The Blog Question Challenge

This challenge was initiated by Alexandra from wrywriter.ca — thanks for putting this together!

Why did you make a blog in the first place?

My first blog goes back to the early 2000s — it was called “Make Love Not War” and it was a space where I was critical of US foreign policy in the Middle East. That blog was about politics, but more importantly, it was my entry into the emerging blog ecosystem. This was before Twitter, before Facebook — blogs were the social web. You had blogrolls, trackbacks, comments, and a real sense of community between independent publishers. That original spark — having your own space to publish and connect — never left me.

Why did you choose your platform?

I chose Indiekit, an open-source IndieWeb server that supports Micropub, IndieAuth, and the full W3C IndieWeb stack. I pair it with Eleventy for static site generation and deploy everything on Cloudron for self-hosting. But “chose” might be an understatement — I’ve written over 30 custom plugins to extend Indiekit into a full publishing and reading platform. It handles my blog posts, but also my blogroll, podroll, GitHub activity, listening history, RSS reader, CV, and even a full ActivityPub server for federation with the fediverse. It’s not just a blog — it’s my digital home.

Have you blogged on other platforms before?

Many. WordPress was the obvious starting point, like most people. I also ran Loudblog, which was a CMS specifically designed for managing podcasts back when podcasting was still finding its feet. Over the years, as I got deeper into the IndieWeb community, I explored more niche platforms — Tanzawa, Idno/Known — each with their own take on owning your content. I spent two to three years on micro.blog, which was a great experience and a solid IndieWeb-friendly platform. Then in December 2025, I got bitten by the Indiekit virus and took a deep dive into turning it into my own publishing and reading platform. I haven’t looked back since.

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

It depends on the post type. For quick notes, I use Indiekit’s built-in editor or increasingly my new Micropub MCP client — which lets me publish directly from the terminal through Claude Code. For longer articles, I usually draft in a text editor, let the ideas mature, and then use a local LLM to help me polish the text. English isn’t my native language, so having an AI assistant to rephrase and tighten my prose is genuinely helpful. The final post goes through Indiekit’s Micropub endpoint regardless of where it started.

When do you feel most inspired to write?

When I’ve let a draft simmer for a while. I’ll jot down an idea or a rough outline, then let it sit. At some point something happens — a conversation, a technical breakthrough, reading someone else’s post — that makes the piece click into place and I feel the urge to finish and publish it. The best writing, for me, comes from that moment when a half-formed idea suddenly feels complete.

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

Both. Notes and short posts go out immediately — they’re reactions to the moment. But articles and tutorials get drafted, revised, and sometimes sit for days. I recently built a Read it Later feature into my site, and that same philosophy applies to my own writing: some things need time to breathe before they’re ready.

What’s your favourite post on your blog?

Probably my deep dive into Wafrn’s dual-protocol federation architecture. I enjoy creating technical tutorials that help people understand and deploy technologies. That post in particular was satisfying because it combined research, architecture analysis, and a practical vision for how the fediverse and Bluesky’s AT Protocol can coexist — which is something I’m actively working on for my own site.

Any future plans for your blog?

My roadmap is long. The big one: I’m planning to self-host a Bluesky PDS alongside my ActivityPub server, making my Indiekit instance a dual-protocol federation server — your identity and data on your own infrastructure, not on bsky.social. Beyond that, I’m improving my ActivityPub reader, working on better conversation threading, contributing upstream to Indiekit with plugin PRs, and generally continuing to build the kind of personal website I wish existed when I started blogging twenty years ago.