Moving to Bear Blog
My blogging has mostly stopped since August 2022. It's not that I haven't had much to say - I've been saying a lot on Mastodon. It's that other things have been getting in the way.
First, I got into motorcycling. It's something I had always wanted to do, and it has turned into my #1 hobby - to the extent that most of my free time and money is invested into it. This leaves less time for other things.
Second, I've almost entirely stopped using my personal computer, and I'm using my mobile phone more instead. However, my previous blogging platform didn't lend itself well to mobile writing. The blog posts were a combination of HTML and JSON, managed in Git and uploaded via FTP. It could be done on a mobile phone, but it's such a pain that I never bothered.
Nonetheless, I've wanted to write more blog posts, but to make that happen I needed a change. I need a blogging platform that makes writing as easy as possible on a mobile phone.
So I switched to Bear Blog!
Bear Blog posts can be written in Markdown and/or HTML. This lends itself well to writing on a phone. I can draft my posts in Standard Notes, which constantly auto-saves, then publish them on Bear Blog when I'm ready. No messing with Git and FTP.
The ability to write in HTML also made it easy to migrate all of my original content. I've set up redirects for all of the old post URLs, so nothing (important) should break.
I'm sad to move away from NearlyFreeSpeech.NET after nearly 15 years. It's an outstanding service and very affordable1 - but at this time, a managed blogging service meets my needs better.
For those wondering: yes, I will soon be building a new retro theme for my blog, in keeping with the previous ones. I may continue using NearlyFreeSpeech.NET to serve other assets, such as fonts.
Overall, I'm really happy with how the migration went, and with Bear Blog's feature set. I'm looking forward to writing more in 2024.
My NearlyFreeSpeech.NET hosting typically cost me less than $10 USD/year.↩