It's a good question; given that this blog has already, quietly and unnoticed, entered its second decade, and a question that I've never addressed. So perhaps it's time I did so, for myself, and anyone else who might be curious.
Until I was asked explicitly, I'd never bothered to try and examine it in detail, so thank you to Ben for making me think about it a bit more.
"@hl…Where have you ended up? What’re you blogging about, and what makes you keep posting?"
There are two reasons. The first is as a way of helping me reflect and clarify my own thoughts on a topic. I tend to write a lot of notes as a way of remembering things and work through problems, especially at work, but these are very messy work in progress notes, useful in a practical every day way, but they don't generate any deep insights.
By writing out my ideas and publishing them publicly where someone could read them, I'm forced to be clearer and hopefully more coherent. It's not important that anyone actually does read them, but I need the fact that I'm trying to communicate the ideas to someone else to make me look critically at what I'm writing and thinking.
The second reasons is a sort of paying it back, certainly on in the more technical posts. I'm incredibly lucky to have grown up with access to the internet, and been able to use it to answer hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of my questions. Everything from how to stop a tap from dripping to high resolution images of galaxies so far away, that the light in the image started its journey long before any current civilisation was born. This is an astonishing resource, but 'the internet' is not, regardless of what current 'AI' proponents will sell you, a magic machine that conjures answers out of nowhere. It's made from the contributions of millions of individuals, of people.
In that spirit I'd like to be one of those people who contributes, that maybe someday someone else finds an answer, or even just an interesting idea, on my site. Personal sites help to keep the web human. A diversity of sites, and not just a few bland giants, also supports what I think of as Digital Independence, which are similar ideas to the goals of the IndieWeb.
I have to admit I often don't find it easy, and it takes more time than it should for me to publish posts (this one excepted), as I worry about how it's written, especially things like spelling and grammar. I was never any good at English as a subject in school and I think that preconception has stayed with me since, making me self conscious about publishing anything. Not the writing, so much as the publishing, because that is when other people can see those mistakes that are invisible to me, but blatantly obvious to them.
My blog had a bit of a resurgence as we entered the second year of the COVID pandemic. I think mainly, as an outlet for something, anything, even slightly creative. The first year of the pandemic was hard, combined with the arrival of our second child, meant that I, and my wife, were just continually exhausted, from looking after two (very) young children, being stuck at home, no childcare support, no visitors and in my case working. Under those circumstances I had almost no time of my own. My usual hobby and creative outlet of playing guitar, required more energy than I had, but I still needed some way of expressing myself. When writing I could do very small bits at a time, and always had a near-term goal of finishing the current post, which made it more approachable than playing guitar, and when thinking about small children who are trying to sleep, quieter. Before then the blog hadn't been updated so regularly, but that's OK. I don't have a schedule to keep, or anyone to entertain but myself.
Currently this blog is still created using Hugo, as it was in 2021 when I moved from Blogger. Since then I've made minor tweaks to the theme, but that's it. There is always a temptation to spend more time on the appearance, or set-up, but I try to avoid that. The content is the important part; the shell will probably change with the times and fashions, but the ideas hopefully remain.
While I'm in a reflective mood regarding the blog, perhaps I should think a little about the future, what would I like to do with it?
I'd like to be braver about writing about personal topics. As I get older I find that I value this more in other people's writing, and I am becoming more interested in how they were affected by events and experiences. I also have quite a lot of notes from older trips lying around and would probably enjoy writing those up and re-living the experiences as I do so.
Is that an answer?