to participate in a brief blog questions challenge that’s going around on Bear Blog.
The eight questions (nice for copying into your own blog post):
- Why did you start blogging in the first place?
- What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
- Have you blogged on other platforms before?
- How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
- When do you feel most inspired to write?
- Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
- What’s your favourite post on your blog?
- Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I’m always down for writing about writing, so here goes!
The questions are:
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Mostly because I had opinions, but no where to put them. I was on Twitter, but the character restriction and my relative dearth of followers kind of killed my motivation to put long-form thoughts there. But with a blog, I could publish and pretend the whole world was reading. So, on January 1, 2021, I launched HeyDingus with an obligatory ‘Hey There’ post. I was inspired by my favorite Apple-centered sites (Six Colors, Daring Fireball, MacRumors, 9to5Mac, MacStories, 512 Pixels, etc.), so my earliest writing centered almost exclusively around that. But as I dove further into the indie web, I found I enjoyed writing about more personal topics and other hobbies too. I was further inspired by folks such as Manton Reese, Robb Knight, Alexandra Wolfe, Kev Quirk, and Greg Morris. And I love tinkering with new styles and formats, both on the front-end and back-end. (There’s a little more on my About page.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
My main blog, this one, is hosted on Blot. I can’t for sure remember where I first heard about it — maybe in a Do By Friday challenge? But it’s an amazing service that makes a whole website out of files synced to a Dropbox folder. That simplicity — no plugins to manage, no clunky admin panel or dashboard to constantly dive in and out of — really appeals to me. It means for every blog post and page, the “source of truth” is a text file on my computer. I can use any text editor (and all my Shortcuts and other automations) to write and make changes, and within seconds of moving that file to my ‘Posts’ folder, it’s live on the web. It’s really quite something. (Blot’s great for photoblogging, too, since you can just drops images into that folder for them to be published. But I don’t really do that.)
As I noted above, I love to tinker. Thankfully Blot is fully tinkerer-compatible. You can customize every HTML template and line of CSS, if you want to.
My microblog is hosted at, well, Micro.blog. It functions as my primary social media account (@jarrod@micro.blog) and I’ve mostly treated it as a one-to-one replacement for Twitter since that really started going downhill. Micro.blog is super versatile though, and the site (jb.heydingus.net) is a full blog in its own right. I’ve toyed for years with the idea of just moving all of HeyDingus and everything into Micro.blog so that I just have one home on the web. I probably will someday.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Yeah, I got started with HeyDingus on Squarespace. It lived there for its first year or two. It was okay, but it became readily apparent that there was a lot that Squarespace wanted me to do that I wasn’t going to (sell stuff, have a paywall, etc.) and there was a lot that I wanted to do that Squarespace wouldn’t let me (customization, full editing capability on iPad, etc.). I got pretty frustrated with it in the end. I had started to explore Wordpress when I found Blot, and I’m so glad that I did. (Although, it maybe would have been better if I’d found Micro.blog first and just migrated there from the get-go. 😅)
Squarespace could be a good (though expensive) choice if you like a block WYSIWYG editor. But if you just want a box to type your blog posts into, I recommend Scribbles or Pika. If you want to tinker, take advantage of the social web, and be part of a nice community, I recommend Micro.blog. If you are happiest in a text editor and don’t want to think much about the back-end of the blog at all, I recommend Blot.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
Well now, you already know that I like to start things in a text editor, don’t you? Almost everything I write starts in Drafts. I’ve got an editing theme there that I’ve customized with the colors of my blog (light | dark), although with a monospaced font. I usually get everything hammered out there because I love its action bar that I’ve also customized with little tools for the way I write, which is in Markdown. I’ve got actions for quickly pasting text, previewing the formatted text, uploading images to the web and inserting its relevant text, making hyperlinks, adding footnotes, and more. (If you want one, just ask!)
But then posts get sent to my ‘Drafts’ folder 1Writer (on iOS) or iA Writer (on macOS), both of which are hooked up to my Dropbox account to work with Blot. I do a final edit there — they’re each a little more focused of environments — before the post is published. I don’t get to press a ‘Publish’ button, I just move it from ‘Drafts’ to ‘Posts’.
One of these days, I want to customize the preview screen in Drafts and iA Writer to be a copy of my theme on HeyDingus. To have all the right colors, fonts, and the rest of the style would be super cool when I’m checking my work.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
When I least expect it, to be honest. Some of what I consider my best posts have been written in the most uncomfortable positions (sitting on the toilet seat lid, laying on my side in bed, in the passenger seat of a car) on my iPhone because that’s when inspiration struck. Sometimes it’s because I just read something and I want to comment about it right away. Other times, I’ll have been sorting out an idea in my head and I just get a feeling that I need to get it out right now or else it’ll be lost forever. It’s not the healthiest habit, but I can’t help but drop everything and write it all out, start to finish, in those sessions. The hours fly by and the relief when it’s on the web is palpable.
I cannot fathom when folks say they don’t have anything to write about. In addition to those “lightning strike” writing sessions, I have ideas for posts a mile long saved to Drafts. Usually those come in the form of titles. I’ll pull out my phone, write it down in Drafts, tag it with blog so that it gets sorted with the rest of those ideas, and move on. I actually don’t get back to those ideas very often because I have so many more timely or feels-more-important ideas that take hold.
