I sometimes feel Dirty Feed is a weird mix of stuff. Obviously, a large part of my audience comes here for ridiculous minutiae about old television, particularly old comedy. Hello there. I like you.
But there’s also a strand of posts here – lessened over the years, perhaps, but definitely still there – which is about writing for the web in general. Some of this stuff occasionally gets quite widely-read if somebody grabs hold of it and links to it. For instance, this piece I published about the indie web actually did much better than any of the posts about TV I published in 2024. I don’t think the two audiences really have much crossover, which means I’m sure I disappoint a lot of archive TV fans when they see a brand new post on here, and it’s just me wanging on about websites rather than telly.
To which people I say: sorry, this is another of those posts. After seeing this post about blogging habits turn into a little chain letter, posted by people like Jeremy Keith, Luke Dorny and Greg Storey, I thought it might be fun to give it a go.
For those of you who couldn’t give a monkey’s tits about my writing process: don’t worry, there’ll be another post about 90s Granada comedy pilots before you know it.
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Why did you start blogging in the first place?
A very good question. I think it always felt natural that I once I got online properly1, of course I should have somewhere to write about stuff. Exactly where that place was has changed over the years – there was Ganymede & Titan (2003-20), ofla.info (2004-5), Noise to Signal (2005-9), and Dirty Feed itself (2010-now).
Is it weird that I automatically felt that I needed a place to write online? Probably. But I guess it’s the same part of me that wrote school magazines, right?
What platform are you using to manage your blog and why did you choose it? Have you blogged on other platforms before?
Dirty Feed has used self-hosted WordPress since it launched in 2010. WordPress takes a bit of a bashing these days, for legitimate Matt-Mullenweg-shaped reasons.2 I will say one thing: I can think of at least three blogs which stopped updating because their CMS and various dependencies stopped being actively developed. I use WordPress because it seems to me that the self-hosted version is a relatively safe way of ensuring that I’m not going to get trapped like that. I care about writing, not my technology stack.
As for other platforms: I used Movable Type during the glory days of the mid-2000s; I then used Drupal for many years. Movable Type was amazing, but yes, I got caught up in that debate about the software going paid. God, one of the worst mistakes I can think of a company making. They really did chuck it all away.
As for Drupal, it was fun when I could get things working, but it was also very complicated, and I got frustrated when each new version seemed to break something on my site. WordPress, for all its faults, has rarely done that to me. I hear Drupal is a lot better these days, but I was scared off for good, unfortunately.
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 have a very complex writing workflow: I write… erm, directly in the WordPress Editor.3 I’d love to say I use something like MarsEdit or something, and I probably should; it’d really help when writing offline on the journey home from work, for instance.
But the joy of writing directly into WordPress is that it doesn’t matter which computer you’re accessing it from: everything is just set up and ready. And WordPress’s autosave feature means that losing huge swathes of work because you’re a moron is pretty much a thing of the past.
Incidentally, I do pretty much all my planning in the WordPress Editor too: my articles often start out as a set of headings, and organically grow into the finished product. It’s not unknown for articles to spend months on the backend, slowly turning into the final post.
When do you feel most inspired to write?
I’ve swapped around entirely on this. It used to be late at night, sometimes very late. These days, I seem to do all my best writing by getting up at 5am, and doing a couple of hours first thing
I try and do a little bit of writing every single day. I don’t always manage it, especially as I do 12-hour shifts, but it’s the aim.
Do you publish immediately after writing, or do you let it simmer a bit as a draft?
I try and give it at least a day, and check it over again before publishing. Ideally, I should really give it a week before doing one final draft, and I think my work would be far better than way.
But in practice… once it’s ready, I’m impatient to hit publish. My girlfriend Tanya usually checks the major pieces over first, and prevents me from making too much of a twat of myself. If you write long blog posts, I highly recommend getting somebody you trust to do this, if possible.
What are you generally interested in writing about?
A lot of people answering this challenge have missed this question out. I think one person omitted it, and most others have cut-and-pasted it from them, or people who answered them. Maybe they thought the answer was too obvious.
