There is something interesting happening with blogging. For a long time, blogs like this one were the way to opine, to share, to bloviate. Then social media came along and stole blogging’s thunder, with the average blogger gravitating towards long threads on Twitter (RIP; † ⚰; 💀; etc., etc.) or photo-heavy Instagram posts. Next came newsletters — blogs delivered by email, essentially — which finally broke the social media hegemony.
And yet, neither social media nor newsletters have ever had quite the same vibe as blogging. If you rely on social media, your posts live or die by how well they attract outrage or sympathy. If you rely on newsletters, you may be inadvertently rubbing shoulders with Nazis. In either case, the continued existence of your “platform” — your social media posts, your newsletters — depends on the whims of a company with its interests at heart, not yours.
All this is to say that I am very happy to see that blogging is having a bit of a moment, as exemplified by the so-called Blog Questions Challenge. This is a kind of internet chain letter, started by Scott Boms on his own blog, “Documenting”, and to which I am rudely attaching myself without having been invited. The idea is that bloggers answer a few questions about where their blogs came from, how they work, and where they’re going. As such, I present to you the Shady Characters edition of the Blog Questions Challenge.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I wanted to write. I’m not entirely sure why, but I read a lot as a kid and books seemed to be important in some slightly mysterious way.
I eventually had an idea that there might be something interesting about the more unusual typographical marks I sometimes came across — ¶ @, *, † § and others — which led me to write what I hoped might become the constituent chapters of a book on the subject.
Having written those “chapters”, though, I didn’t really know what to do with them. Email a literary agent? A publisher? That seemed very forward, so I started Shady Characters instead and have been writing here ever since. (The agent and the publisher came along later, so it all turned out alright in the end.)
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
I’ve used WordPress all this time — almost exactly thirteen years now. It seemed like the best option at the time, with endless scope for customisation and a robust network of supporters from whom to get help and inspiration.
WordPress comes in open source and commercial flavours. The first, where you have to install and administer WordPress yourself, is what I use. The second, where a commercial company such as WordPress.com or WPEngine handles all of that for you, always seemed like a very expensive way to go about things.
Now, though, WordPress’s open source and commercial faces are coming into conflict. Matt Mullenweg, who co-founded WordPress in 2003 and has maintained the air of a benevolent dictator since then, seems to be suffering from early-onset tech leader derangement. (Perhaps it’s catching.) Mullenweg has argued that for-profit companies (his own aside, of course) which benefit from WordPress’s freely available source code should be contributing more to that same source code, despite there being no legal compulsion to do so. The resulting ructions in the WordPress world have not been reassuring.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I used Google’s Blogspot for a personal diary a long, long time ago.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I am not, it is fair to say, a natural writer. I have to treat it more like a job: set up a schedule and stick to is as closely as I can, family and other obligations notwithstanding. To fuel my miscellany posts, I keep a list of interesting websites, news stories and other articles as inspiration. Occasionally, though, something will pop up that I need to write about. A recent post on generative AI was one instance of that; an exploration on statistical frequency of punctuation marks was another.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
Occasionally, I’ll still be trying to figure out what a post is actually about as I’m in the middle of writing it. In those cases, there will be an extended period of writing and rewriting. Most other posts I publish as soon as I’ve finished them.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
I thought about this recently. For a long time, the header on the Shady Characters home page told readers to expect “unusual marks of punctuation, books and book history, and everything in between”. Now, though, with the publication of Empire of the Sum behind me and Face with Tears of Joy coming up this summer, things aren’t so clear-cut. For the moment, I’ve settled on this: “unorthodox information technologies”. I’m not sure it conveys exactly what I want it to, but it’s close enough.
Who are you writing for?
Hmm. Hmm. I would like to say that I’m writing for posterity — to help collate and collect stories, facts and other bits of information that deserve to be shown to a wider audience. But if I’m honest with myself, I’m writing for me — I’m writing because I enjoy the craft and the habit of it, and because each word written by a human being is another blow struck against the entropy of the universe. (I’m a lapsed physicist, in case it isn’t obvious.)
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I honestly don’t know! Have a look at the Contents page and let me know what your favourite post is in the comments.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
In writing terms, I’d like to get back to a more regular cadence, which will be easier once the kids are a little older.
In design terms, I’ll be sticking with this design for a while longer. You can see the original one on archive.org; it lasted for around six years, and the current design is now pushing eight. Even so, I’m quite proud of it and I have no plans to change it any time soon.
The one thing I would like to change is the WordPress software that underpins the blog. It’s written in a programming language called PHP that I don’t especially enjoy using, and the shenanigans at the top of the WordPress community do not inspire confidence in WordPress itself. Grupetto.cc, my (very) occasional cycling blog, uses a system called Eleventy. It’s simpler and more flexible than WordPress, and I’ve been plotting a move to it for Shady Characters for a while. Time will tell when that happens.
Next?
Might I tag in Glenn Fleishman or Doug Wilson to give us their answers to these questions?
Thanks for reading!