Blogging. Why do I do it, how, history? Let’s dive in.
The oldest copy of my blog on Internet Archive is from January 21, 2012.
The “Blog question challenge 2025” was started by Ava as a thing on Bear Blog, but eventually escaped to other platforms as well. And now it has landed in my corner of the Internet, after Mark Pitblado tagged me.
Why did you start blogging? #
Blogging sits at the intersection of two passions—writing and technology—which have defined my career. So far, my career includes 20+ years as a technology reporter, 10+ as a podcaster recording episodes about technology and society, and most currently five as a communication strategist with a focus AI implementation.
What blogging provides for me is a personal space to try out half-baked thoughts, write about topics that are outside my professional domains, and share links to all interesting things I stumble upon in my research, news monitoring.
What platform are you using for your blog, and why? #
The what: Since spring 2024, this blog is now published using Eleventy.
The why: I had heard about “static site builders” for a while, and considered Jekyll, Hugo, and others when looking for an alternative to WordPress but eventually landed on Ghost. While I understood as much that the static site builders probably was something I would enjoy using (not the least because their plaintext focus and Markdown centric approach), I didn’t fully understood the concepts of builds and deploys and whatnot.
The pivotal moment came when I decided to get a presence on Mastodon, and soon realised that the Indieweb with personal blogs actually is well alive. Quite a few of them also shared a distinct aesthetic I liked a lot. Poking around a bit in page footers, about pages, etc, I found out that many of them use Eleventy. I also found a very active Eleventy community on Mastodon, started to follow a few accounts and the #11ty hashtag – and slowly started to understand the concepts behind static site generator in general and Eleventy in particular. But also found a very welcoming community with an ethos I appreciate.
Long story short: On March 10, 2024 I triumphantly posted on Mastodon that I had a local install of Eleventy running on my MacBook.
And here we are, 10 months later, with a blog that I’m very happy with, in terms of design, structure, and functionality! Happier than with anything I’ve used over the years.
Have you blogged on other platforms before? #
Yes! My primary domain name, thoresson.net, was registered November 11, 1998, and soon after I published my first personal, handcrafted HTML page on the World Wide Web. It wasn’t really a “blog”, but with some reminiscence of one. And even before that I had an online presence on FidoNet. Not strictly a blog either, but definitely a start of my blogging journey as this was where I discovered online communities and online communication for the first time. (And given current developments, with increasing interest in both the Indieweb and the Fediverse, there are obvious similarities with FidoNet, and its decentralised structure. I like it.)
Moving in to the more traditional domain om blogs, I’ve been on WordPress for a couple of years. And, as outlined above, moved from WP to Ghost to Eleventy. The stepping stones on the way from handcrafted HTML to WP I can remember now included Textpattern, Symphony and Statamic (where I first became familiar with the difference between dynamically served sites and static ones).
How do you write your posts? #
I guess this question is intended to be about tools, and I’ll get to the ones I use. But to me, the process is an integral part of “how”.
Everything written starts an idea on what to write. The initial phase involves capturing and nurturing these ideas—a process that demands significant attention. Once there is a clear idea on what to write, the how is mostly mechanical labour.
Ideas are everywhere. I find many of them in my RSS subscriptions, in posts shared on Mastodon, LinkedIn, and elsewhere, in conversations at work or with family and friends, and, not the least, in my head during my lunch walks.
So, capturing ideas and thoughts is the crucial first step towards a new post. The wonderful little iOS app Drafts has been my universal inbox for years (and with my switch to Eleventy also a way to in minutes go from “interesting link found on the Internet” to “link shared on my blog” – I’ve been asked about the details for this workflow and have the intention to blog about it), more recently in companion with Tana. Tana has superb voice capture features, which makes it a great tool for my walks and my car drives. Tana is also where I now collect quotes from things I read, thought fragments, post ideas, etc, and slowly put the pieces together to early drafts.
From there, I move to iA Writer, the best Markdown there is. Period.
The most recent addition to my tool stack is Msty, a LLM wrapper I use together with locally hosted language models like Llama and Phi. I find interacting with a LLM being useful in a couple of stages throughout my writing process.
As a non-native English writer, they help to improve grammar and overall flow. And even with 20+ years as a professional writer, I still struggle with writing good titles. I don’t find that suggestions from LLMs can be used as is very often, but many times I get the creative seed I need to formulate something I am happy with. Finally, for longer texts that are based on more structured research or an interview I’ve made, I have also found that LLMs can be helpful: I have a prompt where I compare my text with the source material, prompting the model to try to find misunderstandings I’ve made, important parts that my text doesn’t get into, etc. Worth noting is that I do not not use LLMs to produce text, only as a thinking partner.
When do you feel most inspired to write? #
Whenever I’ve a distilled idea. My challenge isn’t inspiration, it is finding the time to act on it.
Do you normally publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit? #
Link posts, immediately. Longer text are often going through an editing process.
What’s your favourite post on your blog? #
Most of the texts are in Swedish. But among the ones in English, related to the topics in this post are Social media, algorithms, user control, and server costs, Put a personal domain name under the Christmas tree, Tinkering with tools is not necessarily procrastination, and We need to refine our discourse on Artificial Intelligence.
Any future plans for the blog? #
Oh, yes! There are 29 open issues on Github for future development ideas, ranging from small bugs to new features. Dynamic OpenGraph images to make for pretties sharing of links, crossposting link posts to Mastodon, and more.
Who will participate next? #
I’ve already asked them, and both Zach Leatherman and Bob Monsour are happy to help this branch of the blog question challenge grow.
Why them? Because Zach is the creator of Eleventy, without which this blog wouldn’t exist in its current state. And Bob is a very welcoming member of the Eleventy community, and the maintainer of the 11tybundle, an excellent resource on anything Eleventy.