⚙️ Trying Out Bear Blog
I've been aware of Bear Blog for at least a few years. I've always appreciated minimalist markdown-centric platforms and thought it seemed cool when I first came across it. At the time I was still more interested in self-hosted and micro blogging in particular1, but it was on my radar. Since then I've become interested in traditional blogging again and pretty disappointed in the state of self-hosted blogging options. WordPress for instance has evolved into something that is completely ridiculous for its original purpose.
My axodys.com domain has had some form of blog since 1999, but it's been pretty inactive for the last few years. It also no longer feels like it should necessarily be a standalone blog, but rather just a page or two representing my online identity with links to other blogs, projects, and social media accounts. At the beginning of this summer I started thinking seriously about reorganizing and shifting all my longer form blog content to a separate subdomain, but life happened and I never quite got around to it.
Today Dave Winer linked to Bear Blog and after taking another look I was intrigued enough by the community and blog discovery elements to give it a try for myself. I do have some doubts about the current state of pagination and the post archive page performance limitations for my purposes given the number of posts I've written over the years. There are also no significant import tools currently. Consolidating 25+ years worth of sporadic blogging would be a long and ongoing manual project, but I'm interested in trying the service out at least and seeing how it goes.
I've mostly solved this with a php microblog solution I found on github and contributed a few small improvements back to. It's not a very active project though and I still need to do some additional work before I'll be fully satisfied.↩