Blot is just right

You may have noticed that once again things have changed around here. This time, it’s due to switching from WordPress to Blot. We’ve been around this block before, but lemme ‘splain¹.

I’ve switched from Hugo to Eleventy to WordPress within just the past several months. This is not surprising to any of you who’ve been following along. Sometimes I switch blogging tools because I’m mad at whatever I’m using. Other times I switch because I’m bored. This time it’s a bit of both.

Mostly, I switched because I don’t enjoy using WordPress. WordPress is powerful and easy and everywhere, but the editor is unpleasant and everything just feels heavy and overwrought. I also tire of plugins nagging me to “Upgrade to Premium!” all the time. I tell myself I can live with it, but in the end I never can. On the other end of the spectrum, my usual static site generators (e.g. Hugo) feel like too much work. They require maintenance and sometimes break for no reason I can see. They also require some form of deployment mechanism as well as hosting, etc. It’s too much.

The decision between super-easy-but-icky WordPress and more-work-but-pleasant Hugo always trips me up. While debating this with myself earlier, I remembered Blot. You see, Blot is like an SSG but without all the dependencies and fuss. Put some Markdown (or HTML or Text) files in a Dropbox folder and boom, a nice blog appears. There’s a little more to it than that, but still. With Blot, I can use any of my favorite text editors to edit posts. And there’s no deployment or “Send to blog” steps. I simply save the file and the rest is taken care of.

I gravitate toward software that “thinks” like I do. Blot thinks so much like me that it’s creepy. If I were going to build my own blogging tool, it would work like Blot works.

Another great thing is that Blot’s developer, David Merfield, is preternaturally helpful. He’s gone so far above and beyond what’s expected when helping me that I almost felt guilty. He’s just nice. Reading his News page shows how he’s continually making improvements. And also how helpful he is.

So I’m back to using Blot for Baty.net. It’s easy, and I get to live happily in plain text files. Thanks for playing along.

UPDATE May 29, 2023: Aaaand, we’re back on Hugo. I wanted everything on my server.