Bear Blog Question Challenge!
Thanks to Rhui over at →Always In Progress for tagging me in the Bear blog challenge!
I always like a challenge, especially one where I get to write about myself. A while back. Ava over at "hi, this is ava" created a really nice bear blog question challenge to get people to open up about their blogging experience, and what brought them to Bear in the first place.
So, here are my answers!
Why did you make the blog in the first place?
Simple answer: I lost interest in photography and wanted to get back into writing.
More complex answer: I've been blogging off and on for a few years now, either in writing (since 2002, when I was part of the Scottish Blogs as well as the Blogging Brits webring - the blog was called 'Star of the North', for reasons to complex to go into here but which I promise I'll explain at some other point in time) or my other main hobby, photography.
I was an early adopter of Instagram, creating the account I still have in around 2011. Nowadays Instagram is a horrific cesspit of clickbait and AI slop, but younger readers may be surprised to learn that once upon a time it was actually a fun community space for photography, a bit like Facebook before it joined MySpace in the race to the bottom.
I posted fairly regularly using my iPhone 3, and met a lot of really nice people there, both online and in person. I still maintain an Instagram site, and a portfolio but I've kind of lost my interest in photography lately.
Perhaps there's just too much of it, and it's all a bit contrived and really I am not sure what else I can do that hasn't already been done. It seems everything is copy of something else, and so there is very little originality.
So, I was looking for another creative outlet.
For a few years I also ran a blog called Inside Left, which focused on Scottish football. Hey, someone has to, am I right? It was voted the 12th best football blog by The Telegraph back in 2009. It published almost daily, I even had a few guest writers on the site. Once I started getting questions about sponsorship (mainly from betting sites) and the offers of 'quality' articles for a small fee (this was in the days before AI), I realised it was time to quit. Never sacrifice your hobbies for money is what I always tell the kids. I put the site offline - although bits of it are still available if you search - and that was that.
I really enjoyed writing about football, music, and alt.culture generally, so it made sense that getting back to putting figurative pen to figurative paper was probably the most accessible creative outlet.
After years of being on Instagram, which is largely performative (note: imho!), it's important to remember that you're writing for yourself, not others. It's a fine line between being a writer, and being a content creator. I am still learning. I like to think of it as detox.
Why did you choose Bearblog?
I stumbled across Bear purely by accident. I was looking for photography blogs and had somehow found myself on a site called blogroll.club and started looking around there. I found a site called valentine's days that I really liked visually, and the writing was also personal and very beautifully done. I spent the evening reading through the site, and then discovered Bear, the platform. I had a micro.blog account at that time that I immediately cancelled, and signed up for Bear pretty much the same day. I linked it to an old domain I had purchased a while back for something else I had in mind, lifeonadeadplanet.com, plugged in the same theme that valentine was using plus and minus a few tweaks - theft, after all, is the sincerest form of flattery - and the rest is history.
I like Bear for it's simplicity, easy of posting and support from the community that's always adding plugins or themes. I do wish there was a mobile app, however ...
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Yeah, quite a few. Blogger, Wordpress (.com or .org, I can't remember, probably both), Tumblr, SubStack, Medium, pffff. In fact, I wrote about it here. I got rid of most of them when I started Bear, apart from X, and Threads.
Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?
I write my posts in Notepad++, using a few Markdown plugins. I add all the various markdown elements so I have a rough idea of what it'll look like once I post it into the editor in Bear. It ain't pretty but works quite well. I used to use Notion but it's become very bloaty and slow, and most of the features I never really use.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I try and write every day, no matter how banal it may be. I do have a few posts about music and sport ready on the shelf to post, but the daily stuff I will try and write once per day. I am going to label those 'life' so I can find them easily.
Do you publish immediately after writing or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Most of the time I will post straightaway, I'm not one for letting things marinade for days before posting.
Your favourite post on your blog?
I quite like this one, a post about one of my favourite songs of all time. It's a thing I will want to do more of. I also like this one, On existing.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, changing the tag system, etc.?
I'm always redesigning it bwahahaha. In fact, even as I was writing this I made some changes! I don't think there's a day that doesn't go by without me tweaking something. I was in London recently and was really impressed by the fonts used on the Underground there. It's called Johnston, made specifically for Transport for London, and while available commercially I'm too cheap to buy it and use it here. So, I found a font called 'Cabin' which comes closest, so the first thing I did when I got back was change the fonts again. If you see my css file you'll see a vast list of fonts that I've tried in the past.
Look, what can I say, I'm a perfectionist, and as perfection is an unattainable goal it doesn't prevent me from trying.
I have the 'notes' section on my site, the idea was to use it as a sort of twitter/micro.blog feed. Short, one or two sentence updates as they float through my mind. It needs more work, and perhaps a better place to live than the menu they hang under now. The theme I am using doesn't really support it. I was looking at customizing A parenthetical departure because it has all the elements I am looking for, but I really need some time to figure out how to do that.
Tag! You're it :)
If you're reading this or discovered my post and have not been tagged, I encourage you to fill this up! I would absolutely love to read it.
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