Blog Questions Challenge Answers

I recently had to switch author boxes on The New Leaf Journal because the one I had been using (a widget from the IndieWeb plugin) was causing me some concern behind the scenes.¹ While I was in the area, I decided to re-write my short author profile. It occurred to me that despite having published well over 1,000 full-length articles and a[n actual] few million words, my author “profile” is a bit sparse. For the most part, I let my writing speak for itself, but I could not help but think that I could use a good interview. Because no one has asked to interview me in a while², I thought I would look up some questions and answer them myself.

To that effect, I came across a blog question challenge from Ava on Avas Space, which is hosted on Bear blog. It features eight questions, one of which presupposed respondents were on Bear Blog, but was neatly modified by Kev Quirk to be more general. The questions are all questions I can answer, so I decided to tackle this exciting new challenge.

The Questions

To start, I re-print Ava’s blog questions, with the only modification being Kev Quirk’s change to the second question:

1. Why did you start blogging in the first place?
2. What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?
4. How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
5. When do you feel most inspired to write?
6. Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
7. What’s your favourite post on your blog?
8. Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

Now for my answers…

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I fancy myself as a writer and having a website is a good way to publish things. The idea for what became The New Leaf Journal came about in the 2016-17 area. It was originally going to be more of a group project, but when I launched it in April 2020 (inspired by having been furloughed by the law firm I work for as a collateral consequence of the firm not being allowed to access its office pursuant to social distancing policies), I ended up being the only person working on it for the most part (save for some contributions from my good friend Victor V. Gurbo). Since then I have done what I can to be a good steward of my digital home.

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

Both The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social are WordPress sites. By WordPress I mean WordPress the software, not the service. I did not actually choose WordPress. One person I was working with on the project in the pre-launch days decided to go with WordPress and set up the original install of NLJ on Bluehost. It would be more accurate to say I inherited WordPress than chose it.

Were I starting from scratch today, I might consider making NLJ a static site (or using WordPress as the CMS for a static site). However, in light of the fact that I had no idea what I was doing when I began my side-job as a WordPpress admin in April 2020, WordPress was probably the best choice for a self-hosted site. ECS is more specifically a WordPress site because it is built around a suite of WordPress plugins for IndieWeb and ActivityPub functionality.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

My weekly newsletter, The Newsletter Leaf Journal, uses Buttondown, which is a newsletter service which doubles as a blogging platform (one could very well use it as a blog first without worrying much about the newsletter functionality).

I have Bear Blog and Smol Pub accounts but most of my ideas for non-NLJ projects were subsumed by The Emu Café Social.

I briefly had two separate blogs on Blogger in the 2009 and 2012 area. One was similar in concept to what became The New Leaf Journal but I did not keep it going for long. I tried an NBA blog in 2012 but quickly lost interest.

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 described my writing workflow back in 2022 and it remains largely the same today, but here goes the reader’s digest version.

For NLJ, I draft all of my articles in markdown using the Ghostwriter markdown editor. For years, I used Pandoc to convert them to .odt files for editing and copying into WordPress, but these days I can also open markdown files in LibreOffice Writer and then save as .odt (excellent new feature for LibreOffice Writer). NLJ uses the modern Gutenberg editor, which is good for things like placing images but wretched for writing. I would retire from writing if I actually had to write long articles in the modern WordPress editor (I still have yet to recover from formatting my history of New York’s Evacuation Day).

ECS uses the classic editor instead of Gutenberg and almost all of my posts are text-based. I usually write those in the editor itself. If I ever wrote a “long” post on ECS, I would draft it locally like I do for NLJ (I do not love the classic editor although it is less bad for long writing than Gutenberg).

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I feel inspired to write when I have something I am interested in writing about and (A) it does not require much prep-work or (B) I am ready and able to do the prep-work. I also feel inspired to write when I am not tired from having been at my computer for a long time for other reasons and when I do not have work-work deadlines looming over me. I try not to go too long without publishing something, which explains a decent number of my short photo-centric posts.

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

I usually write and briefly refine my draft and then usually have my Mom look it over for typos or anything too clunky. Most of my articles are close to first drafts but some take extra haggling before they are ready to go. Almost all of my ECS posts are first drafts.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

My favorite article is Welcome to The Emu Café. I published it less than one month after launching NLJ. While it is relatively short and not oft-visited these days, it describes the site I want to run and the types of things I want to write.

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

I plan to add a blogroll in the very near future and I think and hope that some of my ideas for it may inspire other independent webmasters (that will be part of my Winter 2026 Season Project). I also want to use NLJ to share more external projects, see for example my recently-published visual novel.

I would be interested in working on my own theme for NLJ. Our current theme, BunnyPress, has served us well since June 2020 (and continues to serve us well), but it has not been updated since 2021 and some aspects of it are a little bit finicky to tweak. But because it works well and hammering down and testing a new theme would be a great deal of work, I continue to focus on publishing articles instead of excessive tinkering.

1 Zotero was interpreting my rel-me social links as authors. While I doubt many people are saving my articles in Zotero, it caused me some consternation about article meta-data, so I decided to play it safe and stop using the Indieweb widget for the time being.

2 True story: I received interview requests related to my BLOB DYLAN reportage and my article on Amazon eQuad cargo bikes. Sadly, none of them panned out.