Blog Questions Challenge 2025 (no blog chain breaking)

On the road to picking up the blog pace, I was tagged by Brian Bennett, and I will preface with the same thing about some dread of doing a blog version of a mail chain letter. But I follow Brian’s blog (old school style) and hey, what better blog topic is there?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

It was the best of times, it was… well it was the best. Having early (1993) gotten interested in myself, but also, getting educators web publishing, where at the time I felt like everyone could and should learn how to be Writing HTML (web tutorial, kept alive by me). I was all into working, playing on the web into the 2000s. Seeing the early blog platforms- MovableType and Blogger, got me thinking that this was a more reasonable ask of educators to create web content, something with a GUI for composing and publishing.

To be cheeky, I might say it was my usual ed-tech strategy to Do What D’Arcy Does (that being D’Arcy Norman) (still blogging) as well as my good friend Brian Lamb was doing (still blogging), so I followed with the launch of CogDogBlog April 19, 2003 with as usual, a pun based post I Blog Therefore I Am. This includes the etymology of the name plus my blog history in my About page plus a more pun-ridden anti Colophon. As a 21 year old blog, maybe it’s an adult now, but its sprawling.

Blogging is at the core of my approach, its the center, and my technical gome. It’s for thinking out loud, telling stories, ranting. It’s been a magnet for many things that led to more work. And significantly, what you do not realize until much later, it becomes a magnificent tool for my timelined self, a reference to much in the past I forget. See rightt here, I cannot recall what I was doing on February 5, 2016 (can you?), but with a simple hand construct of a URL, I can know — https://cogdogblog.com/2016/02/05

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why do you use it?

Yeah, it might be unfashionable now to brag about being on WordPress, given it’s CEO childish tantrums (whom ironically my blog led to meeting, dining with and keynoting a WordCamp). But these antics only affect to dot com side of the space, I see no effect on my self hosted version now. I am not at all compelled to switch out for petty reasons.

I just love WordPress for the innards. I started just to post a blog, but I got into modifying, customizing, writing custom code, and basically making it my web tool. There’s much more to it than what it looks like on the screens, the affordances of everything having an RSS Feed, the clever ness of the template structure, the ability to hook into any part of the process to create something unique, are still powerful. You can do so much without coding but just fiddling with its URLs. It can be a blog syndication engine. A platform for publishing online journals. And do not get me started about SPLOTs and Calling Cards.

I am not too crazed or doing much with the editable site themes (I prefer working the design through templates), but have gotten over the block editors whinging. I kind of like it.

Also, shout out to Reclaim Hosting for the long stellar hosting of my fleet of sites. I have actually forgotten what a nightmare dream other outfits can be.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

My launch in 2003 was on MoveableType hosted on an Apple Xserve in my office at the Maricopa Community Colleges. I got to know it fairly well, but the details were fuzzy. It was two years later I migrated to WordPress 1.5 running on the same server.

I will stake a claim that I was blogging in 2000 during a sabbatical travel jaunt to New Zealand and Australia. This was no plaform, I was hand coding the HTML for daily entries, but it sure looks bloggy to me. And the damn thing still works. Hey I was early into static web site creation!

How do you write your posts?

I mull many of them in my head, sometimes there’s a germ of idea that is my start but in the writing it evolves. I bookmark potential related stuff in Pinboard, and admittedly keep a bunch of browser tabs open with items of bloggable interest,

My start is however usually with the “hook” or metaphor, and usually I aim to craft a clever title first. And I nearly always find, before I write anything, an open licensed image I use as the featured image. I typically rummage in my own flickr stream (0ver 70000 possibilities), sometimes in Google images (with filter for Creative Commons) or from Openverse. I find this process of thinking first visually, opens the idea stream wider for writing.

But I am thinking the question is more technical? There is no much to say, I do all my writing in the WordPress editor, and like I said, I have made my peace with the block editor. I don’t do much on fancy layouts (columns and visual formatting), my regular blocks are Paragraph (duh), Heading, Lists, Code for code, Blockquote, Images.

I do have a custom thing for autoembedding URLs for Mastodon posts, so they appear as an embed. And I slapped into a plugin that adds autoembeds for Mastodon URLs and more– Internet archive media, Padlet, Pixelfed –a fix is needed for Mastodon, the autoembed has not formatting in the editor, but does when posted.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I can’t pick a rhyme or reason, it’s when an idea starts to almost quiver and not let me rest until I write. But I am to try in the hour between the time my wife leaves for work and I start doing my work. No, wait, I feel inspired at lunch. No wait, it’s at night, after dinner and we watch a show.

It has no real fixed time. I feel inspired when the words feel like they need to get out. And I have to say my how outlook feels a boost when I post.

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

I publish right away. I bothers me to leave posts in draft, I rarely do. I have no qualms about it being no perfect, and happy to tix typos (frequently) or fix links later.

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

The first one? The last one? What a terrible question! In tagging me, Brian mentioned my recent “Coulda Been a Contender” post. But it was not exactly picking a favorite, but one you felt was really strong and would maybe draw responses, yet it felt like no one noticed.

Okay, Alan, choose.

I can’t do just one!

Coming to mind are maybe the one about finding some interesting numbers on the underside of my deceased brother’s rocking chair, leading to a wild bi of research into the history of Temple-Stuart furniture. Somehow it continually draws in comments from people looking online for information on this furniture, including one from the grandson of the company’s founder.

Oh wait, there are so many ones about my mon, maybe the favorite was the time she was visiting me in 2015. While I was working online, Mom called out from her chair where she was reading a book, “Alan? What is this ‘Twitter’ thing? Can you explain it?” The post was my attempt If You Can Explain Twitter to Your Mom… that includes me recording our conversation after I tweeted asking for people to respond. In looking back at it, I forgot I made a twitter account for her and would occasionally post stuff I heard her say.

No, this could be my favorite! The Amazing Flower story where while doing a workshop in Hobart, Tasmania, I was demonstrating the power of strangers commenting on a set of my flickr photos of unidentified (to me) wildflowers in Arizona. The one the audience picked to look at? The stranger who commented was in the room. Mic drop! This was the genesis of the Amazing Stories of Openness (which is it’s own WordPress blog).

These are all key, but the “favorite” is simply the blogging of falling in love with Cori and moving life to be with her in Canada.

We Fit

Any future plans for the blog?

A lot more posts? I got tons of ideas that have been percolating a while. The current plan has been integrating the WordPress ActivityPub plugin to make the CogDogBlog a self posting entity in Mastodon. The plugin part is easy. I’m looking in to more to creating other functionality off it it, largely to re-do the DS106 Daily Create to pull responses from Mastodon (since the Twitter-based approach was killed by the Musky Dark Lord).

Oh, I have been talking to Reclaim Hosting abour moving the whole CogDogBlog enterprise to is Reclaim Press cloud platform. Apparently the size of the old blog barge will test their statement “no matter how small or how big.”

Who will participate next?

Oh who to tag and dare to not break the blog chain? It sounded a bit like from Brian’s post tagging me, the tagging was via the fediverse, but I can stretch the rules? First I tag Cori my wife and a beautiful blogger. An easy tag call is my blogfather, friend, and a neighbor a province away, D’Arcy Norman, who has been so consistent on blogging over the log haul and now, plus he has changed up his whole set up for blogging via Hugo. I’d likely also tag Brian Lamb other in what we called us as the Three Amigos, but I can see that Tom Woodward has beat me to it. My third then is a writer extraordinaire, Gardner Campbell (he needs to do more of the name of his blog).

Don’t break the chain!

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Featured Image: Never Break the Chain flickr photo by cogdogblog shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license