cohost!

with all the people doing website type things with the cohost deadline approaching, it seems like maybe a good idea to mention Bear Blog ʕ •ᴥ•ʔ

disclaimer that i have not actually used this myself, but people who know way more about websites than me (like @jkap) are using it right now, for example: https://jkap.io/

why am i mentioning a blogging platform that i'm not actually using, haven't used, and isn't even in the class of things i'm looking at using (like static site generators)?

well, it hits a lot of points that line up well with the small web blog + rss concept:

as mentioned above, people who know way more about websites than me are already using it
you get a blog and rss! wow!
as far as i can tell, you can actually subscribe to individual tags over RSS? that's neat for like, letting readers filter and target specific interests without being self conscious about that thing you post about 28729 times a day being a little much
it's very lightweight and the output is human-readable
a plain text pageview that doesn't have a bunch of media attached seems to be just a few kB
it's not bringing in a billion javascript frameworks and profiling tools. or actually any at all unless you explicitly add it yourself as far as i can tell?

but it is a hosted solution, which solves the very immediate problem of "cohost has one week to live and i'm very busy, i will not have an entire website ready by then" - you can probably have one of these up and running in a few tens of minutes, plus or minus however long you spend making it look how you want

it's not without downsides of course. here are some:

since it's hosted, you don't "own" and aren't fully in control of your own blog... if the service did disappear, your blog would go with it
- this runs against my principle of "i would like to be able to pick up my entire site as regular-ass files and deposit it on a new host and have it Just Work"
- but it does at least look like "download all your posts as markdown in a zip file" is a feature they're looking at which would go a long way to settling this tbh
- for most people, "this service stops existing" is probably a lot less likely than "i don't do basic maintenance and my website rots" or "i'm busy and never created one in the first place"
it's maintained by one guy so if he gets hit by a bus, that could be a problem
- i mean i hope he doesn't though
being a very basic lightweight blog, it may be missing some things you've got used to, like link summaries or media embedding

but one very big advantage i think it has for a lot of people who aren't turbo-nerds is that it solves the you gotta make it easy to post problem.

let's be real, if you're not already an aforementioned turbo-nerd, editing a bunch of files under a tree just right, checking them in or rebuilding or committing them to a github (normal people: "the fuck is a github?") to get it on your site is a lot of friction if it's something you're doing frequently. so... probably not bad for a mostly unchanging site, but bad for posts. especially if you're trying to do it from like, your phone in the middle of a forest or something. from what i can tell, this is better about that

i'm actually going to be seriously considering throwing one of these up for myself shortly. i know i want to build a whole site and i want to have full control over the posts and everything etc etc etc. but there's 100% absolutely no way im going to have the brain space to do that in under a week. and this is a second-best option that hits a lot of targets i want to hit and has some nice-to-haves built in, too

if you're stuck in the same boat, might be worth a look

Birdout: Paradise

@SomeEgrets

disaster bird

posts from @SomeEgrets tagged #hnnnnnnnnggggggGGGG internet

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