What 2025 blog question challenge ?

A few weeks ago, Jason sneakily slipped me a link to a blog post of his. He knows that I already subscribe to his blog but you cannot be as wise without meddling with the forces of nature. Well, long story short, his meddling worked so… here we go ?

Why did you make the blog in the first place?

I, honestly, cannot remember why I made it in the first place but it was a long time ago. I do remember that my first post was about the plugin I wrote for weechat. After that, I sort of wrote on things I was playing around with. I said it before, it’s how I learn. Maybe the difference is that I dig deeper, beyond the surface. It’s fun, I get to document it for myself because believe it or not, I do come back to the blog for refreshers. It also comes handy cause I can simply send someone a link that explains a topic in more details.

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

I use Hugo to generate this blog and if you know where to look, it is open source. The answer to why is a bit more complicated but to simplify it, I prefer a static blog over CRMs. Hugo is quick and I have it integrated with Emacs where I write my posts in org. The generation, packaging and deployment is all automated.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

This blog started its life on WordPress. I was never quite happy with the performance for such a simple blog. It was then migrated to Joomla. That phase did not last long because once I learned about static blog generators, the blog was migrated to Nikola quickly. My Nikola setup was quite elaborate and I wanted to simplify it, for one, and to make it faster. I checked Hugo out and liked it but migrating from rst was a pain. Orgmode helped a lot with the migration but after a long journey, here we are running on Hugo.

How do you write your posts?

The whole blog is one org file. I open it with Emacs and add a new section under the relevant Tag. Once I save, Emacs generates the Markdown file, somewhere. I don’t have to care about its management in most cases. I can, then, generate and run my blog locally with Hugo. Once I’m happy with the result, I commit and push. The pipeline takes care of the rest, once all the magic is done successfully, I deploy with a manual confirmation step.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

I don’t know if that question applies to my case. I don’t even know if I do. It takes a lot of time and effort to write these posts. Documentation is very hard, ask any developer. I’m not sure inspiration is a requirement, hard work is.

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

I publish immediately. I mean the post has already took a few hours to write… If I find a mistake in the future, I correct it and fix the timestamp of edit.

Your favorite post on your blog?

I don’t have a favorite post. I know a few that I share frequently, though.

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

I don’t believe so. Nothing visible to the user, but the infrastructure is always moving.