Blog Question Challenge 2025

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Indie Web Queen and founder of 32 Bit Cafe, Xandra tagged me in this blog question challenge.

It brought back some nostalgia of those cringey days of MySpace quizzes that went round where you'd confess your shoe size and star sign like you were unraveling governemnt secrets.

Honestly, were those just covert security question traps? Maybe. But we were too busy ranking our Top 8 and uploading badly photoshopped selfies.

What colour socks are you wearing?
White 🤍🐻‍❄️ basic, boring, beloved.

If you were a biscuit, what would you be?
Custard cream. Cute on the outside and soft on the inside 🥺🩷🌞

What is your mother's maiden name?
Ha! Nice try. 💅 Go back to the underworld, hacker demon 👹

I digress. These questions seem delightfully harmless, and I'm a sucker for a good blog meme. Let's get into it.

Feel free to copy them and post your own! Maybe Sneek, Inkcaps or Sage would like to...?

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

Because I was nosey. I like reading what other people write. Tiny snippets of someone else's Tuesday.

I wanted to be a part of that, part of the conversation, part of that archive of people in the 21st century saying their bit on the internet.

Although, the truer answer depends on which version of me we're talking about. More on that later.

What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why do you use it?

This site is built with Eleventy, it's essentially a folder of markdown files and templates passing off as a full-fledged site.

I wanted full control, and static sites are really robust. I'd had some experience with Hugo in the past - found that really tough - so I went SSG shopping and saw a bunch of people I admire use Eleventy, so I gave it a go. The learning curve was still there, but the quirks weren't as weird and were more manageable than I found for Hugo.

I write in VSCode, deploy with GitHub Actions, and host my site on Neocities. I like it because it's mine. I get to tinker. I get to break it and fix it again.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I have been on the internet since my very early teens. As soon as I could hook up to the internet via a modem.

I've been around the block with blogging platforms and social media. I started journalling in the early 00s in OneNote, but my machine died and this was before the days of cloud backup, so all my preteen musings died with it.

So I moved online with a (very) personal blog on Blogspot, or what is now Blogger. I poured my young teen heart and soul into those blog posts. Masking people's names just in case anyone ever came across it. In my head, this was an entirely secret diary, but the likelihood that someone came across it a few times is not zero.

I've had Tumblr's and WordPress blogs galore. Ones for school, ones for crafting, ones for aesthetic. This site is the first one that has been successfully homespun, and now I'm fairly emotionally mature, I no longer need to scream into the (very public) void and I can actually share things that interest me.

How do you write your posts?

Either like I'm talking to myself, or writing a dissertation. Depends on the day.

Most posts begin as a stream-of-consciousness-babble. Some stay that way and set up a home in my drafts forever, some get deleted after being written. For most posts that you can read, I just wrote as-is and pushed out in the wild before I had the chance to take them down - I usually have to go back and make edits because I missed a typo (writing in VSCode means I don't have any spellcheck doing the heavy lifting for me) or want to rewrite something better.

Sometimes I'll have an idea or a topic that I want to pour over for weeks, maybe months, or in the case of one blog post that I can't seem to finish.. a year. Writing is a skill that has never come easy to me. So for those kind of ones, I poke and prod them, run them through grammarly, change words with thesaurus.com, re-read, rewrite... until I run out of words. Then it's a toss of the coin as to whether they get published or not.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Right as I'm about to fall asleep. My brain decides that's the perfect time to narrate a whole blog post, complete with parenthesis and jokes.

I've taken to sleepily dictating some of them just so they're out of my head as I will very probably forget about it by the morning otherwise.

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

I am, regrettably, a Bish Bash Bosh kind of writer.

Think ➡️ write ➡️ publish ➡️ edit when I spot all the typos.

What's your favourite post on your blog?

I wrote a short poem called Gemini that comes from years of hearing that Gemini's are two-faced and bitchy.

Wanting to express the truth that we Gem's just have many, many facets.

Facets that have no moral standing. Not good. Not bad. Just are.

Any future plans for your blog?

I don't have a grand blog post calendar or a master plan (though that does sound very sensible).

I've got a few interviews happening elsewhere, like People & Blogs, but not here.

I want to write more about my witchcraft learnings, but it is deeply personal and feel it may sit outside of this space.

I'll keep joining Indie Web events and challenges. Probably build a out an Experiment or two when inspiration strikes. Maybe another poem. Maybe a book review. Maybe a rant about heading hierarchy. Who knows.

As always, this place remains open for odd thoughts, dev explorations and snippets of Tuesdays.

Love u all, web wanderers, and thank you for reading my witterings.

Frills xxx

The Community

I am certain there are loads more, follow the trails back through everyone's posts to find more!