Bearblog Question Challenge

01/05/25

I was tagged by Jedda to answer these questions, which I found super fun and exciting! I haven't done stuff like this since I was a kid.

I was going to tag Sylvia but I saw her new post in my RSS feed where she'd already answered the questions! So I'm going to tag TB instead.

1. Why did you make the blog in the first place?

Last September or so I wanted to make a website to post my artwork. I messed around with Wordpress for awhile but it was really clunky and just too much for what I needed. While fiddling around with it, I decided I wanted to make a blog as well.

I tried keeping a journal for years and years but never stuck with it. I thought the blog format would be better for me since it combines my two biggest interests outside of art: writing and tech.

I'd say it's been a success. The more I write, I want to write more, and I'm becoming more confident in what I write about.

I loved writing essays in my senior year of high school, as well as college. I always wanted to return to writing them but didn't know where or how. The fact that a personal blog never occurred to me before now is kind of wild, considering everything else.

2. Why did you choose Bearblog?

As I said above, I started with Wordpress but didn't like it much. I asked on Mastodon what platforms other people used. A few suggested Bearblog. I thought it would be too simple at first, but after seeing Jedda's blog I realized there's a lot of customization options under the hood, if you don't mind getting your hands dirty with the CSS and HTML.

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I was on Tumblr for the entire second half of my adolescence, from 2011-2016. I wrote a lot on there, but most of it was not healthy and probably shouldn't have been shared. Once I hit 16 I started doing a lot of research and reading on trans topics and sometimes wrote about FTM history, etc, but I never had that many followers or anything.

4. Do you write your posts directly in the editor or in another software?

If it's something short, like a status update for my homepage, I write in the Bearblog editor. Otherwise I use Sublime Text with the Markdown and HTML 5 plugins. (I'm writing this post in Sublime Text right now, lol.)

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

All the time. I keep a pocket notebook on me wherever I go to jot things down, whether it's poetry, a thesis statement for an essay I have in mind, random thoughts, etc.

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

I immediately publish things like statuses, notes, journal entries, and the like. But I tend to sit on proper blog posts for a couple days. Right now I probably have at least 10 different drafts lol.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

Definitely I Am a Trans Man: A Second "Coming Out" and Retrospective. I think my best writing is either my poetry, or my essays on trans stuff. I have a lot more that I want to write.

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

There's a lot of little tweaks I want to do tidying some graphics up and reorganizing pages for navigation. I also want to make more custom themes and finally figure out the final iteration of my theme switching code.

I'm frustrated with how it looks on mobile, but I love the end result on desktop so much that I just try to live with it. I'm not really a big fan of making every website mobile-first.

Besides that, I'm pretty happy with the form and function of my blog.

✘ Posted on — 01/05/25
✘ Last modified — 6 months, 4 weeks ago
✘ Link — https://blog.xavierhm.com/bearblog-question-challenge

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