How and Why Do I Blog?

Permalink

Follow me via:

---

Text-to-speech support required

For part of 2023, a good amount of 2024, and all of 2025, so far, I’ve been blogging. In that, I’ve been writing down my thoughts on random things, or talking about topics I find important, or imperative. Originally, I was doing this across Wordpress blogs, and even successfully imported posts from even older blogs, so that I could sort of, kind of maintain a bit of continuity with my writing online. But, eventually, I made the switch to Jekyll for more control, and to build what you’re seeing now.

Why?

The reasons I write on a blog encompass a few different brain-juice bubbling arenas. I do it because I need a buffer in-between not writing my books. I have three unfinished sci-fi novels sizzling in storage, and a fourth kinda just waiting for me to pick up the keyboard again. It keeps my brain ready to actually write fiction again, by continually just long-form posting on my own website.

I do it, because sometimes short-form social media isn’t satisfactory for what I want to say, or express, and what better way to say those things, than on a website, via a server that I control, that holds all of my thoughts. A place where I can say whatever I want, and never be silenced, or censored. Something I have very intimate experience with. From being cut-out and blacklisted from the synthwave Twitter community, because asking someone not to misgender you is a high crime, to multiple Mastodon instances with, frankly, questionable moderators and admins.

I write on a blog, because one day over a decade ago, I thought I wanted to be a political writer for some big outlet, and someone I looked up to took something I wrote, and then insulted me. And if there’s one force that drives me the most, it’s probably spite.

Even though tons and tons of people have decided that what I have to say doesn’t matter, or that they don’t even want to see or acknowledge me, I continue to persist, regardless.

Because fuck ‘em.

But how do I write?

Back on Wordpress, it was mostly a process of navigating through laggy menus and careful formatting, but now? I write in VSCode. I have a script I’ve made that asks me if I want to write up a Post, a Log (for changelogs on the website), or a Note (for shorter form posts that I honestly don’t really use all that often, and aren’t featured on the site, currently).

Once I’ve executed the script and told it what I want to do, a blank template is created in my _posts directory with a new file that utilizes the current date, and a simple title I’ve given it.

From there, I setup the actual title, the category, the tags, and then, later, after the post is made, I input social links to places I’ve posted what I’ve written.

In a way, I’ve kind of setup my website to be a more central place where my posting happens, so that a lot of what I post on social media eventually leads back to my website. I’ve even considered installing GoToSocial so that even my ActivityPub posting is done here, but I haven’t decided if I want to do that.

… mainly, because I’m pretty dedicated to labyrinth.zone, and I also have a Wafrn account, and also a Mastodon account over at social.lol (lol).

But anyway …

Most of my posts consist of plain text, and HTML for formatting, links, and images.

It’s a very coder way of writing blog posts.

I’ve thought about designing a system for Jekyll that gives me a more visual way to choose what I want to write, and then do so in some kind of auto-formatting box with easy image placement and link creation …

But that’s a lot of work to do, for something I’m already doing, that isn’t even really that hard.

I feel like it’s really important not to reinvent the wheel and then call it convenient.

That’s really it, though. That’s why I write, and that’s how I do it. At least, for now. This post was inspired when I posted on labyrinth looking for ideas on what to write about, and @megabyteghost@masto.hackers.town suggested exactly this topic. So, there you go!