5 Questions Challenge

Jan 19, 2025

Tags: blog q-and-a hugo

While browsing around the web I stumbled onto a group of blogs that seem to be updated pretty regularly. This is exciting! The blogs are coming back, nature is healing! One recurring post I keep seeing is this ‘5 question challenge’, and even though it was started by users on the bearblog platform it has since been adapted and made more generic for any platform.

Onto the questions!

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Besides the random blogs started and abandoned going back to the late 90s, I started to think seriously about doing this in 2020. I had decided to build a cyberdeck and enter it into a contest hosted by cyberdeck.cafe. I needed a place to put build logs and project files. That website lasted about a year before the server it was on shuttered. Then in 2024 I had started to get back into analog photography and wanted a platform agnostic way to share photos. iCloud is fine for people in the apple ecosystem, but what if I want to send someone a gallery that uses windows and an android phone? What if I didn’t want to use google photos? I decided to put together a photo gallery website for myself. With the galleries quickly sorted, I started to make this into a place where I could write reviews on cameras and list their features. The camera database was born! And out of that, hoping to one day write longer reviews and do photo essay I made sure there was a blog section. It also helps as a pseudo wiki, a place where I can remind myself and write out how I accomplished certain things on the web. While I’ve been dabbling with html for most of my life, I am by no means a coder. I’m scraping by here! So having a place I can write out what I did and how is useful, especially when life gets in the way and I spend time away from the site.

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

In 2020 someone recommended Hugo as a quick way to build a website and it really is. I love the platform. For me, one of my big requirements was a quick and easy to use photo gallery. I also wanted something static without a lot of overhead and absolutely no tracking. I build this entire theme from scratch, believe it or not. I found a really kick-ass tutorial that was aimed at getting a barebones theme up and running quickly, and from there I was able to suss out everything else (absolutely no chatGPT or AI was used to make this)! I am also hosting this on neocities, I love their mission and have since moved on from the free tier to be a supporter. I imagine eventually the site will become big enough that I may have to move, but for now it’s excellent.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have a wordpress site for my business, but it’s just being used as a portfolio. I’ve used wordpress a lot in the past, but never to really run a consistently updated blog. I hate wordpress haha and would never want to use for something recreational. Way way way back in the day (like pre y2k) a friend of mine got me some hosting on a really cool website. My subdomain website ran on a php-based, homespun blog platform. Lastly, during the pandemic I decided to use twitter (rip) as a place to post my thoughts and micro-reviews about video games. That’s pretty much been my history with blogging. This period is the most consistent I’ve been blogging in my life.

How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?

Hugo uses markdown files to generate pages so after I create the post files in terminal, I use bbedit to write. I like bbedit, but I liked textwrangler more (come on, the lasso icon?? no contest). Sometimes i’ll start a blog post and leave it open in bbedit for days as I’m working through it. I also continue to use this like a personal journal, or a way to get some feelings out without posting. You know how they say the act of writing an angry email can be cathartic without sending it? It’s the same with posting.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Recently, I’ve been writing after bigger life events or when I’m trying to digest something, like the passing of David Lynch. I’ve also been trying to put some low stakes posts together and tutorials, because if I can make this a part of my life, if I can make a habit out of it, than I will stick with it longer. The more I give to this blog, the more I can personally get out of it.

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

I touched on this briefly, but I will sit on drafts for days. I actually still have a draft about the recent LA Fires that I haven’t posted. Again, sometimes just the act of writing it is cathartic itself. But also sometimes the posts are hollow.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Oh what a question, how do you choose?! All of these posts came from me, and in some way they are all equally important. I think the first post is my favorite because its semi-autobiographical, technical, funny and historical. It’s really the perfect origin story of this blog and helped me define the tone I use to talk about changes and developments to the blog itself. I know it sounds like a cop-out but my blog is relatively new so I don’t have a lot to choose from. My second favorite is the post announcing that neocities filename character limit broke the galleries and I used a gif of Chris Elliot in Cabin Boy to illustrate that.

Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?

I just went through a redesign AND added a new feature! I just finished building the microblog section, bleets, a feature I had wanted to implement for a little while. I think what’s coming next is going to be a personal video game review section. I love video games and I like to do short reviews on them and I’ve been thinking of a way to incorporate that into my site. There are some dank game sites out there so I have some research to do. Another thing I need to do before all that is finish fixing the opengraph previews and get a proper RSS feed working.

Thanks for reading this, I hope if you stumble across this and decide to add these questions to your blog you’ll let me know! You can find me on bluesky or feel free to send me an email, which is cyb3rbuffalo on gmail.