Moving blogs all over again

07 Aug, 2024

During the course of May this year I took part in WeblogPoMo2024, a challenge to write a little bit on as many days as possible.

I chose a theme - why I stopped using a particular Tumblr account that I'm really fond of in retrospect - and soon my posts became a weird examination of my own happiness over time. Having a blog, I said, is a way to express joy, especially when posts link to brilliant content from other people. I also said that I felt uncomfortable with my own blogging setup as it currently stood:

I find myself limited by how I'm using [the blogging service] and, surprise surprise, much like my use of Tumblr back in the day I'm not really using the service in the way it was designed for.

The month-long blogging challenge ended. My wrap-up post ended with me saying that I was resigned to moving platform:

I have a vague idea of how I'd want my dream site to work: a welcome page showing a stream of content from subsections like blogs and link lists and photos sections, a simple design, nothing that requires too much responsive design.

I haven't posted a blog since.

What I have been doing is trying to figure out how to simplify my approach as much as possible. I'd ended up in a weird situation where my super-simple online presence was stretched over two services (Micro.blog and omg.lol) and three domain names. There were similar-but-slightly-different CSS styles on each site. I had my vague idea of something, but that vague idea was vague and, if anything, potentially added in more complication.

I tried to go down the entirely self-built route but the barrier to entry was just too high. I needed to make a significant investment in time to understand the basics before I could even start to build something vaguely ambitious, and then some kind of financial investment in a programming tool.¹

I lamented, then looked at things I've tried before like Squarespace. I didn't want all that functionality (and that I'd be tied to them forevermore). I poked around with a few Wordpress installations but couldn't get something that felt light and breezy.

Dear reader, I pretty much gave up.

One night a few weeks ago I had a notepad in front of me and sketched out the simplest way to bring everything together:

• Use one site or service
• Use one domain name
• Have a blog
• Have a tag within that blog that lets you post links to fun stuff elsewhere on the web
• Have a few slashpages within the same site
• Build a front page that simply displays all that content

Ok, basic plan achieved. I've overcome the main problem of what content I'd have and how I'd post my own stuff and links to other people's content.

What would my site need? It'd need a service that allows me to custom build that front page, a blogging engine, a way to easily display lists of posts with a certain tag only, the ability to add custom pages, and a very very simple way to update the look and feel.

But then: ennui. I could probably do this with Wordpress I guess but I'd already ruled that out along with the usual suspects. Those new services like Pika were interesting but too basic or limited in their styling. Bear Blog looked too bare bones. I was back to feeling lost

...and then someone reposted Brandon into my Mastodon feed and I saw he was using Bear Blog in a way that almost exactly matched what I wanted.

The past week has been a small frenzy of activity:

• I opened (another) new test account on Bear;
• Brandon shared a blogpost detailing all the code he'd used to customise his blog which I moreorless stole wholesale;
• I posted some dummy content;
• I adapted Brandon's code for my own purposes;
• I spent a ridiculous amount of time choosing custom fonts;
• I migrated a few posts from my old blog just to see if everything worked ok.

I did all that over the course of two evenings. It came together really quickly and with fairly little compromise. I knew this would all work pretty much as I wanted, so I migrated all my old blog content across, paid for a proper Bear Blog account, uploaded old images... and then spent three days messing around with CSS.

CSS isn't fun. It should be, but something about it always breaks my mind. And I can be indecisive - do I want a bit of extra padding, or for my line breaks to be dotted rather than solid, or for links to change colour when I hover over them?

I faffed and I got some help (thanks Sara!) and I realised I was just tinkering around the edges now and that...

It's over. It's done.

It's still barely a week since I opened that new test account but I'm already itching to make this site properly live by migrating my domains over. I'll give it a few more days, maybe write a little more. I'm excited to have this space, to be genuinely happy with it and confident that I can use it how I like.

Maybe I'll write more than once a year too.

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