An Almost Anonymous Blog

Bear Blog Questions Challenge

Brandon tagged me in the latest Bear Blog challenge that's been going around; normally I don't take part in challenges like this one, but I'm feeling a dearth of writing topics at the moment and thought this was a nice piece to ease back into the blogging habit. I'm not going to tag anyone, mostly because anybody I'd tag has already done the challenge!

1. WHY DID YOU MAKE THE BLOG IN THE FIRST PLACE?

I've been posting things online in various forms since my brother taught me how to make a website in the late 90s. Back then we did it on a DOS computer and our Internet experience was entirely text based between news groups and the Lynx browser. I only mention this because I think it might inform some of my choices for my online activity overall, but maybe places me in time for some people. I mean, I could tell you I'm 40, but maybe some 20-30 year olds don't know how different some people's online experience is from how things have been since Windows 3.1.

But back to the question: I made my blog because I want somewhere to share my writing. It's a dream to write professionally1 but I'm not at that stage. Having a blog means I can publish whatever I like, whenever I like.

2. WHY DID YOU CHOOSE BEAR BLOG?

I honestly can't remember how I even found Bear Blog, let alone why I chose it, but I can provide my best guess. I'll get to other platforms in the next question but this iteration of the blog is a successor to one of the same name I hosted on WordPress.com. I was tired of all the ads injected into my site and even created a little disclaimer telling people how they can read my posts with their browser's reading mode to avoid ads. So, with Bear Blog providing a free platform without ads, I started experimenting and eventually stopped posting on WordPress and put all my efforts here.

3. HAVE YOU BLOGGED ON OTHER PLATFORMS BEFORE?

Yes, several. WordPress has been my most common (and I still have a WordPress blog at https://www.alternativeairwaves.com), but I've used Blogger, Tumblr, and LiveJournal. Most likely there are others I'm forgetting.

And if you want to get technical you could argue that any site I've maintained in the past is probably also considered a blog, so you have my original internet provider's web hosting, GeoCities, any number of free web space providers.

Oh, and 11ty, which I use for my personal site (https://srgower.com), which technically has a blog on the form of my Week Notes.

4. DO YOU WRITE YOUR POSTS DIRECTLY IN THE EDITOR OR IN ANOTHER SOFTWARE?

Interesting timing for this question. Usually I write directly in the Bear editor, but I have experimented with writing in plain .txt files and copying into the editor; right now I'm typing this in Notesnook, trying out a new workflow. The thing I dislike about most online note platforms (including Notesnook) is that when you type in markdown it automatically converts your stuff into the desired formatting. When you copy the text to Bear Blog, that formatting disappears, which is why I switched to just using .txt. SimpleNote used to do this for me but a while back they started implementing a very annoying captchca and it broke my workflow.

5. WHEN DO YOU FEEL MOST INSPIRED TO WRITE?

I don't have a singular time that I feel "most inspired". In the past I had a ton of ideas while working, in between tasks; but recently I switched to an open office environment and I find it much harder to just start typing. Maybe it's also because I've been very busy that the creative part of my brain hasn't been fully active since the start of December. Most often I get ideas for something to write when I'm walking my dog. I try to jot them down in Google Keep in a "writing topics" note I have running but more often than not the idea I get in my head while walking the dog is much better than what makes it onto the blog.

6. DO YOU PUBLISH IMMEDIATELY AFTER WRITING OR DO YOU LET IT SIMMER A BIT AS A DRAFT?

Based on the wording of the question, I'll say "immediately after writing". Technically I save the post as a draft and review it a bunch for broken links, misspellings, and to see if I want to tweak any words. But I don't usually save things as a draft and come back to it. I have done it on occasion but not often.

7. YOUR FAVOURITE POST ON YOUR BLOG?

I really wish I could properly answer this question. I was going to approach this as, "what post did most people react to?" or "what post had the most views?" but I don't believe that's the spirit of the question. It's not other people's favourite, it's MY favourite. I've written so many posts since I hopped over to Bear Blog that they get lost in my mind. Once they're published, after a certain amount of time they leave my subconscious. So, as I type this, I don't have a favourite. BUT, I will look through my list of posts and see if there are any that stand out.

Update: I found some posts, listed in order of oldest to newest:

There are various reasons why I singled these ones out, but for a lot of them it's because of the time it took to craft them combined with reader reactions.

8. ANY FUTURE PLANS FOR YOUR BLOG? MAYBE A REDESIGN, CHANGING THE TAG SYSTEM, ETC.?

No. Early on I played around with tags, and wound up with a system that works. I think I probably have too many tags still but I'm not about to change that any time soon. As far as redesigns? While I have an understanding of HTML and CSS, I mainly tinker with code rather than outright design things. If I want to do something specific I will research it and try it out a few times. But as for the look and feel of the blog, honestly I just use things that MGX has designed, because he's really good at it. The current theme is "abzug" which he released mid-November last year. I took the design and added my own tweaks based on things I've added over the last couple of years.

So no, no future plans for the blog for the time being.

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  1. Or at least publish writing in any "formal" medium, paid or not.↩

#challenge #questions