6 months of my site & what I think of bearblog
I recently noticed that this site has turned 6 months old and has gathered precisely 30 posts, not including pages. It's been fun and I'm somewhat impressed that I've managed to keep writing stuff this consistently. I thought I would take this opportunity to write down some thoughts around this site and the hosting service, Bearblog.
runarcn.no
All in all, I'm very contempt with what I've made of this website. When I first made it, I did it as a sort of dump-space for all I want to share and for getting to explore stuff like creating a website, something I've wanted to do since I was like 6. Today it has definitely fulfilled the role of a online creative playground in terms of what pages I want to create, writing what I want to write, and putting this up as I want.
A thing I find really cool about websites is how you choose how you want to make your website and how you want to format it; the only limitation is knowledge. This stands in great contrast to ie. Instagram where the most you can do is change your profile picture, pinned stories, and pinned posts. There's no such thing as choosing a font, creating a page layout, and much less doing all of that beautiful stuff to be found on nekoweb or countless other indie websites that deliberately go into creating a very indie look. While the visual identity thing is more or less disappearing from websites nowadays (just look at how similar all wordpress templates are) it's stil nice that it's possible.
Personally, I've had two major designs of my site so far. The first one was a reskin of a bearblog template, whereas the second was ripped from another site and then reskinned and adapted to fit my site. I've also snapped some tidbits from other sites here and there, as detailed in my sources-page.
While it hasn't become the "share literally anything I want"-garden that I might've been wanting, I'm not exactly too against it either. Some things I feel more comfortable not having accessible on the open web. Maybe I'll make another, de-indexed, password locked site for that stuff some time. Maybe not. Regardless, I am very contempt with this decision for the time being.
I'm still a little bit undecided about my decisions to disable analytics and hiding the upvote-button. On bearblog, you have the option to also publish your posts on it's own discover-page which aggregates all posts on the service and sorts them either by random, new, or popularity. Currently, I'm posting there but with no option for upvoting, in practice making the post only for random and new.
I made this choice because I have a tendency to get too caught up in the numbers and judge my writing based on that instead of my actual writing. I also fear that it will lay bounds on what it is I write, making it more affected by the number than of my choice. However, I am very certain that I would get more reads (and with that more replies) if I reenabled it - the latter is one thing that I'd especially like. Analytics-wise it's also cool to be able to see from where people are reading etc., but I'm also just generally not a big fan of sites tracking you in any sense.
bearblog as a hosting service
It's somewhat difficult to write about this site without talking about Bearblog. In general, bearblog is great. It's minimal, it's free and the premium tier is cheap, at it doesn't get in the way. You can write anywhere without needing any fancy interface, instead only getting a big box to write whatever you want in markdown. You can add images and embed html manually if you want to make something fancy. This is great.
Bearblog is full of bright sides. It's super easy to use while still having lots of possibilities for what you can do. It's also not tied to any app, saving both jank on my PC and phone and allowing me to connect from any computer in the world as long as I have my login - I often write whenever I take a break at work, such as right now. Having such a minimal interface, it's kind of impossible to get lost in features (looking at you Avid Sibelius) or distracted when working. It provides what you need, and that's it. You can expand on it if you really want.
Herman also writes many great things in the bear manifesto, which, when combined with it's years long reputation of being solid and staying that way, looks very promising for this platform.
In terms of criticism, I only really have two: The first one is that it's license was changed into a non-free one, and the second is that bearblog, and especially bearblog documentation, is super jank.
On the first point, I want to compare bearblog a little bit to the Obisidan-situation in the note-taking space. Yes, there are alternatives with free licenses, but many of them provide worse services. Bearblog is super minimal, works on everything, and even has it's own buttons for exporting the entire thing as .md or .csv. I can't say the same about ie. WordPress. Even better, since I decided to pay a pretty small sum for the premium tier, I can email Herman (the developer) direclty whenever I need help and he has always either provided a solution or straight up fixed the issue for me within 1 day. Seriously. In other words, regardless of my ideological disagreement with the license, I can't really see myself moving away from Bearblog. Hats off to Herman.
The jank however is a somewhat different situation. Bearblog comes with a docs-link in the footer, but the docs don't mention the markdown guide. The plugins are in the official docs but are unofficial even if maintained by Herman and have integrated installation method by default. There's a page for editing the CSS in your dashboard, but no way of previewing before pushing. All of this and more has lead to the creating of many third party services for bearblog (luckily mentioned in the docs) covering everything from integrating third party sites to this hack for styling your 404 page.
While some of these things maybe should've been built into Bearblog itself, it would definitely be difficult to keep it as small as it is (2,7kb!!!) and also kind of be a hinder for some of the things I like in terms of minimalism. It's nice to see that even though bearblog is actively against being community built that people are making the best out of it. Being a little janky is also part of why I chose bearblog. I still need to learn html/css and how to modify plugins or whatever to my taste; I'm learning website building, not just bearblog building.
I certainly wish some things here were improved, but all in all, still a really good service that I plan og staying on and have very few issues with recommending. I even helped my girlfriend set up her own one!
bearblog as a 'community'
The final thing I want to touch on is bearblog as a community. This section is a little bit shorter as it is at the end of a 2hr on/off writing session and because it is the one I have the least to say about.
I recently read an old comment on hackernews on an old thread called Resurrect the old web:
The old web was great but it broke society in a different way and formed the basis of social media's current problems. Writing about your situation and expecting other people to desire to know you so much that they go out of their way to learn about you is not a substitute for 1-1 or 1-group interaction that formed the basis of human culture for centuries. If you want to do something revolutionary to start restoring a healthy society, once a day, call (or DM or text) someone from your contacts list and say "I saw something today that made me think of you, so I wanted to see how you're doing. What's new in your life?"
The way I see it, bearblog is not exactly a community. I think of bearblog as a service I use to post texts, and sometimes to find texts. Every now and then I can email the author or get a reply from the author having an (often short) dialogue. Sometimes there are posted replies. Bearblog feels closer to a bunch of loosely connected individual text posts with an aggregation feed. This can be both good and bad. For my case, I sometimes miss having more interaction with people, but also, that's why I have Signal or Discord.
Typical community features are missing, in my opinion for the better. You cannot find a follow-button (forcing usage of RSS or mailing lists) and the comment section needs to made externally - or have mails for replies. I like this :) it fragments communication methods in a hindering monopolies-way, keeps bearblog minimal, and encourages using different services. It's very UNIX in a sense; bearblog handles posting, communication can be done elsewhere.
However, I must say I enjoy having the option of using the discovery feed and that it is good to see different interactions being done in it. This can obviously be called a community if you want to, but here I chose not to refer to it as that.
Finishing thoughts
6 months is a while, but it is also nothing at all. It does very much not feel like 6 months have passed since I made this, and even less so when I say it as "half a year". I only started regularly writing since I came to Brazil and also only started really creating the websites identity then. This one is definitely going to change over time as I have more ideas or whatever.
I am however very happy that I have kept it this long and that it seems to be turning into something permanent rather than a short project that I throw away. Part of my motivation for creation was to have a more public archive of my life and thoughts than just diaries in the corner of my room. This is a dream slowly coming to reality now :)
To end off, I just want to say I wish I was less reluctant with sharing this elsewhere. Currently I kind of don't want people to see it? I guess I'm a little afraid that people will not like it or find it weird or something like that. Maybe it will change over time as I've had it for longer or maybe changed what I write about a bit. Who knows.