Localghost

The blog questions challenge

Sophie Koonin
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This takes me back to my teenage years, doing Friday Five on my blog and later on the sets of questions on LiveJournal that were known as memes. Thanks Sally for the tag! <3

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

As a teenager I blogged obsessively, posting about every minute detail of my life, every boy or girl I liked, every exam I was dreading. In researching my talk about personal websites (a blog post version of which is coming soon!) I found many of my old sites on the Wayback Machine, and had a great time archiving all the posts and simultaneously turning inside out with the cringe of it all.

When I headed off to university I started going out and doing IRL things instead of being a little computer goblin, and that was it for blogging for about a decade.

In 2018 I was preparing for my first proper conference talk and had gathered a load of great advice from more experienced speakers. Someone suggested I put it in a blog post, so I wrote one on Medium (I know, I know). The following year the .dev domain names became available and I snapped up localghost.dev, and decided I'd move that post from Medium to here. Over the coming years I wrote another post... and another post... and I was averaging about 4-5 posts a year until 2023 when I picked up the pace a bit.

Sadly, that post was so full of now-broken Twitter embeds that I recently decided to archive it.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

localghost.dev is an Eleventy shop, though in a previous incarnation it was built on Hugo, which I liked well enough but not as much as Eleventy. My blog posts are markdown files, with different categories of post rendered differently.
I originally found Eleventy a little intimidating as I had no idea where to even start with it and the documentation wasn't super clear at the time, but Andy created a brilliant guide to getting started with Eleventy which made everything a whole lot more approachable. I haven't looked back, and it's still my platform of choice for new projects. I keep meaning to try Astro to see if it's as good as people say.

In a past life, I used a whole host of different platforms: free web hosts with static HTML pages, Diaryland, Greymatter and Wordpress blogs hosted by random bloggers I'd met on the internet, Blogger, LiveJournal. I have very fond memories of Greymatter.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Right now I'm writing this post in VS Code; if I'm writing longer-form posts that require a bit more editing and thinking, I'll use iA Writer to get my thoughts down, then back to the IDE to get it ready to publish.

I've briefly considered moving the writing to a CMS of some sort, mainly because I hate manually inserting images and faffing with image sizes, but since updating my site to use Eleventy Image that's become easier. I want to keep this a static site, plus I don't have the energy to self-host CMS software and keep it up to date, and considering how relatively infrequently I write anyway, it's not really worth it.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Not as often as I'd like. Occasionally I'll be struck by a great idea, write it down in Obsidian or something, and then forget I wrote it down. Now and then I'll think "I could write a blog post today!" and go spelunking for my list of ideas and pick one I feel like writing about. Sometimes those ideas get turned into conference talks instead, and sometimes my conference talks get turned into blog posts.

Some weekends I'll sit down intending to bash out a few thoughts about something that's been on my mind, and then accidentally write a big post. Those are some of the best ones I think, because they tend to be more personal. I've found that sitting down and trying to force myself to write something is never a good idea. I've made peace with the fact that I post relatively irregularly, and I'm just happy when inspiration does strike. I'd love to be one of those folks who frequently posts useful technical tutorials and deep-dives on their blog, but I'm afraid you'll generally get the contents of my brain instead.

I think that's powerful in itself, though: we're expected to be part of these big capitalist hellscape social media networks and post all our thoughts on there for them to comb for ad targeting parameters, and then try to sell us things. They can hide our posts from others if they don't like what we're writing about. Even on sites like Mastodon – less capitalist, still hellscape – the reply guys come out in full force and tell you exactly what they think of your post and how actually that's a bad take because blah blah blah... This is my own website, and I can post whatever I want.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?

Generally I'll do it all at once, though for bigger ones (like the version of my personal websites talk I want to write) are so big that I need to do them in several sittings. I am about to leave the house, so there's a risk this one will be languishing on a branch for a while until I remember that I need to finish it.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

I have different favourites for the personal posts and the informative posts, so here's a few of each.

Personal:

Useful:

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I will almost certainly add a new theme at some point, because more is more. I'd also like to start collating some of my weird and wonderful pet projects under the localghost.dev banner rather than on individually hosted sites.

I'm also planning on starting a webring for technopessimists based off of a thread of very tired people on Mastodon, so watch this space.

Who’s next?

I'm relatively late to the party and not sure who hasn't done this yet, so if you're reading this and you haven't been tagged before, this is me tagging you!