2024-09-01

A blogging experiment that started with a bang of excitement but ends with a whimper

A story which begins with me excitedly experimenting with building a static blog for a client then dreaming of doing the same for myself only to realize I'm likely stuck.

After finally adding dark mode to my Beardy Guy Creative website a couple weeks ago I suppose my attention shifted to thinking a bit about that site as well as my Beardy Guy Musings blog. I'd previously hosted two blogs on Word Press, one for Beardy Guy Creative that focused on Apple tech and design, the other at beardystarstuff.net was everything else, mostly a mix of personal and thoughts on politics and world events. Fed up with Wordpress I moved beardystarstuff.net to Micro.blog a couple years ago and then merged the remaining tech focused blog into it a year later. I've liked having it all simplified in one blog on a service that is mostly reliable. I've got the visual character of both pretty well merged with similar logos on both as well as matching colors. All in all, it was a good move and posting to micro.blog has been much easier, more enjoyable.

So why am I experimenting with anything else? Years ago I spent a lot of time just mucking about for the fun of it. In the early 2000s blogging was just as much about expermenting with html, design and possibilities as it was writing. In recent years, having grown frustrated with WordPress I just wanted an easy, frictionless way to post to my blog. WordPress sucked the joy out of it. I never got comfortable with it on any level but still used as it seemed like the best option for self-hosted blogging. And I had enough going on in my life that I didn't want to spend the time finding any alternatives.

In August a couple things popped up that have given me a bit of inspiration and led me down a rabbit hole.

First, A client mentioned interest in a redesign of their website and along with it an interest in finally setting up some sort of blog. I'd mentioned it too them a while back as they have never had social media and didn't want it. They do have a website that we update often and which could do with some sort of blog-like feature as a kind of social feed. As I redesigned the site I began to consider what a simple blog might look like. They don't want to update it so I'll be doing that. I'll be lucky if I can get them to commit to a weekly post which they would send to me via Apple Messages for posting. Even with that kind of infrequent updating, if it becomes something we can stick to perhaps in the future frequency will increase so I wanted a manual update process that would be easy.

Short story long, this led me to create a process using Apple Shortcuts. It goes like this:

Client sends text and/or photo for the blog.
I copy it then use Spotlight to open the a Shortcut which opens a text entry field where I paste in the clipboard then hit okay. This runs a second Shortcut which:
Creates a new html file in the Journal folder with the new post content. It copies that content along with a linked date at the top and combines it all. Opens up the main Journal index html file and I just paste the new entry at the top. All I have to do is upload this html file and the individual post html file. The end result is a blog that follows the usual format of most recent blog post at the top. Each post has a clickable date link to the individual post. The reason for this is I've also created an RSS xml file.
After uploading the two html files I'll open in Safari to confirm it looks as expected. Click through to the individual blog post page, select the text I want on the RSS feed, then use the Safari share sheet to run the "Selection to RSS" shortcut which opens the RSS file, I paste to the top. Upload to the server and the feed is now updated.

The whole process takes a couple minutes and isn't much more than the time it takes me to post to my blog on micro.blog. I have a variation of the Shortcut that takes a selected image in the Photos app, optimizes and resizes, saves to the appropriate folder and duplicates the above steps to create a stand alone html file, etc. Again I just paste. The only difference is that with a photo post I have the additional temp of uploading the photo to the server.

Creating this blogging system on my client's website was the first point of inspiration. The other was that I had also spent a few days rediscovering blogs and had begun experimenting with following blogs using Safari's Tabs feature. That exploration of new-to-me personal sites and blogs got me mulling over my two sites, specifically how I blog and the question, do I want to make any changes?

I'm still mulling it over. I've got thousands of posts going back 20 years so I'm likely stuck. I don't know how I'd go about getting them transitioned over.

If I were starting a blog today I'm fairly certain I would opt out of using a paid blogging service again. Instead I would use the above mentioned system or something very similar to create my own static blog. Now, this may seem silly, but damn, I really like the potential of doing it "manually". As an experiment I spent a couple days just duplicating a handfull of posts into a new log style list of dated posts using a another Shortcut-based system. It's easy to write and create new posts. If I wanted to pursue it I'd follow the same step to create an RSS feed. What are the benefits to this? Drawbacks?

Benefits

Easy to change the css if I want to change up the theme. It's just basic html and css. No mucking about with template system. The link above is literally just another html page on my site in its own directory with the individual posts and a folder of images. It could not be simpler or easier.
Posting, as described above is easy, quick. I've actually set-up a slightly different posting process because for my own blog I'd likely do a lot of full-on blog posts like this one. Locally, I'd be writing it in individual Markdown files, using iA Writer to copy as html then running a Shortcut that sends it through a template thet results in the new file and opens up my blog index page where I just paste the dated, linked post to the top. Then upload to the server.
For the reader the result is obviously a very fast loadig a page of links. Clicking through to posts is fast.
All under my control. Just a couple of folders to back-up.

Drawbacks

The most obvious drawback is, as stated above, the huge archive I already have. I don't see a way to move that over to this system. I could start cross posting everything to this new system and know that going forward I've got duplicates. Not sure what use that would be though. It would mean though that going forward I would have my own, up-to-date, completely self-controlled content in place.
No obvious way to add comments. I'd likely just rely on email.

Why bother with any of this if I'm happy with my current arrangement? Well, it started as a bit of fun and curiosity. But there's a bit of a nag in my mind about hosting at micro.blog. It's an excellent service at a great price. It has built in ActivityPub support though given its limited implementation I can't really rely on it so it is of questionable use for me. But more than anything, it means my 20+ year archive is sort of stuck. Yes, it's possible to export and import it into another service. But the point is that I'm still reliant on a service of some sort to export-import to host my website which, when exported is a folder containing thousands of nested folders aranged by date: Year>Month>Day. Yes, each post is easily readable as a standalone markdown file which is great but I wouldn't know how to put it to use.

It is what it is. I'm not dissatisfied. I'm just aware of being stuck. I have no doubt that