Blog Questions Challenge 2025
It’s like the 2007 blogosphere may be returning1? Hopefully. Anyway, Alan tagged me in this chain letter blog challenge thing, so here goes…
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
My first blog posts were written in the then-new Apple iTools “iWeb Publish” tool. I have vague memories of static pages being saved to my iDisk, then synced to a webspace on an Apple server somewhere. I’m not sure why I started posting on that. Just to try it out? Maybe there’s something to this whole Web thing? I’d started just before going to my first WWDC, so was drinking the kool-aid pretty deeply at the time. Early posts were about our not-yet-born child (who is 22 years old as I write this), WWDC, and learning objects software development stuff from the early CAREO days.
Interestingly, this publishing workflow is pretty similar to what I’m doing in 2025 - writing locally, publishing static HTML to my own computer, then syncing to a webserver somewhere…
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?
I’ve been using Hugo for almost 5 years now. (also - wow! it’s been 5 years already???) I wanted to move from WordPress to a static site generator to reduce server demand and to future-proof my website. The darker morbid reason is that I’d just completed chemo and was, for some reason, reflecting on mortality and what would happen if-and-when. Moving to something that was easier to just coast on its own seemed like a good idea at the time.
It doesn’t matter if MySQL/MariaDB/whatever-comes-next continues to work, or if a future PHP update breaks things again, or if WordPress falls apart. The constant updates needed to keep a WP site online over time are basically a dead man’s switch that I didn’t want. Once my site’s been generated as static HTML files and uploaded to a basic webserver, it’s done. It’ll run with no intervention for years. The only limiting factor is paying the bills for web hosting and domain registration. Which I want to figure out so that’s sustainable too.
Anyway. Under WordPress, my website took over 500ms for the server to generate the page anew for each request, then serve the increasingly bloated payload of javascripts and frameworks etc that often added up to a MB of data for a single page. That’s crazy. Now, the pages are all pre-generated as pretty small static HTML files (aside from a couple of index pages that are pretty big).
Even search is self-contained, using a javascript-powered script that reads a .json index that’s generated fresh with each site rebuild. The search index is pretty big, but is only loaded when someone actively starts to search, and then includes the entire search index in about the space of a handful of pages in the previous WordPress site. And the javascript search is FAST.
I’ve been really digging Hugo, and how I can customize it to do what I want. I’m sure I’ve done things in ways that are not recommended (some changes are directly in the theme I use, some in a child theme, some in separate layouts, so updating the main theme would get tricky - but I have no reason to do that for now…)
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Hah! All of them?
I’ve kept track in the colophon page.
How do you write your posts?
Currently, I have an Obsidian vault configured to use my Hugo site’s local content directory. It’s all just markdown with frontmatter to set it up, so it just works. I have some Hugo templates set up to apply to new notes to turn them into blog posts, photos, pages. Then, I just uncheck the “draft” setting for the post and the next time I run hugo publish, up it goes!
Publishing is automated using a couple of Shortcuts on my mac. They’re just triggers for shell scripts in ~/bin, but make it pretty simple to publish the site and rsync it up to the webserver.
Of the 3 shortcuts, “Process Photos to Blog” looks in ~/temp/photos for image files exported from Photos, converts them all to .webp format for publishing to the web, moves them into the hugo static/photos/YYYY/ folder, and creates new posts in content/photos/YYYY/. I can then edit the posts in Obsidian if I want. I don’t, usually.
“RSync Blog Static Files” just runs rsync to push new/modified files in the hugo static folder up to the root of my webserver’s blog directory. I do this for sending up images and css files without having to publish the entire site.
“Hugo Publish” runs, surpringly, hugo publish (with some options), and then rsyncs the output up to the webserver. That whole process takes 30-45 seconds to run on my laptop, and is the most “computationally expensive” part of running my site. After that, it’s just dumb files that can be served very easily.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
Hm. Over the last couple of years, I mostly don’t? I mean. I’m writing this because I was obligated to do so. I’ve written things recently that I just wanted to get out of my head, to formalize thinking about something, in a way that can be shared. I have to be much more mindful about what I write in my role. I used to just be able to just post anything, without thinking about Being Professionalâ„¢ or considering what colleagues may think if they saw it.
Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit?
Since moving to Hugo, I’m more of a simmerer. In my WP days, I’d post things much more quickly. Now, knowing that I need to run Publish before anything goes online, I tend to pause more. Some posts are written in one shot, some take a week or more. Some take months. Some don’t make it that far.
What’s your favourite post on your blog?
I don’t know if I have a favourite, but I have a few that I’m fond of:
- A Graduate Architecture Critical Practice Studio on Learning Spaces - about a course I co-taught, using my dissertation as the basis for introducing architecture students to designing for teaching-and-learning.
- on eduglu - part 1: background - from 2008, some of the early thinking of how an aggregator platform could be designed for teaching.
- Norman’s Law of eLearning Tool Convergence - from 2013, what was essentially a throwaway snarky comment turned out to be one of the concepts that guides my thinking to this day, which connects nicely with:
- on the false binary of LMS vs. Open - from 2014
But what have I done lately? I’ve shared I Remain Conflicted Over Generative AI with leaders at my institution to help frame some discussions and planning.
Any future plans for the blog?
Plans? I don’t have anything concrete. I’d like to blog more often. I tried the weekly post thing for several months, hoping it’d push me to write more regular posts. It didn’t, and became an obligation. So, writing things that don’t feel like obligations?2
I do plan to continue posting the 365photos photo-a-day thing, which I’ve now been doing for 19 years straight3.
Who will participate next?
Not sure how the chain works. Who knows if anyone follows RSS anymore…
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