That’s a very refreshing take and it reminds me of a simpler time, before “Web 2.0”. I can do HTML/CSS no problem, I actually teach a web development course in high school. For my own blog it might be too much of a distraction though, I really want to focus on the content.

But I agree, building a website from scratch can be very rewarding :)

Thanks! I’ve already checked it out, and it looks promising. From what I’ve seen so far it’s similar to Hugo but written in Rust instead of Go.

For my purposes, this definitely looks like an upgrade, thank you for the suggestion!

I like how it’s similar to Ghost, but a lot smaller and easier to maintain. There is also an iOS app for editing posts on the go.

I think it will be either this, or one of the static site generators.

I didn’t know about 11ty, thanks for the suggestion! I’ve been using Hugo before, but not for blogging. Maybe a static site generator is the way to go after all.

Oh, interesting! I was wrong about bear blog not being open-source, thank you for the correction! So it would be possible to self-host, it’s just not officially supported. mataroa looks interesting as well, maybe even more minimalistic than bear blog.

I’ve already looked into bear blog, I really like the philosophy behind it. The reason I don’t use it is because ideally I want to self-host, and bear blog is not open-source (edit: cannot be self-hosted easily). Also, I want to embed images in my blog, and from what I’ve seen, you have to either take care of the image hosting yourself or pay a monthly fee. It also looks like the backups are only text, no images, which could make migration to a different platform painful. I had the same issue with blogger.com back in the day, it was possible to export the text, but then the image links were all still pointing to Google’s CDN.

From what I’ve read, the new editor does not use Markdown by default anymore. It’s possible to create a Markdown “card” but that’s still embedded in the new format. So it’s very easy to accidentally create posts that cannot be exported as plain .md anymore.

From the link above:

Koenig has now been rebuilt on a new stack: React.js and Lexical — both of which are open source frameworks developed by Meta. So, Ghost is now using the same underlying technology that powers every single editor, comment box, or user input for billions of users across Facebook and Instagram.

The static site generator is a very cool idea, I didn’t know Ghost could do that.

I’m in Austria where the usability of self-checkout counters is often terrible, sometimes to the point where there are employees nearby for troubleshooting. I try it sometimes in stores where it’s available, but only if I’m not in a hurry.