Well this is weird.

There I was reading through Kazza's blog feed, saw this meme about blogging, and read that Neil's blog was where she found it. It's weird because Neil is a long-time blogging friend, and I thought his blog had shuttered a while back because I noticed the feed hadn't updated in a long while. I went to his site, saw a bunch of social media icons, and assumed he stopped. I keep up with him on Facebook, so I didn't give it another thought.

He never stopped! So now I have subscribed to his feed again (which is working just fine for me now).

And now back to that meme...

Why did you start blogging in the first place?
Long story short? My own amusement. — I had a website back when the web was new, and everything was hand-coded in HTML. Just a half-dozen pages with fake news articles for my fictional existence as ruler of my own planet called Dave's World (and later DaveWorld). Then the Netscape Navigator web browser had a programming language added to it. I re-wrote my site to have the "news" of my world created on-the-fly via something I wrote in LiveScript (eventually called JavaScript). It assembled the front page "story" from randomly assembled snippets (taken from of a huge library of snippets I dreamed up). You could keep refreshing and get a new story. Eventually I started writing the fictional news articles myself because the generated articles were getting stale. It was just a way to be creative with my writing. Later on I had a kind of "Behind the Scenes of DaveWorld" section where I talked about my real interests instead of fake ones. This eventually got spun off into a hand-coded Online Dave Journal which lasted until blogging platforms became a thing. Then it was re-titled DaveBlog (using Blogger, I think?)... and ultimately renamed to Blogography when I was looking for my own domain, and here we are.

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
I switched to WordPress because it was free, and my previous platform was being moved in a more commercial direction.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?
My previous platform before WordPress was Movable Type. I was a hardcore fan, adopting it as soon as I found out it existed. I goofed around with other platforms from time to time on other projects (most notably Joomla, Blogger, and LiveJournal), but Blogography proper has only ever been Movable Type then WordPress.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that's part of your blog?
I used the online interface for Movable Type, then moved it offline to a tool called "Kung-Log." That was eventually renamed "Ecto." When that stopped being developed, I started using "MarsEdit." I still use that to compose my entries, but I have to paste them into the WordPress "Classic Editor" because it can't use the security I had to adopt when my blog was getting hacked regularly.

When do you feel most inspired to write?
After I got up-and-running, I committed to 1000 entries of Blogography. To speed through that, I started blogging daily. I've been blogging daily (with a few breaks every now and again) ever since... way past the 1000 entries I was planning. What used to inspire me was technology. Then it was travel. Now it's just living my life. I write out of habit, and stuff that happens along the way is what inspires me to keep going.

Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Depends. I usually let it sit until I have a chance to read it and fix mistakes the following day (meaning I'm always a day behind). Sometimes, if it's something like this meme that doesn't require much revision comes along, I'll just publish immediately afterwards (the entry I had ready for today will now be published tomorrow). Sometimes, if I'm really fired up, I will let it sit for days, reading it and revising it a few times, until I'm sure I want to publish it. More than a few posts have then ended up deleted once I've calmed down. Even if I'm busy, I still make sure to write something down every day... but don't have time to read them and can get behind, so they pile up to be read and get published all at once (but keeping the original date they were written).

What are you generally interested in writing about?
Absolutely anything. A lot of time it's strange stuff I notice or weird things that happen to me. It can also be me talking about an article I read, a TV show or movie I watched, or something else that crossed my path. I no longer write much political stuff (and have deleted some of my older political entries) because I don't see the point to it. People are so polarized now that nothing I say is going to matter, and all I seem to get is hate for my opinions. I do miss writing about travel, because that's one of the things I've been most passionate about in my life.

Who are you writing for?
I began blogging to let my friends and family know what I'm up to (because I was up to a lot of stuff back in the day!). Now that I'm mostly staying at home with my cats, I'm writing for myself. To be honest, I've probably always written for myself from the start. Everybody else is along for the ride if they want to be.

What's your favourite post on your blog?
Most all of my favorite entries are from a long, long time ago. Back when the blogging community was how people kept in touch, and blogging comments were our "social media." I have a section here for my favorite entries, but I haven't found reason to update it since 2012. The #1 entry on that list still makes me laugh because it was just so stupid. I brushed my teeth with baking soda. It was awful. I wrote about it because I thought it was funny. A lot of my early blogging days were like that.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
No plans at all. Maybe if it had a ton of regular traffic, I'd want to change things up (though I like this design as it is, and haven't changed it in decades)... but blogging is mostly dead now. Social media is where everybody is at. I do get a lot of traffic from strangers via Google simply because I've been doing this for so long and there's tons of random content here, but most of my regular interaction with people (including long-time friends made by blogging) is on Facebook now.

Who else do you want to tag?
So few of us are blogging that there's not much of a reason to do that. Those of us still around will see this eventually and take part if they want to.