I don’t know if I could call it a trend, but it can get there. Still, something is going around my corners of the internet called the “Blog Questions Challenge,” which reminded me of a simpler time online.
The idea is simple: You answer a few pre-defined questions on your blog, tag some other people to do the same, and the process continues until there are no more bloggers. Since I don’t see many bloggers out there anymore, it felt nice to be included in such a thing when the fantastic Charlie tagged me along on Mastodon.
Since I like talking about processes, it felt like this topic could be refreshing for whoever reads my articles here and surprising for those who might find it in the middle of a bunch of pictures and stories.
So, let me start with this Blog Questions Challenge…
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I don’t know if there was a reason behind my first blogging experience, which happened when I was a teenager in Brazil when I had access to a new world. I remember using some websites in the late 1990s, but nothing caught my attention for long enough.
Around 2000, I started becoming increasingly interested in the body modification scene that I found online. There was a website called BME that focused on user-submitted imagery, and I started submitting images of my piercings and tattoos.
Once you did that, you were invited to join an online community with people who had also submitted photos to the website. This was my first experience blogging and in what I could describe as a proto-social network of sorts. I met many people through this website and attended several events, which was extremely fun.
I used to work in a tattoo shop, and I kept updating a blog with what I did, submitting images to the website, and trying to improve my English writing skills almost daily. It was fun, and I believe I kept writing there until 2006 or so when I started focusing more on my design work.
That is when I started my design blog, Pristina.org, which I still have and write on almost weekly.
What platform are you using to manage your blog, and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I know this isn’t nerdy enough, but I use WordPress here and in other blogs. I have been using WordPress since I learned about it, and I don’t know if I should change it since it works fine for what I need to do. But I know there are better, faster content management systems out there.
Still, there are too many articles here with way more images than they should, and I don’t want to go through another migration again.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool or a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
I like to think I’m a man of consistency regarding my blogging and writing patterns. I have been using Evernote to keep track of the articles on my blogs, and I wrote this on Evernote before I pasted it on WordPress and published it.
I started using Evernote years ago to save my text documents as a cloud backup of my data and files. Nowadays, I have several hundred articles from different blogs.
I’m not a laptop person, so I write my articles while sitting at my desk on my iMac with my cats walking around or sleeping in a box beside me.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I write them early in the day or late at night since I like the silence around me to focus on writing. At the beginning of every month, I write down a list of topics I want to write about on Frame Travel Roam Capture.
I try to write them consistently and publish something new every 5 days. Sometimes, it doesn’t work, and I must backtrack on some articles. But it keeps me on track to write and edit the many pictures I take around Berlin and the places I travel to.
Do you publish immediately after writing or let it simmer as a draft?
I don’t publish my articles here immediately after writing. I often schedule them for a future date to track my pre-defined articles calendar.
After writing an article on Evernote, I bring it to Grammarly to correct my words since writing long texts in a second language is still challenging for me. After that, I save the article on Evernote and bring it to WordPress, where I add links, tags and categories.
Later, I go to Lightroom and edit the images that went with the words, and that is it.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
This is easy since my favorite article is about my bike trip from Berlin to Copenhagen. Also, it might be the longest text I have ever written.
I loved the trip. I dreamed about the scenery I saw, and I’m looking forward to the next stage when I cycle from Copenhagen to Oslo.
Do you have any future plans for your blog? Maybe you’ll redesign it, move to another platform, or add a new feature.
After a painful migration from another blog, I will not change anything soon. My goal is to keep writing about Berlin, photography, and my trips and sharing them with people who might enjoy what I do here. This blog is an excuse to take more pictures, share great places, and write about them. Simple like that…
I have been considering moving from Evernote to somewhere else for a while now, but I still have to settle on what this other software might be. Maybe I will have an answer for that on my next Blog Questions Challenge.
Now that this is over, I have to tag others here, and I have no idea who I should tag. I decided to tag myself to write this entire thing again in Portuguese on my design blog. Maybe my friends from Canal Alemanizando would be willing to try this out, so here it goes.
If you read until here, congratulations. This is the end of my Blog Questions Challenge. Try to explore other articles here, you might find something cool.
