Blog Question Challenge (Jan 2025)

I’ve seen this blog challenge appears weeks ago not too long after it was created. Many bloggers in my RSS reader participated to it. I had no plan to participate initially but I got kindly tagged by Brandon, so I decided to play the game too… It felt like I already answered most of those question before on this blog, so I may point to many other posts in my responses.

Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I mainly started to write about technical things I was trying to learn. I always enjoyed the web, I used to manage manga related websites while being a student and once I started working I thought it would be good to have my own blog since I didn’t had time to keep working on my other sites. I created the first version in 2010 in French. In 2013 I switched to English because I also wanted to get better at it. And I was using English more and more at work so it seems like a good idea.

14 (!) years later, I still blog mostly about technical things I do or learn, even though I started blogging about less technical things in the past couple of years.

I didn’t blogged continuously though, i didn’t blog between 2015 and 2016 or between 2018 and 2020. But the blog has always been online. Over the year, the domain changed 2 times, as I started with blog.bacardi55.org, then bacardi55.org before moving to bacardi55.io (which I may change back to the .org again as the price for the .io increased a lot).

I wrote a long why do I write on this blog post years ago that is still relevant, read it for more.

What platforms are you using for your blog, and why?

I’ve been using Hugo for the past 4 years and I love it. While being a “simple” static site generator, it is very flexible and highly adaptable. Html output is so easy to generate and (self)host, making it easy to maintain. Also very easy to over engineer its deployment like I did :D.

The blog is selfhosted at home.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I used multiple platforms over the year, namely: Drupal, Carew (in PHP, dead since), Nikola (Python), Hugo (golang).

I started with Drupal because I wanted to learn this CMS as I would have to use it for my next job (created the blog during my notice period before joining the company where I would use it). But while very powerful, it was way to much complexity and maintenance for such a small and simple website. Updating and maintaining database and the codebase (for security) was a pain for such a sporadic blogger like me.

Moving to static site generator was the best thing I did to simplify my setup and motivate me to actually write. I switched first to Carew because it was using PHP, a language I was/am very familiar with. Then, after each hiatus, I decided to revive the blog using another technology. Because recreating it motivated me. Also, carew was dead so I had to switch to something else. Tried multiple but enjoyed Nikola a lot.

When I tried hugo in 2021, I understood I found the right SSG and didn’t move since.

To learn more about this site history, read the dedicated page.

The only thing that never changed during all that time is that I always selfhosted my site. Either at home (at first and now), or at some point in some cheap VPS I was hosting my services on.

How do you write your posts?

I wrote extensively about that already, but the summary is: I write everything using emacs in the orgmode format. I then use an emacs package called ox-hugo to export my writings in a hugo compatible markdown format.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I usually write either in the morning (rare) or late at night (most of the time, like right now). I like writing when the house is calm so can be my brain. But that’s just for writing the post itself. For technical posts, I usually takes notes whenever I work/learn about the subject. Then I transform the notes into posts during the dark hours :).

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

Posts can stay in draft for a very long time, but only when unfinished. As soon as I finish a post, I usually published it quickly after a single proof reading (which explains a lot I know).

Your favorite post on your blog?

That is a tough question to answer. So hard that when the same question popped on the bloguidien challenge, I had to write a very long post to sort of answer but not really. I’m not going to copy paste that long post, so I’ll just advise people who wish to know my (long) answer to this simple question to read the full post.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?

I wrote about this in my 2024 in review and plan for 2025 post, but in a nutshell:

• Notes / Micro blogging: I would like to add micro blogging to this site, and sync it with my Fediverse account.
• Article sharing: I don’t like the current implementation, so I need to redo it.
• Hidden articles: I’ve talked about having private posts before

Who’s next?

Picking in my English blogger list in my feeds reader, I’m tagging Cory Dransfeldt, gru:Bz and Ben Tasker.