One thing I’ll add is that I used to be pretty formal in my writing style. I figured no one would take me seriously unless I wrote with correct grammar and punctuation, and followed traditional formats, and got everything just right.
That strictness made me write less.
I’ve mostly given up on perfect writing style, not ending sentences in prepositions, and avoiding contractions. Now I write like I speak — or at least how the voice in my head speaks.1 It makes it more enjoyable to read, I think, and I like it. So there.
My three rules for blogging:2
- Write things that you would enjoy reading.
- Don’t take yourself too seriously — it’s just a blog, so experiement and have fun!
- Be helpful, curious, and kind. If your blog post isn’t one of those things, you better have a damn good reason for posting it to the everlasting web.
Sneaky rule #4: Link generously.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Like most people whose response to this challenge I’ve seen, I’m a publish-as-soon-as-it’s-done sort of guy. Sometimes it takes a while as I agonize over every word, link, and caption. But when it’s done, it’s done and wants to be out in the world. Usually posts only make it over to 1Writer/iA Writer when they’re almost ready to publish. But I do have three posts that just live in my ‘Drafts’ folder there. As a treat, I’ll share their titles:
- ‘The New iPad: A Mini Review’ (There since the 6th-gen iPad mini came out in 2021. I psych myself out about product reviews and then they never get done. I pivoted it into a post to discuss my thoughts on that iPad after two-years with it. That was a year ago. Now the 7th-gen iPad mini is out and I still can’t bring myself to finish it or delete it.)
- ‘How I Migrated My Blog from Squarespace to Blot’ (Similarly, I started writing this right after I migrated my blog at the end of 2022. It was a complicated process and I thought folks might find it useful to follow, but it got really long and in the weeds, but I didn’t want to publish without all the details. Honestly, it’s probably good enough that I should just put it out there.)
- ‘What is a Blog, Really?’ (I’ve felt for a long time that everything is just a blog. And by “everything” I mean everyone’s Twitter, Mastodon, Threads, and Bluesky accounts. Their YouTube channels and Pinterest boards. Your grandparent has a blog in their Facebook page. The reporter for your local newspaper has a blog in their weekly column. Maybe even streaming television shows could be considered a blog. They’re syndicated stories logged on the web. Web logs. Weblogs. Blogs. There. I’ve published that blog post as a parenthetical in this one. Except I still have a bunch of links and half-formed ideas saved there that will prevent me from considered that draft done.)
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
Oh boy, I don’t know if I could pick a true favorite. I liked Manu’s quippy answer in saying, “Always the next one.”
I don’t pay very close attention to the analytics on my site (powered by Tinylytics), but when I notice one is at the top of the list of page views for a while, I’ll give it a tag of “Greatest Hits”. You can see those posts here. None of them are my favorite, although there are some genuinely helpful gems there, if I do say so myself.
One recent post that I’m particularly proud of is ‘Leading By Example’, which I wrote in the aftermath of the 2024 U.S presidential election. The ideas in it had been rattling around my head for years, but in my dismay at the implications of the election, the pieces finally fell into place and I recognized the role I’ve accepted to play in life.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
Oops, maybe I should have read all of the questions before I answered the first ones. You, dear reader, already know that I have soft plans to migrate to Micro.blog. I’m actually sort of in the middle of a redesign. The individual blog posts and pages use the updated CSS which give the site a sidebar, cool sticky titles, and a few dynamic bits (taglines and favorite quotes) that change upon every reload. I really like it. But I haven’t finished tweaking the code to work with my index (homepage) or the blog’s archive page — two of my most viewed pages, alas. Maybe I can finish that up this week.
As far as new features go, my next biggish project that I want to tackle is a /timeline page in which I visually represent my life in a long-scrolling page, with milestones represented spatially. Birthdays, graduations, jobs, moves, purchases of computers and other gadgets, of course — I want to list them all down and then keep it up over the years.
I’ll only fully move over to Micro.blog when I’ve figured out a way to provide a toggle for readers to show only traditional long-form posts, only microposts, or everything. And I want their selection to be saved to their browser. Personally, I love seeing sites where everything is mixed in, but not everyone does. And I think it will be fun challenge to figure out how to make that work, so don’t tell how. 😜
Oh, and Robert’s always asking for a light mode, so maybe I’ll get around to that someday.
Who’s next?
Thank you so much, Kev, for the invitation to this challenge. I thought I’d keep my answers to a modest paragraph each, but I such had a blast writing it that I’m now over 2000 words in. (Sorry to folks who were hoping for a quick read.)
For my part in spreading the love, I’m tagging in Rach Smith, Matt Birchler, and Keenan to the challenge. I’m very curious to hear more about their blogs. (You don’t have to be as long-winded as me. 😅)
As Kev said, if you haven’t been tagged yet but want to participate, jump right in! Nothing’s stopping you and the more the merrier. When you do, please send it to me on social or email. I’d love to read it.
That voice is so much funnier and wittier and more handsome than the voice that comes out of my mouth. Y’all are getting the cream of the crop here.↩︎
Wanna know a secret? I just made up those three rules. But I like them, and I think they’re pretty good. And I do think I’ve followed those rules over the years. It might make for a good blog post…↩︎