new site, new nest
it's the last days of cohost and i never got around to making that site i kept talking about
i want somewhere to be able to direct all the lovely creatures i met to though, so i thought hey, a lot of people who seem to know more about websites than i do are using this Bear Blog thing, so let's give it a shot
i don't know if it's a perfect answer for what i'm looking for, but perfect is the enemy of just getting shit done, so i figure i'll take this out for a test drive, for now. this lets me get my words on the internet fast, and if it ends up being a good fit, then i've got a thing in place to let me make posts. if not, well, just having something is good enough for now
it seems to hit a lot of "small web" points i like, though, which make it at least a little bit appealing:
- page views are tiny, just a few kB each if there's no media attached
- mostly text, markdown formatting
- the output is unobfuscated and readable by creatures
- built in RSS - and from what i can tell, it's fairly granular. you can subscribe to individual tags if you want to narrow down your interests!
- no outside javascript unless explicitly added - only minimal required set of first party JS
- i respect the developer's "building software to last forever" philosophy
but it is a hosted solution, at a time in my online life when i'm trying to reduce my reliance on those. in an ideal world, i'm still leaning toward static generation because the resulting files are entirely self-contained and portable. one of my goals is that i should be able to pick up my site from one host and simply move it to another as easily as possible, as just a blob of files, with no-to-minimal reconfiguration
as for the "forever" philosophy - i'm not entirely convinced just yet, but only because right now, it's just words on a page. i haven't had the time to really dig into what's meant by that and what concrete steps are in place to get us there. but even speaking about it as an ongoing development priority, with enough confidence to put it on the product front page, puts Bear ahead of a lot of other platforms just by virtue of having publicly considered it at all, so i'm willing to extend some goodwill here
ultimately, and i talked about this when i briefly looked at Bear earlier, a lot comes down to the idea that you gotta make it easy to post. going with Bear, for now, lets me get up and running before cohost goes read-only, and gets me a low-friction site that i can use from more or less any platform, with an editor, in a formatting syntax i already know, and no fiddling around with scripting an automation
so i think this is a good launching point. we'll see how it goes. there's going to be a bit of work over the next few days getting themes and links up and running. i have to decide if i want to build the root of my site around Bear, or only use it as a blog/posting component. i'll be starting with the latter, but i'm starting from scratch here, so we can be a little loosey-goosey with it
let's flap to it!