On the Technical Details

Published January 25, 2019

On the Technical Details

In the spirit of transparency: this site is running on the absolutely outstanding blot.im platform. Blot places no apparent branding anywhere on your site — a characteristic so rare and respectable (and respectful) — that I feel compelled to sing its praises.

As a reasonably technical internet tough guy, I tried very hard to self-host entirely. That being out of the question, I tried the following options:

Wordpress

I started out here and was initially very happy with it — easy to spin up, easy to set up, and easy to post from any platform.

But it was surprisingly frustrating trying to achieve the relatively simple layout I was after (essentially the current one). I found myself spending hours trying to do something that ought to be so simple.

Add to that my desires for a more open format, one which I could reliably and transparently back up. And the current onslaught of CMS and microblogging options. So I went looking elsewhere.

Netlify

Everyone seems to love it. I found it incredibly confusing¹.

Heroku

Ditto².

Ghost/Hugo

Both very attractive early on. I actually got a Ghost installation up and running only to find out I couldn’t post from mobile. No go. Honestly infuriating. The whole thing really soured me on Ghost as a platform, particularly given how long basic features appear to have been ‘in development’.

Jekyll/Github Pages

I got very, very close with a mixture of Jekyll and Github Pages. It all looked gorgeous, and when everything went smoothly it worked like gangbusters.

But things broke constantly. It was incredibly fickle about paths and tags and metadata and titling. Posts and images wouldn’t appear, or would cause the site to fail to build entirely.

I am but mortal. I got other shit to do. Which brings me to:

blot.im

Blot is fantastic. It works exactly how I’d hoped Jekyll would behave. What’s more, the git repository is private — an added bonus. Changes are instantly reflected, the price is right, and the dev seems tremendously responsive and active. The roadmap is extensive, detailed, and thoroughly scheduled. The code is even open source!

I am overjoyed. I found it by remembering it from Product Hunt yae those many moons ago. I should have looked more closely then. Thank g-d I found it again. I have seen the light and I am saved.

Last modified October 3, 2023  #sysadmin