#blogging posts — Ben Crowder https://bencrowder.net/blog/tag/blogging/ Feed for blog posts tagged with #blogging. Mon, 13 Apr 2026 03:29:26 GMT en-US https://bencrowder.net/ I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/3.29/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2026/3.29/ Sun, 29 Mar 2026 12:00:00 GMT I’ve been reading through my journals from twenty years ago, remembering old friends and who I used to be and what I worried about when I was young and single. And goodness, I had forgotten just how much I used to blog back then. Perhaps to excess (and by “perhaps” I mean “without a doubt”), but it was fun and I made lots of friends and I find myself missing it. [He says on his blog, where he has posted twenty-three times this year so far.] [He wants to point out, though, that the booknotes and the link posts of late feel qualitatively different — at least on his end — from the everything-goes type of blogging he used to do, and perhaps that’s what he’s missing and what he now — in what smells like a midlife crisis but probably does not actually count as one, not like the time when he impulse-bought a Nintendo Switch for his kids while his wife was gone at girls’ camp — what he now may be trying to resurrect, with hopefully more success than the seven other times he’s tried to do this in recent years.]

Anyway, here we are, twenty years after. (Which, to digress yet again, I read as a kid and quite liked. Maybe it’s time to reread that series.) If you, dear reader, were reading this blog or one of its sundry predecessors (mostly Blank Slate and Top of the Mountains) twenty years ago and are somehow still here, I salute your fortitude and perseverance, and I think you should poke your hand out of the fog of darkness (commentless blogs being one-way glass) and tap out a short email saying hi. [The author would like to note that — mildly disturbing metaphors aside — this friendly suggestion also applies to anyone who started reading the blog later on, anyone starting now (hi!), and anyone who can’t take it any longer and stops reading after this paragraph mercifully concludes.]

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]]> Enjoyed the blogging about blogging about blogging in Bix Frankonis’s post, and happy to add another... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/9.17/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/9.17/ Wed, 17 Sep 2025 12:00:00 GMT Enjoyed the blogging about blogging about blogging in Bix Frankonis’s post, and happy to add another (thin) layer. This part rang particularly true to me:

It’s just that, for me, the blogging that’s actually interesting is the blogging that very much is not a trade and very much an avocation or hobby.

People instead of brands, basically. Along that line, the linked Winnie Lim post about normalizing being a whole person also resonated with me:

Yes pls, normalise being true to your hobbies and interests and your whole self – also why I refuse to have dozens of different instagram accounts and websites for each of my interests. Everything I do is intertwined in some way and I can’t slice myself cold into separate slices.

We have to write about anything and everything to widen each other’s narrow perspectives, to express the amazing amount of detail that reality has, to normalise being whole persons, that having a wide variety of interests can be a good thing, because everything will ultimately feed into who we are and what we create.

Something good for me to remember.

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]]> Moving to Cast https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/moving-to-cast/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2025/moving-to-cast/ Tue, 25 Feb 2025 12:00:00 GMT As of today, this site is now built by Cast, a new custom static site generator I’ve been writing. There shouldn’t be any visible changes on your end, but if you experience some weirdness (like all the recent RSS items showing up as new in your feed), that’s probably why.

Notes:

  • Before now, this site was using a PHP CMS called Blackbullet that I wrote in 2013. I wanted to simplify by getting rid of the PHP dependency and serving up static HTML files instead.
  • I initially started the project as a Go app in 2021, abandoned it shortly thereafter, and then picked it up again this past December with some new ideas on how to implement it. Also switched to Node.
  • I wrote my own rather than using 11ty or Jekyll or another existing engine because, well, I wanted to.
  • Right now it rebuilds the site from scratch each time and takes 8–12 seconds. Compilation is fast enough that I’m probably going to leave it this way for now, rather than adding support for incremental builds.
  • No plan at this time to release Cast as open source.

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]]> After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wan... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1477/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1477/ Mon, 06 Mar 2023 12:00:00 GMT After holding out for a few months, I’m finally on Mastodon at @bencrowder@mastodon.social. I’ve wanted to provide a more lightweight way for readers to respond to posts (email can feel a little too formal sometimes) without adding comments to the site itself, and I think this is it.

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]]> Bring Back Blogging is putting together a directory of creators who blog. Recommended. https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1427/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2023/1427/ Fri, 06 Jan 2023 12:00:00 GMT Bring Back Blogging is putting together a directory of creators who blog. Recommended.

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]]> My ill-timed return to Twitter has ended. I’ve thought about moving to Mastodon (supporting the fede... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1394/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1394/ Mon, 14 Nov 2022 12:00:00 GMT My ill-timed return to Twitter has ended. I’ve thought about moving to Mastodon (supporting the federated model and all), but honestly I’m content just blogging here, even if it means a smaller audience.

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]]> After nine months of issue blogging (posting issues of Prints), I’ve decided it’s time to return to... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1352/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2022/1352/ Tue, 04 Oct 2022 12:00:00 GMT After nine months of issue blogging (posting issues of Prints), I’ve decided it’s time to return to stream blogging.

A quick retrospective: publishing issues was fine (the structure helped, for example), but for a personal blog I’m now less convinced that it’s the right fit. Looking forward to posting more freely and frequently.

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]]> Small milestone I almost forgot about: this website turned twenty this year. January 23, 2001. It’s... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1262/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1262/ Mon, 22 Nov 2021 12:00:00 GMT Small milestone I almost forgot about: this website turned twenty this year.

January 23, 2001. It’s possible I started it before that day, but that’s the first reference to it I’ve found in my journals.

Tinkering on the site all these years has been a delight. Truly one of my favorite activities.

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]]> A couple quick updates: Today was my last day at Cedar (formerly OODA Health before the acquisition)... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1274/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1274/ Fri, 01 Oct 2021 12:00:00 GMT A couple quick updates:

Today was my last day at Cedar (formerly OODA Health before the acquisition), and on Monday I start a new job at Hologram.

I’m finally getting around to writing Cast, the new backend engine for this site. The plan is to go full static and deploy via Render. Also planning to move my personal apps over. While I’m still probably a couple months away from having everything migrated, I’m so, so looking forward to not maintaining a personal server anymore. (It’s fun, sure, and I’ve learned a lot, but it’s stressful — yesterday’s Let’s Encrypt root certificate expiration bit me thanks to an old OpenSSL version, for example — and it’s no longer something I want to spend time on for personal projects.)

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]]> For those subscribing via RSS or JSON Feed: I’ve added the post tags to the top of each post, mirror... https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1265/ https://bencrowder.net/blog/2021/1265/ Sat, 21 Aug 2021 12:00:00 GMT For those subscribing via RSS or JSON Feed: I’ve added the post tags to the top of each post, mirroring what you see on my site.

(My reasoning for including the tags and putting them at the top, by the way, is to make it a little easier to see at a glance what a post is about and whether you want to skip it.)

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