Blog Questions Challenge
Date:
[]
Categories:
[Blog]
Tags:
[Blogging],
[Challenges]
For a wrap-up at the end of 2025, I thought I would try the Blog Questions Challenge as modified by Kev Quirk.
Why did you make the blog in the first place?
To have a personal place to write random thoughts, post artwork and photos, and document things I find useful and want to remember. And also because I want to participate in the Indieweb.
I discovered the Indieweb community this year through posts on Mastodon and from bloggers like Mike Sass and others (See Indieweb Inspiration). It’s a worthwhile mission, reclaiming the Web from the corporations that are taking it over. I want to make my own small contribution to the effort.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
My site is built with Grav, a flat-file CMS. I chose it because of its ease of installation and operation, and the Hypertext theme had a minimalist look that I liked and thought would be easy to adapt. I wrote a little more about Grav in a separate post.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I tried out Blogger about 20 years ago, and I’ve experimented with Wordpress. I currently use Joomla, not for blogging but for a neighborhood association site that I maintain. For my personal site I considered Joomla, Drupal and Wordpress, but I liked the idea of a flat-file CMS, with no database to maintain. Grav turned out to be a good fit for my site.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
At the moment I use iA Writer on a laptop. I create drafts of random topics as they occur to me, and cycle through them trying to get something close to being finished. Some posts come together fairly quickly, some sit around for a few weeks or months. For example, I’ve been working on this post off and on for a couple of weeks.
Once the post is finished and published to the blog, I often do some final editing in the Grav dashboard.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I’m trying to write at least a little every day, most often in the morning, whether inspired or not. Ideas come at random, while reading or taking a walk, and if I’m lucky I can get something down in writing before I forget it.
Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I definitely let it simmer. Once something seems ready I put it up on a staging site for a day or so before finally posting it.
Your favorite post on your blog?
I only have 22 posts at this point, so I should be able to pick a favorite. I suppose my post on the Classic Arts Showcase, just because I think more people should know about them.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
I’d like the site to evolve to be more of a digital garden. I like Grav quite a bit so far, but if I want to change the format of the site I’ll have to learn Twig, the template engine that Grav uses. I don’t think that would be a problem, but maybe a PHP-based CMS like Kirby that doesn’t use Twig would be better? I plan to spend some time in January creating a test site with Kirby.