Thejesh tagged me with these questions.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I started my website in 1997 on Geocities at https://www.geocities.com/root_node/, mostly talking about me. (A cousin once told me, “Anand’s site is like TN Seshan – talking only about himself.” 🙂)
(As an aside, I didn’t know that searching for Geocities on Google renders the results in Comic Sans!)
I wanted a place to share the interesting links I found. Robot Wisdom by John Barger and Scripting News by Dave Winer were great examples: collection of interesting links updated daily.
In July 1999, as a student at IIMB, I decided to put that into action by creating a custom HTML page updated manually.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
WordPress. Because it was the most fully-featured, mature platform when I migrated to it around 2006.
Before that, I used:
- A custom HTML page on Geocities. But it was hard to update multiple links, create individual pages, categories, etc. So…
- A Perl-based static-site generator I wrote myself. But as my link count grew, each generation took too long. So …
- A CGI-Perl-based blogging engine I hosed on freestarthost.com, handling commenting, etc. But at BCG, I didn’t have time to add many features (linkback, RSS, etc.) So…
- Blogger as a parallel blog, briefly. But it didn’t have as many features as (nor the portability of) WordPress. So…
- WordPress – moving across a bunch of hosting services, and currently on HostGator.
- I also blogged in parallel on InfyBlog, Infosys’ internal blogging platform on LiveJournal.
How do you write your posts? For example, in a local editing tool, or in a panel/dashboard that’s part of your blog?
I started with custom HTML in Emacs (or whatever code editor I kept moving to).
Briefly, I used Windows Live Writer, which was quite a good blogging tool.
Now, I write in Markdown on VS Code and paste it into WordPress’ editor.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
When an idea that’s been bubbling for a while in my mind bursts out.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I publish immediately.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
The next chapter of my life, which I wrote on a one-way flight back from the UK to India to start Gramener.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I plan to move it to GitHub Pages with Markdown content and a static site generator. I might write my own SSG again in Deno or use one of the faster ones.
Who’s next?
I’d love to hear from