A blog about blogging

-=-=-

This seems to be a "thing" going around.
I spotted it over on DirtyFeed, a blog about TV, production, presentation and things like that.
I guess if it's a "thing", then I oughta join in.

Why did you start blogging in the first place?

As someone who creates too much content, I needed somewhere decent to wrap it all into a gigantic oversized bow, so I've actually always had some sort of blog, since my earliest days on the web, circa 2000.
They've never been a proper blog, mind. Usually "I made this game" and "I made this game" and "I made this game". .. though I'm not sure my modern blog is too far from being that, some days.

When I launched AGameAWeek, I tried to blog more often and make it a more integral part of my weekly content, but struggled to stay on top of things.
Without a specific schedule, I can tend to drift off and put the blogging lower on my list of priorities. They then get forgotten about, and largely abandoned.

Back in 2015, however, Pixelarf started doing a picture-of-the-day challenge, which I took up, eventually moving the daily Pixelart into a section of the site.
Once the prospect of "do it daily" came around, the more regimental blogging schedule came alongside it, and I think the blogging has been pretty much daily, ever since.
.. Albeit occasionally just me waffling about nothingness!

What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?

I used to host from WordPress, but that keeps growing in ways that I'd never use it.
Ironically, given the huge amount of content that I DO have on this site, it seemed like WordPress was always missing the mark insofar as what I actually needed it to do, and would constantly keep adding multi-megabyte features that I never needed, but which would gradually slow the whole server down to a crawl.
"Why don't you use cacheing" came the constant feedback, to which my reply would be "a blog page shouldn't take 3 seconds to render"

Instead, I extracted the database, rebuilt the database in a way that I could work with, and then built my own blogging site around the database.
The site is nice and minimalistic, now, as chaotic as the amount of content might appear.
Everything is simple blog posts now, be it the actual blog, the game archive, the music or the pixelart. They're all fundamentally the same thing, so I no longer have 7 or 8 separate databases, and it's no more complex than rendering the blog pages in a slightly different manner, depending on what the reader's looking at.

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

My blog script has a very very simple text box. I type in the text box, then I click Save.
That's all I need.
Somewhere to type.
It's all I've ever needed, even my game coding is devoid of any fancy IDE. Just a box and some ascii. Job done!

When do you feel most inspired to write?

Once I've accomplished something interesting in the realm of GameDev. If I've just managed to figure out something important to a game, I'll typically open the blog up, and jot things down.
Of course, some days nothing interesting happens in the slightest, and I feel the need to "Keep up the Daily" part of the blog, so I'll tend to waffle about something random and off-topic. I'm sure you've read plenty of those.
If a blog is about something I watched on telly, it generally means that I didn't code anything significant or worthy of a blog.

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

I used to post immediately, but for the past year or so I've been trying to write things late at night so that I can re-read them with fresh eyes in the morning before posting.
That's the plan, anyway.
It doesn't always work out, either due to tiredness, or being too busy actually coding, so some mornings it can be a panic to get a whole blog written alongside the pixelart and poetry.
Those days can be a bit crazy.

But usually it's the night before.

What are you generally interested in writing about?

Typically something gamedev'y, though if I'm honest, I don't think I waffle in-depth as much as I probably should do.
I should probably tackle a few more in-depth posts. Like, "how this level generator works" and things like that.
.. To be honest, I'd probably run out of ideas for those after a few weeks. They do get awfully samey!

Who are you writing for?

Whoever bothers to read.
Michael Fernie's always around to read things, so I guess him..?!
Since publicising the Discord there's been a couple of people who joined in, but not much conversation's going on over there.
Maybe that says more about "who I'm writing for" than anything.
..
I'm yelling into the void!

What’s your favorite post on your blog?

Oh gosh, that's a hard question.
I do like "Struggling..".
This blog is a trail of thought that I had on one particular day, where everything seemed to point to "Why don't you write a scripting language?"
From there, my coding adventure took a wild detour from standard GameDev, to actually trying to write a language that I could use to create my games.

Of course, that wasn't the plan. The plan was much simpler. Just a "show an example" kind of language. But it grew, and it grew, and the ideas spiralled out of control.
Oodles of Optimisation, and plenty of additions, have meant that I now have pretty much a fully functional (to the degree that I need it to be) language that I can write my games in.
But it all started there, on that day when everything was poking and prodding me all at once.

I'm quite proud of where that ended up going.
.. even if nobody else uses JSE!

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

I often grumble that the general look of the site isn't up to scratch. Everything's kinda plonked in front of your face, and a lot of people don't even bother clicking around too much.
It's not very easy to navigate, and content tends to get lost once it's more than a few days old.
... Which isn't great when there's decades worth of stuff here!

The difficult part is trying to figure out how to reorganise it all, or present it with any degree of artistic talent, which.. of course.. I'm definitely lacking!

Next?

More of the same?
I rarely plan out blogs, and instead tend to write about whatever's been happening on the day.
Planning isn't really my thing, which I think you can generally get a vibe for when trying to read through some of the content on the site.
It's nothing special. It is what it is!
It's just general waffle from a guy trying to fill his time.