bear blog question challenge (7½ months late)

17 Aug, 2025

I'm a bit late to the question challenge posed by Ava ...

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

2. Why did you choose Bearblog?

3. Have you blogged on other platforms before?

The answers to these are all kind of mixed up because it depends on what you mean by "the blog", so I'll address them together.

I started blogging in 2006 on Blogger, the Google service.¹ I was in fourth grade and my blog posts were boring descriptions of each school day. (Well, I imagine they weren't boring to me at the time!) Here is an excerpt where Brian₂₀₀₆ describes getting a graded math test back.

I got a 99.

Not that bad, but well… but the point is, it’s not bad. E.g., good. Which I was denying a second ago. Well, er… whatever… ok.

I imagine an editor coming to this passage with a red pen, ready to make me "omit needless words", and having their head explode.

Since it was so long ago, I can't really tell you what I was thinking when I did all this. I thought blogging was cool? Because I saw lots of cool people online, and they had blogs, I think? I hadn't worked it out. I still think blogging is cool, albeit for different reasons.

In February 2012, I migrated that blog to WordPress. In November 2017, I migrated that blog to a static site on GitHub Pages. Along the way, my blog posts were steadily becoming more technical, more polished, higher-effort. This was intentional, and nice in many ways, but I started missing having a lower-effort outlet for writing and sharing thoughts publicly.

So, in September 2024, I restarted my WordPress blog. The first post there, I eventually lightly rewrote/updated into the hobgoblin of little minds, take two (which elaborates on the motivation in much more detail).

At the same time, I had been keeping an eye out for a more casual blogging platform. The most prominent blogging platforms I saw were all professional-/marketing-oriented. Monetize your writing! Grow your audience! That's all well and fine, but it wasn't what I was looking for. (I additionally excluded Substack for the reasons Platformer left Substack in early 2024².) I don't remember how I found Bear, but I think it was by chance when I noticed its footer on some blog on Hacker News, and was immediately impressed by its ethos and feature set. I like every phrase on the Bear front page, but if I had to pick my favorite I might choose "no-nonsense". No sharing, no notifications, no engagement metrics or algorithms. Although upvotes and the discovery feed exist, they're minimalist and not in your face. I also like posting with simple Markdown.

I made a few test posts on Bear in late November and early December, not intending to commit right away. But shortly thereafter, the WordPress drama boiled over into the Onion-esque headline To Log Into WordPress, You Now Have To Agree Pineapple on Pizza Is Good, and I started considering myself as having "officially" moved here.

Most people would probably say that this Bear blog is a different blog from the blog(s) described above; but, one post was largely a repost from the briefly revived WordPress blog, and they existed at different times on the "same WordPress address", so, who can say for sure?

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

These days I draft in Obsidian, which lets me work on the drafts offline and/or from my phone (I feel like I'm underutilizing Obsidian, but it works for me). Previously, I'd mostly draft in Vim in a folder of plain text files, and maybe occasionally check in on the Dropbox mobile app. For posting on my main blog, I move posts out of Obsidian and into the blog generator when I start needing to get the finer points of the formatting right or to implement JavaScript. On Bear, I usually move posts to the editor only when they're almost done, but previewing it on the actual site always prompts some last-minute editing. Like adding this sentence.

5. When do you feel most inspired to write?

Somewhat embarrassing answer: late in the night as a form of bedtime procrastination. A runner-up is in the earliest moments of boarding a plane, when I'm alone with my thoughts and the discomfort of flying hasn't set in yet.

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

Drafts almost always simmer (see title of post). I frequently get tired of working on a specific post and round-robin through dozens of drafts, writing whatever I feel inspired to at the moment. Occasionally I make it a point to dash something off in a single setting.

7. Your favorite post on your blog?

I might just say my favorite reason to be okay. It's short and works for me.

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

Nope! And quite deliberately. I don't want to actively attract readers to this blog. I'm here to specifically avoid that, because any effort I put into making the blog look pretty and organized, I feel pressure to live up to with the content, and I don't want that pressure. I already have plenty of that on my main blog.

(I have spent a while tinkering with the styles to put underlines back onto links for accessibility without adding too much visual clutter, because this is Important to me; but that's it.)

I might want to attract readers to specific posts, if I think they're relevant to the reader; and so I will try to make each individual post live up to its individual standards, but no more. But I'm just talking to myself now.