The Blogging Learning Curve

My favorite blogging platform, Blot, seems to be defunct. There are major issues with template editing. When I try to edit a template on my iPad, the device heats up, gives me a browser error and then reloads the page. Numerous users have reported that the Google Drive integration is not working at all. You can't add navigation items to your menu. The PayPal subscription sign-up option returns errors that block registration. Occasionally, the site is simply inaccessible. There haven't been any signs of Blot's developer in six weeks or so.

To be fair, this was always a legitimate concern. In the threats to the platform, it lists the potential problems with only having a single person maintaining the platform.

Blot's bus factor is still 1 – if I get hit by a bus the show stops. Since the source code is public, it would be possible for those who liked Blot to keep it going on a different server, but coordinating the switch might be tough.

I truly hope the proverbial bus accident didn't happen and that the developer of Blot is okay.

Despite knowing the risks, I built my blog on the platform, anyway. I built several themes and published a few hundred posts. I hopped around to different blogging platforms, but when I came back to Blot the most recent time, I realized the dangers of doing so. My rationale was, if the app is no longer usable, I would port my theme to another static site generator like Jekyll or Hugo. I was already using git to publish my Blot blog posts, anyway, so the user experience wouldn't be all that different.

Know this: Standard static site generators are a pain to set up. There's a reason that almost every demo site for the themes available for a given SSG is filled with code. These engines are mostly for developers and tinkerers. Despite the initial challenges in setting things up, I now have my site deployed and the theme I was using on Blot mostly rebuilt on Jekyll. However, the official Jekyll Ghost importer brought in many of my Ghost posts with only the metadata and no content. Besides getting the content for many of my posts, there are still some kinks to iron out. For instance, can you have true search on a Jekyll site? That's something I haven't quite been able to answer.

I evaluated Hugo for a bit, but then I realized that many of the themes I was reviewing didn't look meaningfully different from the one that I'm already using on Ghost and would require some modification. In addition, Hugo seems to have different steps to set up the app, based on the theme you are using. Each theme itself has several options for install. One is usually recommended, but not if you are doing this, this or that. The subsequent options for deployment and configuration vary, depending on the path you selected to install your theme. It's all a bit dizzying.

For now, I'm going to stick to Ghost. It has a strong team working on it, and their business model is sound (pay for hosting or self-host). I'm excited about the upcoming ActivityPub integration. It's easy to work with, and the API is compatible with using text editors to publish. I'm familiar with it, even from a server management and infra perspective.

Thanks for reading my Ghost blog.