Blog questions challenge 2025

Hyde, who had seen a post from Adam, who had been reading Kev's blog, who had seen a post from Brandon, who had been tagged by Jedda, who had been tagged by Ava, who came up with a blog post challenge … wait, where was I?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

I've never really seen myself as a blogger, if I'm honest. Which might explain why I'm so bad at it! I'm hardly what you'd call prolific. Johnny.Decimal as an idea is now 15 years old and here we are at post #100.

Which is funny, because I love writing. But I'm also really conscious of people's attention. I dislike how my own is constantly being bartered for, and so I feel that unless I have something useful to say, I'm not going to spew words out to fill the void. There is no void. There's the opposite of a void.

Also I was on Twitter since 2009 -- when you sent it an SMS to post -- and so I think I've got that tell everyone what you're doing all the time thing out of my system. I've realised that nobody cares what I do. Thank god.

So I feel like my blog is more of a communication channel and less of a blog in the traditional sense.

What platform do you use?

This website was hand-coded by me in Astro. Astro is amazing. My hand-coding is not, so much. But I'm getting better!

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have a few posts still lingering on a Wordpress site but they're old (2008/9) and embarrassing so I won't link them. And I mean literally, a few posts. Perhaps five.

How do you write your posts?

Usually directly in to Visual Studio Code, in Markdown, with vim keybindings. This whole site is one git repository.

Occasionally I'll draft something in my beloved Bear, but usually not.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I have something to say. See above. But not at any particular time of day.

Walking is the ultimate life-hack for writers. I don't know if I've ever had an original thought while sitting on my arse looking at a screen. But go for a walk round the block and let it tumble around up there. That's where the good stuff is.

Do you publish immediately, or later?

Usually pretty quickly. If I do the draft-then-come-back-later thing I tend to find that the moment feels like it's passed.

I'm definitely one of those people who can't really 'see' a post until I literally see it, on the published site. Not on my dev site, where it looks identical. It needs to be the live version. Then you read it and go ooh that's not what I meant and make a few quick edits.

What's your favourite post?

I don't have a favourite.

Any future plans?

I feel that my comms are bit disjointed. I even published a comms plan to try to solve the problem. But I'm not happy with it.

So I'd still like to streamline official Johnny.Decimal communications, somehow. But I don't know what that looks like yet.