The Blog Questions Challenge
This challenge has been recently making rounds on the Internet and as I’ve seen a lot of my friends and people I follow in the tech industry take part, I figured that I want to, as well. So this is me answering a set of questions about how and why I blog on this website.
Why did you start blogging in the first place?
I’ve learned most of what I know now about building for the web by following people on the web; design sites, blogs and studying other people’s markup and CSS. One of the sites that made a big influence on me on my early days was A List Apart in 2001 and CSS Zen Garden in 2003.
So I think the answer to this question lies there; mainly because I saw a lot of the people who I looked up to at the time do it. People such as Jeremy Keith, Jeffrey Zeldman, Trent Walton, Ethan Marcotte, Richard Rutter, Scott Jehl, Andy Clarke, Mark Boulton, Chris Coyier and Dan Cederholm.
Being part of this movement, for me, felt like being a part of a larger community of nice people who are sharing their knowledge for others to learn from. It still does.
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it?
This website is handcrafted with vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript, built with Eleventy, and hosted on Netlify. The designs and pages were created in Safari using its developer tools and the Cursor code editor. Content was written in iA Writer.
I chose Eleventy because it’s fast, simple, and extremely flexible to work with. So much so, that I’m actually using it for all my projects at the moment. Even the Nord Design System’s much more complex architecture is built using the same tool.
Have you blogged on other platforms before?
I was using Middleman previously and migrated this website in 2018 to use Eleventy, shortly after Zach Leatherman published it. Before Middleman become a thing in 2011, I was using Wordpress to power the blog.
How do you write your posts?
I usually write my posts in iA Writer if it’s a longer article. For more technical articles, I may draft them out directly in Cursor because it allows me to more easily work with interactive code blocks and such, and immediately preview the changes on my live website.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
My design studio is probably quite different compared to most designers out there. It’s a combination of a home recording studio and a workstation that I built inside an old walk-in closet on the 3rd floor of our house. The space itself isn’t enormous by any means, around 30 ft², but this dedicated quiet space gives me the luxury to feel inspired, find focus, and get a lot of things done.
This is also where I feel the most inspired to write. Especially if I have a cup of coffee and some soul or jazz playing in the background.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
It depends. If it’s just a simple post such as this or something technical, I will almost always publish it immediately. For more complex thought pieces though, such as this, I will let it simmer first, come back to it later, and edit it in iterations until I feel comfortable to publish it.
What's your favourite post on your blog?
I would say either On Design Tools and Processes or Typography for User Interfaces. Both of these are also loosely based on talks that I did while still living in San Francisco, CA, so there’s much more background research that went into them compared to a lot of other posts in this blog.
Any future plans for your blog?
I recently re-designed this website. Mainly, because I wanted to better showcase what I do and have a future home for experiments I may want to tinker with. So I’m hoping to post about those experiments and other thoughts onto this blog in the future:
New website launch day! 📮
I handcrafted a super simple new site for myself to better showcase what I do and have a future home for experiments I may want to tinker with.
Designed in the browser using HTML, CSS, and a tiny bit of plain JavaScript. Powered by @11ty.dev as usual:
arielsalminen.com
— Ariel Salminen (@arielsalminen.com) March 25, 2025 at 11:04 AM
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Who’s next?
I would love to see some of my closest friends and colleagues take up this challenge and write a similar post. Tagging David Darnes and Elwin van Eede here.