But I’ll use the question to make a philosophical point: I think a lot of people, quite reasonably, think Dirty Feed is a website about archive television, and specifically about archive comedy. But it isn’t. Dirty Feed is about whatever subjects I’m interested in at any given moment. Right now, that means an awful lot of old comedy. But who knows what I’ll want to write about in twenty years, or even ten years?
I used to be the kind of person who would start up endless new websites every time I wanted to talk about a new topic. (I had an IT Crowd website which lasted three months back in 2007.) These days, I think it’s far better to set up a single home for your work, rather than creating multiple different silos. I find letting your writing grow and change is far more satisfying than starting from scratch all the time.
Who are you writing for?
Oh, I’m supposed to say “myself”, aren’t I? Yeah, yeah, it’s just me, I don’t care if anyone reads my stuff, I’m doing it for my own personal pleasure.
That’s genuinely true some of the time4 , but especially with my writing about archive comedy, things are a little different. While I’m certainly writing to please myself, and to discover new things about shows I love, I do also want to communicate those ideas to others, and that involves trying to think a little outside my own head. Considering how in-depth some of my pieces get, knowing how to pitch things can be hard, and over the years I haven’t always got it right.
Still, I’ve perhaps got a little better at drawing people into my world, especially in the last five years, and a lot of that is simply through writing better introductions to articles, rather than leaping right in. I try to imagine someone who loves the programme I’m writing about, has a general nerdy interest in TV, but doesn’t have the time and energy to research all this nonsense themselves.
The most gratifying feedback I receive is from people who say that they weren’t interested in a given topic, but my writing style somehow made them care anyway. Whenever that happens, I know I’ve written something half-decent.
What’s your favorite post on your blog?
I don’t think my archive comedy writing gets any better than this piece on the Fawlty Towers pilot. For more general TV-related work, this piece on how terrifying I found Knightmare manages to go to places I rarely manage. And for stuff that is nothing to do with television at all, this piece on rescuing an unpreserved BBC Micro game is everything I want my writing to be.
Those last two pieces were written within two months of each other, in the middle of a global pandemic. No, I can’t explain it either.
Any future plans for your blog? Maybe a redesign, a move to another platform, or adding a new feature?
I try not to get seduced into a spiral of redesigns for this place. I’ve seen it happen far too often to others – I used to do it endlessly myself – and it often just seems like an excuse for not writing. Over the last 15 years, Dirty Feed has had four major designs – the current one launched in 2022 – and I’d argue that’s probably one too many.
As for moving to other platforms – despite my thoughts about why I’ve stuck with WordPress above, I’m not entirely wedded to it. In particular, moving to a static site generator like Eleventy is appealing. But the problem I have is that unlike many blogs, Dirty Feed has a thriving comments section – not particularly in terms of the number of comments, but in the quality of them. There have been plenty of occasions where my dodgy research has been entirely rescued by somebody taking the time to post a comment and correct me.
Most of the comments solutions for static sites which I’ve seen look fairly awful. And transferring those comments from WordPress also looks like a pain in the fanny.5 I might make the break one day, but, y’know, I’ve got posts about film sequences in Some Mothers Do ‘Ave ‘Em to write. Taking time away from writing in order to push files around isn’t my idea of fun.
Next?
I’m supposed to tag other people in to get them to answer these questions next, but I’m not going to do that; it feels like setting people homework. But if you feel sufficiently inspired, I’d love you to answer these questions on your own site, and then post a link below.
Ah, the days where I had to argue with my mother about the cost of dial-up. ↩
I ain’t linking to exactly what that is referring to. If you know, you know. If you don’t know, don’t waste your time. Go for a nice walk instead. ↩
Classic, of course, I’m not a monster. ↩
You can usually tell when I’ve written something purely for myself, and don’t care if anybody else reads it: I never turn on the comments for those pieces. ↩
And yes, on that latter point: I am fully aware of the irony of my “not going to get trapped” comment earlier. What can you do? The internet sucks. ↩