Look, I know I keep waffling on where to post things, and I’m sorry about that. There are simply too many good, viable options for writing things and putting them online.

Earlier today I wrote about using Tinderbox for blogging. Now, I’m writing this in WordPress Hugo, using its Gutenberg editor Emacs, which I very much dislike love. Thing is, WordPress is a good answer to the question, “If one was forced to choose a single tool for publishing all of my writing, what should it be?” It’s probably the best answer, but hoo-boy, how disappointing.

WordPress has everything one could need for publishing. It works well enough for anything. It has search, comments, stats, a massive ecosystem of plugins and information, good hosting options, etc. But dammit it’s still WordPress. It’s still overwrought. It continues to drift further from its blogging roots (full-site editing, blech!). And I swear, if I see one more “Upgrade to Premium!” notice in the dashboard I’m going to (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻.

For grins, suppose that I just talked myself out of WordPress. What are my options?

  1. Hugo. Powerful, fast, flexible, well-supported, and I have lots of experience with it. Lots of themes. Currently running baty.net. Free.
  2. Tinderbox. Weird and wonderful. Infinitely flexible. Expensive (but I’ll pay for it whether I use it for blogging or not, so moot). Markdown is possible but requires swimming upstream. Difficult and fragile for blogging (at least for me it is). No themes or ecosystem around blogging to speak of. I’m on my own.
  3. Blot.im. Simple. Super easy posting. Depends on Dropbox (or some other sync tool). Inexpensive. Well-supported by the developer (but only one developer). Can be slow. I’m not in control of the hosting environment.
  4. Micro.blog. Great service. Easy to post. Sometimes unreliable. Nice set of tangential services. Uses Hugo under the hood, but I’m not in control over the server environment. Posts end up in the Micro.blog timeline, and I sometimes don’t want that. Great cross-posting. The editor is too basic, making longer posts less fun to write.
  5. Kirby. Probably great, but I’m not going there yet.

After writing all this, it became obvious. I’m going back all-in with Hugo here at baty.net. I’m even going to try once again to post my daily notes here. Imagine what I can do if stop having to maintain multiple systems and just make writing and publishing baty.net as seamless as possible.

Check out all these fantastic old manuals. (via Kottke)