Blog Questions Challenge 2025

I was tagged to answer these questions by Anders Thoresson as part of the larger Blog Questions Challenge originally started by ava.

I’ll pass the baton (and a very optional tag to) to Lynn Fisher, Ryan Mulligan, and Sara Joy!

Here are some friends that have already participated:

• Ethan Marcotte
• Bob Monsour
• Maybe you? (If you want me to link to your post, send me a DM)

Why did you start blogging?

I originally started blogging on WordPress during the original era of Blogs, circa 2007. Blogging was a thing often mentioned in popular media — everyone had a blog and was writing on their own space, Google was invested in driving traffic to blogs (via search and a quaint little product known as Google Reader). It was a really great time for independent folks to get started and invest in a platform that would pay off both in the short and long-term.

I also am staunchly of the belief that people should share what they know — it doesn’t have to be something that is novel or exclusive or even new. Share what you know and we all benefit from it.

Unfortunately I also vividly remember a vibe shift when Twitter originally started to get popular and Google Reader was shuttered to make way for Google+. Search feels as though it has been (mostly) conquered by bad actors and social media platforms. A similar shift seems to be happening with how information is consumed via Large Language Models (for the worse).

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why?

I created the Eleventy project to help others create and easily manage content web sites (like blogs), and that’s what I’m using for this site (since 2018). You can read about the early origins of Eleventy on Eleventy, a new Static Site Generator.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I do maintain a little table of platform history on my about page. I moved from WordPress to Jekyll in 2013 after going through some dark times with WordPress security vulnerabilities and database scaling issues. Updates needed to be applied on WordPress at approximately the same cadence as early Microsoft Windows and it became cumbersome to manage. I did have plenty of experience with PHP and MySQL at the time but didn’t feel as though that work was worth it for what I was getting out of it.

How do you write your posts?

I write my blog posts in my text editor on my computer (currently VS Code). I don’t write posts on my phone, though I do capture ideas in the Apple Notes app for later iteration. I then commit the posts to the git repository (currently on GitHub) and the site is built on Netlify.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’ve built something new, learned something new, or read something new. I love doing deep dives on new topics but those can be very time consuming to write.

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

I usually publish immediately and then iterate for a day or two before I share it on socials. If you’re subscribed to my feed you’ll see some of those iterations happen in your reader as I obsess over grammar and copy. This step can only happen after publishing (as issues of this nature are usually invisible to me before publishing).

What's your favorite post on your blog?

The most successful blog post I’ve ever done is A Comprehensive Guide to Font Loading Strategies but it definitely isn’t my favorite.

The first one that jumped out at me was this 2017 blog post about anti-aliasing fonts (also known as font smoothing) titled Laissez-faire Font Smoothing and Anti-aliasing. I learned a lot writing that one and it was a lot of fun.

Any future plans for your blog?

Where do I see my blog in 5 years? Hopefully continuing my current speed of ~30 posts per year and going strong — and still on Eleventy, too .