Tag, You’re It

Eric tagged me into this chain letter of a post. From what I can glean, you are supposed to steal the headings and treat them as questions.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Three key reasons:

• So I wouldn’t have to keep repeating myself;
• to act as offloaded memory for minutiae, bits, & bobs; and
• as de facto peer review for my nonsense.

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

WordPress because it had the most market share when moving clients off my own CMS in 2015. I wanted a platform that was open source, presented a generally accessible admin view, was ready with RSS, allowed for total customization of the templates, provided built-in commenting, had a strong support community, and let me contribute accessibility skills through that community.

Then Gutenberg happened and I tapped out on that last part. Then Matt Mullenweg happened and that second-last part has fallen away.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

If evolt.org counts, we were powered by ColdFusion (in a custom CMS written mostly by Jeff Howden) back in 1999 through the turn of the millennium. I was one of the founders, so it feels like my blog at some level. I also wrote about the experience as a chapter in the 2002 book Usability: The Site Speaks for Itself.

I cross-posted the stuff I wrote there to my personal site. It started as static HTML then moved on to templates I wrote using Active Server Pages (classic ASP!). After a few years I moved to Blogger, then my own content management system called QuantumCMS (wow is that 2002 site icky) until I spun down the product and exited my company at the end of 2015.

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 write them in the classic editor in WordPress. I’ve configured it so there is no WYSIWYG view. Which means every HTML tag in the post itself I manually typed like a frickin’ weirdo.

A couple of times I have tried MarkDown or HTML as stand-alone files and pasted them into the editor, but for some reason I find that less satisfying than this tiny white box set in Courier with no color coding and absolutely no way to tab-indent anything. I might need therapy.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I am annoyed, discover something new, or someone is wrong.

So pretty often.

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

It depends on the amount of research and whether they are technical or opinion posts. But usually within 24 hours of finishing. I also have draft posts going back to 2015.

The weird thing is that I return to old posts, sometimes for years, to add updates. Those updates can be corrections, new information, related articles, and more. When I do that, my goal is to turn around an update within an hour or two. I do it for me, but also in the hopes it motivates other sites to make some of their posts evergreen and share their own date-stamped updates.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

The web, accessibility, bugs, testing, a tiny bit of consulting insight, and some aspects of internet culture. There was a period of time I was writing about social media a bunch, but then the marketers rolled in, turned social media into an emotional manipulation and rage-monetization racket, and I decided I would rather be nice to people instead.

I have considered expanding it more than once to include food and recipes, but I recall I would rather eat or make the food and nope right out.

Who are you writing for?

Me. Future me. Also people who are wrong. Also also everyone who keeps trying to find an answer to that edge case question. Also also also, people who learned wrong information from terrible blogs & developer sites that seem to have no quality control, editors, nor interest in accuracy when it’s easier to just monetize eyeballs by getting the first information about a thing out there to juice their SEO regardless of its quality.

It also used to be for people who still use view-source, though my HTML and CSS is so outdated I am ashamed of it.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Maybe Inside the evolt.org Rebuild: The HTML and CSS from 2001. It’s a time capsule of my verbose writing style, cutting-edge HTML and CSS of the era, and a project I loved. At the time, working with people across countries, time zones, languages, and cultures was both brand new and obvious in the scope of the web. These were good people giving their time back to the community (and eating the cost since there were never ads).

It also lead directly to my first book project, mentioned above. It was incredibly popular and helped set the tone for some best practices that developers took forward into their projects, especially accessibility (which I got wrong in quite a few cases).

It’s also insight into how much I have grown in 24 years and how little I have changed.

Sadly, all the comments are only on the evolt.org version of the post. They don’t apply to the version of the site that moved to Drupal some time after I left.

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

It’s well past due for an underlying code update. I want to make some design layout tweaks, but I keep changing my mind. My HTML and CSS selectors were originally written to avoid classes, but that has proven brittle as I folded in new features. I had no reason to do it that way other than to see what it felt like. It was gritty and tasted of rain after a lightning storm.

Also, if a proper fork of WordPress happens then I am very interested in exploring that.

Tag ’em

Fine. I’ve got a couple:

• Léonie Watson, because she’s the tops.
• Steve Faulkner, because he’s my bottom.

As far as I know they are under no obligation to be timely.